Title: Left of West

[cosmic_tuesdays]

Title: Left of West
Author: Hannah Orlove
Fandom: House, MD
Rating: R
Pairing: House/Stacy, House/Cuddy, strong House-Wilson friendship
Notes: Written for wtf27, prompt #4: Wings. Thanks to aureliapriscus, cenori, cryptictac, deelaundry, and thedeadparrot, in various capacities, with extra to emblem and euclase. Commentary on this is up here.


I wake up scared, I wake up strange.
I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever going to change.
I wake up scared, I wake up strange
and everything around me stays the same.
-
What A Good Boy, Barenaked Ladies


One of the first things House noticed was the way the patient looked at him – the second thing, actually, after the wings. Just a quick flick of his eyes to take in House’s body as soon as he entered the clinic’s exam room, head to toe, like he was checking for something, plus an expression House didn’t immediately know how to categorize. It looked familiar, but he didn’t know where to place it in his personal dictionary of human faces.

The patient sat up straighter, too, but everyone did that when a doctor came to look at them. Not everyone continued the movements by setting their shoulders farther back and folding their wings closer to their torso, but some exceptions could be made under clearly extenuating circumstances. “I hurt my ankle.”

After a double-take and quick check of his own – unlike the clinic patron, he did his best to hide it – House asked, “Rough landing?”

The man narrowed his eyes slightly. “Yes, actually.”

“That’s usually how these things go, but I’m going to take a wild leap of faith and assume you didn’t get this injury from falling off a ladder.”

“I was coming down, and for some reason I didn’t measure the landing distance right, and –”

“More helpful would be seeing the ankle itself.”

As the patient swung his leg up to take off his shoe, House noticed the way the parts of the man’s body moved together. It was a more complicated and elaborate process than what was typical: while he moved his leg, he leaned his torso over and pushed his wings up, while also moving his shoulders forward.

When the shoe and sock were off, House rolled the stool over. All he needed to do to diagnose the injury was take a look, but he picked up the ankle to move it around anyway. Normally, he wouldn’t touch patients, but honestly, how many times did a chance like this come up? Maybe once a decade, if he got lucky.

House used too much force at first; he hadn’t expected for the ankle and leg to be so light. It was like picking up a milk carton that looked full but turned out to be half-empty. House covered his surprise quickly. The skin on the guy’s foot was really soft, too, and his temperature was higher than what was typical. He held himself still while House pulled and pressed, hissing when the already-injured ligaments and swollen joint got strained even more. Glancing up, House noticed his face was still, too, and he was staring straight ahead.

“It’s a sprain.” He stood up, the force of which made the stool roll back. Going over to get some bandages out of a cupboard, “It’ll heal in a couple of weeks. Stay off it and you’ll be fine.”

“Perfect.”

“Getting an extra two weeks of vacation as dictated by doctor’s orders? You’d better believe it.” House grabbed the stool and rolled back over. “Don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll be back on your wings in no time.” He couldn’t tell if that amused or annoyed the guy – with his body language, it was hard to tell, and his expression didn’t change – until his face softened up around his eyes.

It wasn’t a lie when House said he wanted to see him again in two weeks, justifying the request by saying he wanted to check how his ankle was healing, which, really, wasn’t strictly necessary: it was a mild sprain and would heal just fine on its own. But House did want to see him again, and it was worth taking a shot to see if he’d come back. And it wasn’t like he couldn’t be pushed into believing that a check-up would be a good thing. Even if, from his face, it did look like he was playing along with House.

*

Naturally, the biggest problem with free clinics was all the patients, but that really couldn’t be helped. The second biggest was that they were free, so there was no obligation involved and no way to enforce appointments. Then again, that really depended on the person. Some random college student who wanted to make sure it wasn’t genital warts was not going to come back. Someone doing his best to make sure he was seen as a productive and valued member of society, on the other hand, would definitely be there on the predetermined date for the follow-up.

Hearing there was a patient in one of the exam rooms was par for the course; not so much was being told James Wilson was waiting in exam room one and had asked for him specifically.

He was prepared for the lightness of the ankle this time; the research he’d done in anticipation and out of renewed curiosity mixed well with firsthand experience to prevent any more gaffes of that ilk. In addition, the research – most of it old, but things like hearts and bones didn’t go out of style – provided him with enough information to bluff his way into doing an unnecessary examination.

The stitches on James’ shirt looked too professional to be hand-altered, and House wondered where it’d come from. The strip that went between the wings to cover the spine was secured to the rest of the shirt by Velcro patches. James undid them before carefully lifting the shirt off like a lifejacket, tassels dangling down over his knees. House watched from across the room, not wanting to get in the way of the wings, and then pulled out a stethoscope, positioning it extra-carefully after he navigated around to take a look at the most well-developed shoulder muscles he’d ever seen on a non-competing gymnast.

“Take a deep breath.”

Damn, his heart was loud. And those lungs – wow. Moving the ’scope down to his lower back, “And another.” He could see the ropy muscles flex under the skin on the right wing where it joined the rest of James’ torso. At the moment both of the wings were pulled forward and close around him. Old orthopedic diagrams flashed in front of House’s eyes. “Everything sounds good. You can put your shirt back on.”

House watched Wilson’s hands carefully as he reached around under his wings to secure his shirt in a set of well-practiced moves, glancing away from House to grant himself a sense of privacy.

*

House didn’t expect to see Wilson again. Nobody House knew, not even Garrity from legal, needed a personal courier, and Wilson went to a different hospital for his regular check-ups. Though, that did lead to the question of why he’d come back to Princeton. Sure, he went to the clinic the first time because it was convenient, but the second? Wilson could have gone to his own doctor – probably one who’d treated him since early childhood and had gotten all his own staring over with by the time his special patient had turned six.

Now, touching, that was a whole different kettle, what with the way Wilson had –

“Doctor House!”

House slowed down, glanced around.

“Doctor House!”

House looked up.

Wilson – who else could it be? – waved at him before beginning his descent. He flapped slowly and spread his wings out, keeping his arms close to his body while in the air and moving his elbows up and legs out just before landing. House gave a low whistle of appreciation at the sight of Wilson’s wingspan; with the sun behind him, it was easy to see where the muscle and bone ended and the leathery skin that made up the bulk of the wings began. The blood vessels were illuminated, giving the appendages a dull red tint. When Wilson walked, he favored neither his left nor his right ankle. The medical part of House was pleased with that.

“I thought it was you,” Wilson smiled, hands on his oddly-shaped pack’s straps instead of in pockets.

“I’m sure everyone looks the same from a hundred-fifty feet in the air.”

“Well, that is the altitude dictated by the official handbook.”

“First a secret store, now a handbook? Nice setup you’ve got going.”

Wilson laughed and gestured at a nearby bench. “Want to sit down?”

House declined, opting to continue some stretches while Wilson sat – not perched, sat, on his ass and everything – on the backrest. “So what is this, then?”

“What’s what?”

“Your coming here. I’m not going to buy that you were hanging around in the hope that I’d show up.” House switched to his right leg. “That you were in the neighborhood making a delivery and happened to see a brown-haired guy out running and thought it was me, maybe, but it’s still pretty unlikely.” He watched as Wilson unzipped his pack, flipped through its contents, and pulled out a piece of paper that turned out to be a receipt for a delivery from a local notary public. “Okay, then.”

“I was tempted to look you up in the phone book, but this seemed like a better idea.”

“People make the greatest expressions when you surprise them, don’t they?”

“For some reason, it rarely occurs to anyone to look up.”

When House was ready to get back to his run, Wilson excused himself on the grounds that he didn’t want to sit around and watch and had to get home anyway, agreeing to stop by the hospital on Friday after a bit of discussion. His take-off involved a jump and simultaneous pumping of his wings – flapping really seemed too weak a verb for the movement. House watched Wilson ascend, reach what he could only assume was a good gliding altitude, and fly away to wherever he was going. He watched until Wilson was about the size of a crow, wings and all, before getting back to the run.

*

Stacy was thrilled when he told her about it. She’d been interested in his previous encounters with Wilson, of course, and being told not to be threatened or worried because House had apparently made a new friend ratcheted that interest up several notches, on the grounds that he wouldn’t have to rely on her and her alone if he wanted some company.

“That you can have friendly conversations with someone else isn’t a bad thing. It’s an excellent skill, especially if you want to get something out of knowing them.”

He crossed his arms over her belly while she kept at the dishes. “In that case, I should let you know that I’m specializing in relationships now – he gets the conversations while you do the sex. It’ll be more efficient that way.”

“I’m glad to know you have my priorities in order.”

*

“I work from Sunday to Thursday,” Wilson explained, unwrapping his second egg-salad sandwich and taking a large bite. It was a nice day, so they’d decided to sit outside, even though it was more crowded than the indoor cafeteria. A not-insignificant number of other people had made the same choice, and most of them, when they walked past, took some notice of Wilson. It was largely surreptitious, so House had to look for the indicators of interest rather than the interest itself. A rapid downturn of the head from their table back to the food which had suddenly become engrossing cropped up the most often, followed by jerks of the head or shoulders in their direction instead of outright pointing.

“Why not Friday and Saturday?”

Wilson shrugged, a highly complicated process that sent a small breeze out. “I don’t work on Shabbos.”

“Flying counts as work? What’s next on the list, walking?”

He smiled. “It’s the moving of the objects that counts, not how I do it.”

House watched him inhale the rest of the sandwich. “You’re observant enough to keep the Sabbath and thank God for what you’re about to eat, but you’re not worried about what might have touched it.”

“I also shave and wear polyester.” He ripped open a bag of chips. “I try not to worry about that. It’s all right to be modern and orthodox these days.”

“I thought the Catholics had the market cornered on buffet-style religion. I’ve never seen anyone eat so much cafeteria food at one sitting.”

“There are actually some species of bats that –” House reached over and snagged a chip. “Hey! I was going to eat that.”

“Yes. Note the past tense.”

“You could’ve bought your own.”

“Technically,” he nabbed another, “I did.” He looked down at Wilson’s bag, which was clearly a replacement for his last one. “You buy those from a catalogue?”

Once he caught onto what House had said – which gradually took less and less time – the corner of Wilson’s mouth twitched and stayed in the slightly elevated position. “There’s actually a special store in Teaneck, but to get in you have to know the secret password.”

“Oh, god, please don’t tell me it’s swordfish.”

“I just said it was a secret. I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted to.”

House’s lips quirked up. “Thank you from saving me from a moment of extreme disappointment.”

“Glad to be of service.”

One of House’s more intelligent co-workers came over just then. “Excuse me?”

There it was again: the brief inspecting flick over the person’s body with the quick expression that didn’t immediately dispel from his eyes. Looking at that expression again, House had a small jolt when he realized what it was. He looked up, composing his face to look as disgruntled as possible. “Yes?”

“I thought you’d like to know that Campion’s treatment is…um…”

Gesturing to him while turning to face his friend, House cheerfully took over the conversation. “Wilson, this is Landry, also in infectious disease. Landry, this is Wilson, specialty in delivering documents.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Wilson got up to shake hands with Landry, who followed suit a couple of moments later, just enough to throw off what would have been the flow of a typical introduction.

“Likewise.”

“I really should be going.” Wilson excused himself with a reasonable amount of tact, taking off from the small grassy knoll behind the patio area. Even though he’d seen it before, House couldn’t deny how striking it looked. What was more fun was seeing how everyone else reacted to it.

Watching Wilson? Interesting. Watching people watch him? Even more so. The social dynamics involving people like Wilson were almost totally new to House. He’d seen a few people like him before, in Egypt, but hadn’t had the chance at nine to observe any of them up close and personal for more than a few minutes at a time, and never in extended social situations, like standing in line at the cafeteria or hanging out in a reasonably populated park. Then, he hadn’t had the chance to watch people slow down and stare and speed up again, like shuffling off made the staring retroactively disappear. Then, they’d been ensconced by other Jews, always kept apart together.

*

For some reason, people didn’t get up as close to Wilson as they would to someone else a bit more average – like House, for example. But to be fair, House really had to classify the extra personal space as an advantage to having a friend like Wilson, as opposed to Wilson himself.

The biggest direct benefit of Wilson’s friendship was being able to talk to someone who was willing to give as good as he got when it came to conversations. As good as Stacy was, and as much as he disliked humanity at large, it was really nice to have more than one person to talk to. There was also the continuously low-key amusement over the idea of a long-term anthropological case study, which gave House a low warm feeling whenever he started to mentally write up notes about observable human behaviors. He didn’t share House’s taste for practical jokes, which he found unfortunate; the idea of being able to fly opened up so many new possibilities for old ideas.

Most of the drawbacks had to do with what Wilson couldn’t do, as opposed to what he wouldn’t. Walking wore him out and he hated standing around for anything. He also, among other things, couldn’t go to a theater, ride comfortably in a car, or easily talk to House about what either of them did for a living.

House still couldn’t decide if it was a benefit or a drawback that Wilson was totally shameless about getting House to buy him food whenever they met anywhere. Some days the fact that Wilson was such a good conversationalist fell in-between too: it made it difficult to draw a bead on the rest of him. House knew he’d experienced a lot more of the world than a lot of people, even if he’d hated it at the time, and made a point of not talking about it without proper context. So there was really no reason to be surprised when Wilson told him he’d never eaten sushi during an idle conversation about pizza toppings.

“Do you have any good reason for this particular lifetime deficiency?” They were up on the roof, enjoying the afternoon sun and time swiped from their employers. As usual, House stood while Wilson sat on the edge, wings dangling over the side. He’d been alerted to this meeting by to the pager House had given him a couple of weeks ago ‘for exactly this sort of situation.’

“Aside from never getting around to it? I’ve never wanted to eat raw fish.”

“It’s not like you haven’t eaten equally disgusting mammal organs like cow tongue.”

“Yes, but those have been cooked.”

“Why doesn’t the fact that the Japanese have been eating it for hundreds of years with no ill side-effects make a difference?”

“To begin with, I’m not Japanese.”

“So you have to be of the particular ethnic group to enjoy their cuisine. It’s all so clear to me now – I’ll never be able to enjoy linguine again.”

Wilson smiled. “It’s somewhat touching that you think my life will get meaning from eating a few pieces of fish and rice.”

“I will not stand here and listen to you describe sushi that way.”

“Yes, you’ll stand here and rant at me instead.”

Ignoring the snide comment, “I’ll admit that it’s much more difficult to find sushi made by people who know what they’re doing instead of machine-line grunts who think that a California Roll somehow counts, but give me a little while, I’ll snoop around, and you will eat raw fish and like it.”

“Well, Nostradamus, I’m glad that you’ve got so much confidence in your predictions.”

*

Two weeks later, Wilson ate his words, and almost eighty dollars’ worth of food besides. House had a moment to regret not thinking over the decision – he knew Wilson was powered by a miniature black hole – but it was worth it to see the surprise on his face when he’d taken his first bite of the tuna. Stacy had come along, and they’d all had a great time, even with the difficulty in finding a good spot for Wilson to sit in the restaurant. The faux complaint of “We can’t take you anywhere” that came after some chair-wrangling got a good laugh. House translated the menu so Wilson wouldn’t have to worry he’d eat something unclean, Wilson described all the different prayers for food, and Stacy was more than happy to get the chance to get to know House’s friend.

The outing brought something besides the broadening of Wilson’s culinary horizons; it had, however subtly, opened up a series of conversational doors. When asked how he knew so much about sushi and could speak Japanese so well, House had said he’d lived in Japan for a while, and Wilson had somehow seen fit to reciprocate with the fact that he’d lived in New Jersey his whole life. Born and raised in Lakewood, as a matter of fact, and his parents were still there, in the same house they’d had for thirty-some-odd years. After Stacy asked why he’d moved, he explained there was a bigger market for courier services over in Princeton, thanks to the university. The words had been reasonably satisfactory, unlike the flat sheen in his eyes when he told House that he hadn’t wanted to get too far from home when he was asked why he didn’t decide to move farther away.

Trading nuggets of personal information as though they were pieces of candy or baseball cards was almost tempting enough to ask if he could try it out, but House knew that Wilson wouldn’t agree to anything like that. His friend guarded himself too well. He could try careful probing, which had a reasonably high success rate, but that would take time to find out what he’d need to look for.

He decided to start with immediate family and work his way out from there. Both a logically sound and highly feasible plan, as Wilson was apparently going back home for the Passover Seders soon. When House had stated Wilson wasn’t looking forward to it, he’d protested that he was, and he enjoyed spending time with his brother. The omission of his parents in that statement was the sort of thing House knew to look for when taking a patient’s history, but he didn’t want to press on that just yet. He kept on about the brother, finding out Kenneth had one daughter and three sons.

“Any of them like you?”

They were out on the roof again, enjoying the cold, sharp sunshine sandwiched in between so many cloudy winter days. House had on a coat while Wilson had unzipped the sheaths on his cold-weather shirt and let his wings out, sunning himself like a fantastic reptile. He smirked. “Not yet.”

“But that’s what they’re hoping for.”

“That’s what they’re trying for. Ruth’s probably pregnant again.” Shrugging, “The reason I’m here is because my parents were hoping for that, too.”

“Aren’t the odds one in nineteen hundred if there isn’t a familial precedent?”

“Something like that.” It was clear from his tone that he was certain rather than speculating.

“The chance of an Indian tail is closer to one in a thousand.”

“I know.”

“And the chance of an Ethiopian –”

“I know.” His voice was getting strained and he’d tensed his wings closer in, which House knew by now to mean that he didn’t want to keep this topic going; he’d seen a lot of this bit of body language in the last month. While he would have gleefully gone on about standardized mutations in endogamous populations, his friend did have the ability to fly off whenever he wanted, had demonstrated that ability once, which had the simultaneous result in ending the conversation and denting the friendship. So he stopped and abruptly switched the subject.

“Do you use sunscreen, or am I going to have to deliver a lecture on skin cancer?”

“Of course I use sunscreen.”

“How do you get it on?” Wings were back to where they were and the voice was down. Good.

“There’s this one company that sells it as a spray. Banana Boat.”

“So…no reappropriating sponges and backscrubbers?”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

Even though the desired part of the conversation had been cut off, House still had plenty to think about during his run that evening. Having kids based on the hope of what they would turn out to be would be an unusually selfish move of the parents, any parents. Not wanting the kids for themselves – passing genes or continuing names – but for what they were. He’d mostly done anatomical research – fucked as it was to say, those Nazis had been good for something – but there had been some anthropology mixed in. A good bit of the status associated with the odd kids actually went to the parents, almost thanking them for having the kids to begin with. Not so much with the children. And the parents were also encouraged to have more children if they’d managed to hit the progeny lottery, as many as they could in the hopes of adding another one into their local community in very focused, enculturated form of callipedia.

That Wilson only had one sibling wasn’t logical, based on the cultural connotations of what he was, even in this era of birth control education. Could be that he’d been hard to give birth to. Could be that there were extenuating circumstances. Could be a lot of things.

Not that House could ask him outright or at all, given how standoffish he’d become recently and how little he appeared to like talking about common oddities like himself. Which made sense, he supposed – he didn’t exactly enjoy reminiscing about being a brat. Until Wilson was ready for personal conversations, they’d have to keep on less serious matters, like atheism as a valid religious position, or live performances. House had been somewhat surprised, what with Wilson’s dedication to following rules and orders, to learn how frequently he took advantage of open-air events, from Shakespeare in the Park to sneaking out to screenings at an old drive-in movie theater a few miles outside of town. He’d grinned, explaining that it was practically a teenage commandment to sneak out, and he’d found he liked the minor disobedience enough to keep doing it, even as an adult when it was okay for him to leave the house after ten PM.

Doing his best to act like he wasn’t glad Wilson had given him the opportunity, but willing to learn from his mistakes, House opened up the conversation to teenage exploits. One of his fonder memories of college was rigging the doorknob to his dorm room to set off an electric shock if anyone tried to enter when he didn’t want to be disturbed.

Grinning fiercely at the screams House had described, Wilson took a lot of joy in talking about the prank he’d played in the sixth grade, with more than enough detail for House to understand why he didn’t want to do one anymore – getting caught tended to have a big impact on most people. It was a shame; his aim was probably still impeccable.

*

Wilson gradually shed his reluctance to have conversations, not rushing off if he didn’t want to talk about something but instead changing the subject. Of course, forbidden topics and interpersonal atmospheres being what they were, it wouldn’t be the best thing possible to ask why the cocoon had come about in the first place. He’d just have to wait for an opportunity to present itself. For now, learning about his high school career was enough, the admission his education had ended there worth waiting months.

“It didn’t seem like a good idea,” he elaborated after a long sip of his milkshake. Lunch was still one of the best times for them to meet. By now, House had learned to ignore the innumerable glances and stares Wilson got that he was included in. “It’s not like I could do all that much with a degree anyway.”

House, whose life was based around the principle of acquiring and applying knowledge, couldn’t quite understand this. “I’ll admit that a lot of college graduates don’t actually use their degrees in the actual fields they studied in, but to disavow the entire institution of higher education –”

“Four years cooped up in a school learning very little about practical matters and all about theoretical concepts when I could be out making a living. Nobody in my family thought it’d be a good investment.”

“Mommy and daddy in a lower tax bracket than I’ve been led to believe? I’m sure you could have gotten a scholarship; there are some schools that would be thrilled to have someone like you as an alumnus.”

“It wasn’t about money; it was about time. I don’t have enough of that to make going to college worthwhile.”

“And because you think you won’t live very long you didn’t think it was worth it to seriously study something you enjoy.”

“Because I know I won’t, I knew it wouldn’t be. You do realize there are ways to make your parents proud besides academic contributions – I hear saving lives is good for that.” His tone was playful, almost indulgent.

House knew exactly what Wilson was doing, and didn’t fight it. “Only if you keep on saving them. Do it once, you can coast on it for a few months, but then people forget about it. They’ve got to be reminded of your greatness.”

“That would explain surgeons.”

He snorted. “Childish blood-happy gore fiends, every one of them. Never trust a surgeon; they’re all eager to jump right to the cutting before seeing if there’s anything actually wrong with you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Do, please. You wouldn’t believe how self-righteous they can get.”

Wilson took another long, slow sip. “You save one life, you save the world.”

“Save the pithy aphorisms for fortune cookies.”

House didn’t remember much of what his mother had taught him about friendships, but what remained included the idea of reciprocation; you get invited to someone’s house, and to be polite, you invite them back. Wilson’s mother must have gone to different parenting seminars or Wilson had forgotten everything because most of the invitations had come from House. Though calling them ‘invitations’ wouldn’t be as accurate a description as ‘proposing to meet for lunch again next week,’ two homemade dinners with Stacy aside.

*

The idea of going out to a bar one night came from Wilson, breaking both House’s streak and his expectations. As a rule, his friend disliked meeting in small, crowded areas, especially ones where there were a lot of people moving around. But he was enthusiastic about the idea, so House went along with it.

The bar itself was closer to the “finest rotgut” end of the spectrum rather than “finest whisky,” but in its favor it was clean, had absolutely no pretensions about being something other than a place that served alcohol, and had its own beer on tap. House took an order of that, wanting to pace himself; Wilson got a rum and coke.

“So why are we here?” The beer wasn’t too bad. A bit thinner than he liked, but a pleasant, nutty aftertaste.

Wilson took a sip of his coke. “We’re celebrating.”

“Celebrating what, exactly?”

“Something I’ve been looking forward to for a while.” He gulped down the rest rather quickly, setting the glass back down onto the bar very deliberately. “It took longer than I’d have liked everything to go through, but it’s all done now.”

Either the thing being celebrated was something he didn’t want to share with his family, in which case it was so personal he could only share it with a friend, or he’d already finished the galas with his family and wanted to do it again with House. It was hard to tell which was more flattering. “Any chance of you telling me what it is?”

Wilson grinned. “I got my own apartment. I moved in two days ago.” He motioned for the bartender to come over, and almost as soon as he’d gotten the vodka shot it had gone down his throat.

“Easy there, champ. We’re not in a race for public drunkenness.” House’s beer was only half-gone.

This time, he laughed. “Believe me, it’ll take more than this to get me drunk.”

“I don’t doubt you’ve got quite a bit of practice under your belt, but even with that in mind people don’t start on the really hard stuff unless they’re ready to get drunk.”

“Which I am. Which is why I invited you over, because this is the sort of thing friends do together. They find something good in their lives, and then in celebration they get hammered over it.”

House gave him a look. “As thrilling as a good apartment might be, are you sure it’s deserving of this?”

“Yes.” Waving the bartender back over, another shot, and a shuddering of his wings that created a slight breeze. For some reason, whenever Wilson’s body language included his wings, it made most people around him nervous. House put it down to them not knowing what the movements meant. But sometimes a shudder was just a shudder; House could tell from his face it was the alcohol beginning to kick in. “The rent’s a bit higher than I’d like, but otherwise I can’t complain.”

“That’s fantastic.”

The conversation meandered for a little while after that, mostly silently, while House watched his friend and watched people watch his friend and tried to think of what would keep Wilson from living alone until he was almost – oh. Yeah, that’d do it.

He ordered a shot of scotch. This last piece of information made everything that came before all so simple, but even so, it was quite something to realize that he’d been hiding such a huge detail from him for this long. It gave rise to the question of what else Wilson might be hiding from him. If he could keep a marriage and divorce secret, what else was there in his life?

After he set his shot glass down, Wilson turned to look at him. “You and Stacy should have kids.” He didn’t sound very drunk, but House could tell he was making an effort to modulate his voice. “Do you either of you want kids?”

“Not really, no.”

“You really should have some. I mean, look at you.” His eyes were open wider than normal, too. “You’re one of the happiest couples I’ve ever known. You’re both intelligent, talented, you love being with each other – the two of you would make some wonderful babies.”

He’d had another clash with Stacy two days ago. They’d apologized in their regular blunt ways a little while afterwards, but their fights were happening more frequently these days. They were happy, that was true, but there was more frustration tempering it, more irritations and annoyances. It could just be a bad patch, bad season, Mercury in retrograde or whatever bunk the astrologers said.

“Do you want kids?”

Wilson tilted his head to the side and nodded twice. “I do. I would love to have children of my own someday.” He nodded again. “I’ve been planning on having them eventually, of course, sooner rather than later if possible. Well, not just me – my parents are planning on it too. I think they want me to have kids more than I do, which is kind of strange, but.” He stopped mid-sentence and shook his head once, hard. “Okay, now I’m feeling it, now I’m ready to go.”

“I certainly hope you’re feeling it.” Four vodka shots and two rum and cokes to House’s three beers and one shot of scotch and Wilson was still very much in possession of his faculties, enough to put up a minor argument over paying. In the end, being the one to set up the meeting won out over being the guest.

He didn’t wave around on his feet while he walked, but he didn’t hold his wings quite so close in to his body. Once outside, House started to look around for a taxi – it wasn’t all that late, but he’d told Stacy he wouldn’t call her and wake her up for a ride home – and Wilson asked him about sharing it after they got one flagged down.

“Where is your apartment, anyway?”

“Six blocks from here.”

“You live six blocks away and you can’t get there yourself?”

“I’m probably too drunk to land right. Landing’s hard, you know.” He seemed to find that highly amusing and laughed a little bit. “Of course you do.”

“Are you too drunk to walk there?”

He wasn’t too drunk to roll his eyes or act condescending, but that never changed no matter what Wilson had just ingested. “I’d rather stuff myself in the back of a taxi and pay ten dollars for a six-block ride rather than walk there. Hell, I’d rather fly to Trenton right now than walk there.”

“What is it with you and walking?”

“It’s slow and I’m always sore afterwards. Do you see a cab?”

“Not yet. You know, if you weren’t feeling so scared about landing and I knew your address I’d ask to race you back to your place.”

Hearing that prompted Wilson to giggle. “I’d win.”

“I don’t know about that. Besides, I can call a cab from your house, and if I win I’ll be there to catch you if you can’t figure out how to get down.”

“I’d win.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I’m telling you, I’d get there before you would. I’d win.”

“What’s the address?”

“Four-fifteen, a hundred eighteenth street.”

“Give me a block’s head start?”

“If you like.”

Ordinarily, when Wilson took off, House was there to see and hear it. When his friend flapped his wings, it reminded him of the times his mother had hung sheets on clotheslines to dry or cleaned a rug: big, heavy pieces of fabric that smacked into the air and tried to grab it, making bulky noises in the process. Now, he was too far away to hear it, and too focused on the process of running and the application of speed to look up to track Wilson’s progress against his own.

If he was being honest with himself, he wouldn’t say he was surprised when Wilson was leaning on the wall of his apartment building, his right shoulder pressing into the brick and a big goofy grin on his face. If he continued the honesty track, he still wouldn’t say he wasn’t disappointed at losing, even after three assurances of that outcome.

They took the elevator up a single floor, leaving House to consider just how much Wilson hated walking, and by extension, stairs. When he finally opened up the door and turned on the light, halting to touch a small box on the doorway and kiss his fingers, House had to switch to considering how much Wilson cared about the space he spent time in.

“Nice set-up you’ve got here.” It wasn’t very large and it wasn’t very new, and the only furniture was an end table by the door, a chest of drawers against the far wall, and a lamp next to a nest made out of a couple of futons off in the corner. Random stuff was tossed about near those last two; the small piles only served to further emphasize the empty unoccupied space. And there was plenty to emphasize.

“It’s a place to sleep.” He dropped his keys and wallet in a bowl on the end table. “Phone’s in the kitchen.” The little room had some built-in large-scale appliances, four stools around a small table set slightly higher than normal, no coffeemaker, and a phone attached to the wall next to the refrigerator which was hooked up to a dark answering machine. The sight of the stools made him consider his hypothesis that Wilson picked places to go based on how well he could sit there, and if so, if that was how he’d gotten his alcohol tolerance, what with bars being one of the better default options. He could hear Wilson pissing in the bathroom.

There were several taxi services that were listed as working at this hour – it wasn’t horrifically late, but most responsible adults would be at home by now – and he knew he could call one and be home in less than an hour himself. Then in the morning he could tell Stacy what he’d figured out about Wilson, and mime the more memorable parts of the night to make her smile. She found it hilarious to see someone try to copy Wilson’s body language when the person doing the copying didn’t have all the parts to do it properly. So he made sure to do just that the next morning during breakfast. Ease with others wasn’t something in his life that he actively sought out or tried to cultivate, but when it was present as a result of a longstanding relationship and didn’t translate or end up slipping over into boredom, it was worth savoring.

*

The best thing about the night so far was that the drive-in didn’t run in-house theater concession stand ads. “Why are we here?”

“Because I invited you, and you wanted to come.” Wilson tugged a pair of blankets out of his pack, wrapped one around his limbs and adjusted his seat on top of the car, and tossed the other down to House on the hood.

“That’s not what I’m asking. Why are we here together tonight?”

“You drove, I flew, this was a convenient time, and you like to make fun of modern B-movies.”

“Why – never mind. Just be glad you didn’t dent my car when you landed on it.” House shook his head and ignored the previews in favor of thinking about why his friend was willing to haul ass out here to spend time with him, especially because this wasn’t the sort of movie Wilson gravitated towards. Most of the first half-hour was spent alternatively trying to figure out what exactly he provided for Wilson to make their friendship worthwhile and eagerly pointing out the errors in the mythology and sets.

The hardest part to understand was why Wilson wasn’t getting his daily dose of human interaction from the local Jewish community when anyone with a passing familiarity of the culture knew how valued Wilson was. The idea he might genuinely enjoy House’s company was considered for a moment and rejected on the grounds that it didn’t explain enough.

*

It was true that most of the time people gave House trouble even when he wasn’t asking for it as a part of his job, and after almost four decades on the same planet as them he still had a hard time accepting some of the more boneheaded behaviors he continuously saw, but they were an endless source of interest and entertainment. Since the first night they’d gone out drinking, House had watched Wilson slowly come out of his shell and suggest more and more get-togethers. This was noteworthy in and of itself, but what was really interesting to watch was how the rest of the world dealt with Wilson. It wasn’t in how he himself behaved, what he said or how he said it, but how people reacted to his being there.

People still stared at Wilson, though, when they thought he didn’t know or see, and he didn’t stop with the quick body check-outs or the pervading expressions of pity, either. That behavior was one of the few topics that remained off-limits for conversations – House somehow knew he shouldn’t bring it up. Not because of any notion of politeness or crossing boundaries, but because of the answers he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear if he asked Wilson why he thought everyone he met was equally pitiable.

Although, House had to admit, it was kind of nice when Wilson came to see him when he was locked up in pain on his second day of bed rest: he wasn’t looked at in any radically different manner. It made it easier to deal with him. Somewhat. There wasn’t much to say, and House wasn’t in a mood for conversations. He’d given up on civility the previous afternoon, the boredom and frustration and pain feeding off each other and eating away at him.

“Isn’t it your job to figure these things out? What’s wrong with people?”

“Thank you so much for reminding me; I was almost afraid I’d forget.”

*

When he realized what was going on, it was too late to do anything about the infarction itself; all he could do was minimize its fallout.

When he woke up from his coma and the lucid fever-dreams, still in pain and now recovering from a new, completely needless surgery, it was too late to pretend he could come out of this wreck unharmed. Stacy and what felt like the entirety of the staff of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital – especially the still-fresh-from-the-shop Dean of Medicine Lisa Cuddy – were apologizing their asses off and trying to see if there was anything they could do to make his life better now, completely missing the point that they shouldn’t have given themselves a reason to apologize in the first place, not taking a moment to think that they didn’t need to treat him like he was incapable of living even though he was now a cripple.

There wasn’t even someone he could bitch at. Practically the only person he knew who wasn’t feeling guilty was Wilson, and House was quickly growing to resent how little he could talk to him. They both knew that but didn’t say anything about it, their conversations becoming more and more limited in content as the topics were exhausted.

Long-term care was somehow worse than the enforced bed rest, mostly because this time there wasn’t a hope of an egress for this situation, partly because his parents had come by to see him. The first time had been quiet, restrained, until his mother had started to cry and House had tried to tell her not to. Comforting had never been one of his skills and his attempts were almost worse than not trying at all. His father had tried to tell her to stop, too, with firm words and a hand on her shoulder.

The next time was the next day, and it was a bit better because there wasn’t any crying, even though neither of them seemed to have any idea how to deal with their child anymore. They never had, of course, but for the last few decades he’d managed himself and now that he didn’t, they were back where they started.

*

It was bound to happen sooner or later – Wilson coming by when House’s parents were there, too.

“Oh.” He lowered his wings fast when he saw John and Blythe. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were – entertaining, I’ll come back –”

“No.” House pushed himself up into a sitting position as best he could – it had been a bad day for a lot of reasons, so there was no reason to turn down someone who could run defense for him. “It’s fine if you stay. Mom, Dad, this is my friend James Wilson. Don’t make any sudden moves; he spooks easily.”

That got a chuckle out of his dad, though his mother was the first one to move to stand.

“No, it’s all right, please don’t get up.” He used his hands to emphasize, which seemed to work, because she sat back down. House knew what Wilson was trying to prevent – when Stacy had tried to shake his hand, Wilson had shied away from her like a six-year-old who was afraid of cooties, leading to some extreme discomfort before he could explain himself – but this time he was somehow annoyed, rather than fascinated, by his friend’s cultural prohibitions.

“Then you should sit down, too,” his mother gestured at a chair. “I’m sure you’d like to get off your feet.” He took the invitation, twisting it around, kneeling on the seat rather than try to get his legs through the space under the arm-rests.

His dad leaned over and offering a hand of his own, giving no indication of the momentary pause before it was picked up, “You can call me John.”

“Yes, sir.” This got a returned smile, a good sign. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Greg didn’t tell us about you,” he continued. The tone was curious, without any hint of annoyance or impatience at the lack of information.

“Yes, he did – didn’t you? You’d told us that you’d made a new friend when I asked how things were going.” She wasn’t forcing out cheerfulness; she never needed to. On good days she could radiate mellowness rays. On days like this, well.

“I might have…”

“No, you did.” His dad took another look at Wilson. “You just didn’t mention he’d be like this.”

Wilson blinked, tilted his head slightly, and his wings stayed perfectly still. House didn’t know what to make of that.

The ‘you tell us more about yourself than our son did’ part of the conversation went as well as could be expected. The interesting bit came when Wilson asked John exactly what he was retired from, and what he’d done in the Marines. He was always so proud of being a pilot and so used to people being impressed was pretty entertaining to see it fall flat for a change. Wilson did what House thought of as a micro-flap, the tiniest tensing and releasing of his wings, while shaking his head and sounding genuinely apologetic. “I’ve always been scared of airplanes.”

“But you fly every day,” Blythe pointed out.

Wilson sighed and broke eye contact with her for a moment. “That’s different. I’m the one doing the flying, not a machine. No offense,” he glanced at the colonel, who nodded and held up a hand to indicate none was taken, “I’d…rather just fly myself, if I had to get somewhere.”

“Does everyone like you feel this way about airplanes?” John asked.

Wilson smiled politely. “Every one of them that I’ve talked to, yes.” A few minutes after that, he was out the door, bidding House and his family good-bye, promising to come by sometime next week without giving any indication of a day or time.

It was easy to blame his parents for not knowing what Wilson didn’t like talking about, as they’d only known him for about thirty-five minutes, and House took the opportunity to funnel out a bit of his anger. He needed an outlet, the more precise the better: life in general was a good thing to be angry at, but it didn’t give the same satisfaction as something specific like his physical therapist. Anything smelling even vaguely of New Age rhetoric automatically set of his bullshit detector, and being told to visualize healing made House want to grab the guy, drag him downstairs, and stuff him face-first into the maggot farms. Not that he could do that anyway, which made it all the more frustrating.

The only downside to picking out the specifics was the sheer number of them he could think of. The leg alone had an extra surgery, regular and completely boring MRIs, physical therapy that in practice was never as useful as it was in theory, the long-term care ward and time apart from home and Stacy, got him reduced to a shivering, crippled, pain-wrecked lump of a person, and to cap it all off, the pain.

The pain wasn’t the leg. The pain happened because of the leg, but it was its own entity, the way an individual mountain happened because of the tectonic plates shifting. It ripped through him, and on bad nights he imagined it as some sort of parasite, like the maggots downstairs, something that had been laid in his body to survive by eating his flesh from the inside out, gorging itself.

His life’s ambitions had been radically stripped down from being a valued and contributing member of the medical profession who might someday get married to the love of his life to going from day to day without being in so much pain he was afraid to move in case he’d set something off and feel like he was shattering.

Pills and liquids beat it back, ripped out its teeth and claws, but never whetted its appetite. It couldn’t be kept away forever, or completely, just parts of it for periods of time. Finding what had worked with the fewest side effects – the hallucinations had provided more entertainment value than the cold sweats, which had ranked just below the bodily discharge issues – had been a fun couple of months. For a given value of “fun.”

*

One of the first things he had to deal with was waiting for the people around him to come to terms with what had happened and realize how their lives would all be different. Not necessarily in five or twelve step programs, but just accepting that he wasn’t going to be able to go running in the evenings.

Some parts of his life could be picked up and fixed without much work – his job, for one. The rest, not so much.

Lisa came to see him one day at the tail end of his PT session, before it was time for Stacy to pick him up. That she knew when to show up wasn’t a surprise; she was running the hospital now, and probably knew the middle names of all the janitors’ kids. That she was in a slinky blue dress cut just low enough and clinging in all the right places while he was dripping sweat from every exposed piece of skin wasn’t embarrassing; it was that he couldn’t muster the energy to be even somewhat interested in her cleavage that bothered him.

“Hello, House.”

He looked up at her; not a bad vantage point, really. “Hello to you, too. All of you.”

“Glad to see you’re doing well.” She handed him a towel, which he immediately started rubbing at his pits underneath his shirt. He’d done worse in front of her in school.

“Meeting with potential donors today?”

“Press conference.”

“So what are you doing here when you could be primping?”

“I wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“I’ve got a very biased opinion about that.”

“Yes, but it’s good to get news right from the source.” She wasn’t making any of those little glances or asides or fidgeting gestures so many people did; her speaking more gently than his physical therapist could be taken without a fuss. “How are your meds?”

“Vicodin’s still the best. Just to make sure: it’s one free bottle with every ten refills, or twelve?” It would have been nice to gab after he stopped trembling ever-so-gently, but Stacy came in, and after she and Cuddy exchanged the requisite small talk, it was time to go. After all, she was his ride.

Stacy, thankfully, had cripple-ized their home, putting in things like a shower seat and getting rid of some of the furniture to make moving around the place easier. It all felt more like lip service than it actually was; he could tell from the way she moved around him, the way she picked out her words and held her tone that she was really trying to help out and make his life easier. He almost found it endearing.

*

It wasn’t like they didn’t try. House knew how hard it was for Stacy to shutter herself around like this, from work to home to the hospital for PT and back home to get the day’s chores done before going right back out to get him. He knew she knew how much he hated not having anything to do with himself or be helpful at all. There were dozens of problems he couldn’t go ahead and ask to get help for, not with her overstrained already and his one friend supremely under-qualified. There were a few that he knew Wilson to be precisely qualified to help with, but House also knew not to ask about them. Sure, Wilson could commiserate on the fact that stairs were the work of the devil, or give him some advice for how to deal with a disintegrating relationship, but there wasn’t going to be an easy way to slip that into a discussion about the musical validity of sampling and editing.

He wasn’t above asking him outright, but one Thursday he got a short message which put the kibosh on the planned prefab conversation.

“Hey, House. Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t come over this week.” Wilson would usually come by on Saturday afternoons and his working week’s evenings; House tried not to let on how much he liked the company. The best part of the visits was the fact that Wilson didn’t seemed to care about the visible signs of House’s new status as cripple. If he did care, he hid it well, which was almost as good. “Something’s come up, and I can’t say when it’s going to be over, but as soon as I do I’ll let you know. Tell Stacy hi for me.”

House played the message two more times, listening for cues. Wilson had kept his voice calm and flat and didn’t give out much information; both were good signs something was up. If this was something that had been brewing, then it he’d have seen it somewhere in the past several months. No, this was sudden. House took a moment to creatively curse his lack of biographical knowledge of Wilson. It could be anything from his parents divorcing to…well, anything. He was sure he wasn’t above hiding good news.

Two weeks after that, there was another message. “Hi. Sorry I didn’t call last week; things got kind of hectic. I can’t come by this week, either, but next week should be fine. Give me a call when you get this.”

To avoid any more chances of phone tag, House deliberately waited until Wilson would definitely be home from work to call.

“Hello.” There was the wobble and clink of glass being put down onto tiles.

“I was afraid I’d missed you, what with the spring migration coming up.”

“House!” He didn’t sound like he was faking the cheer. “How are you doing? How’s the PT going?”

“Swimmingly, thank you so much for asking.” He’d had an afternoon-long row with Stacy over how effective it actually was. “You said next week –”

“Yes, about that, I was thinking that it might be nice to come over for dinner.”

“My, aren’t we presumptuous.”

“I’ll cook.”

“You realize that changes everything.”

“Of course it does. How’s Thursday?”

“Thursday’s fine.”

“What time should I come over? Six? Seven?”

“Six would be good.” He could definitely be presentable by that time, even if it wasn’t a good day pain-wise. “I was wondering –”

“Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t sound all that great.”

“I’m fine. No night sweats, minimal constipation, nothing I can complain about if I want to project the image of health and healing everyone seems to be going on about.”

“And if you don’t?”

“What’s the point in sharing disgusting news if I can’t see people’s faces?”

“Good point. I’ll be sure to arrive with an empty stomach.”

“Don’t you always?”

Stacy’s minor delight over having a visitor got her to clean up without making any fuss over how much of the mess House had contributed to, or how little he helped her. About a sixth of the time he could understand her complaints and where they were coming from, what caused them. Otherwise, he hated to hear them and wished she’d take extenuating circumstances into consideration: he hadn’t even been three months out of the hospital yet.

*

Wilson arrived ten minutes early, not even breathing hard. House momentarily regretted that he hadn’t been able to watch him land in the parking lot.

“Sorry we haven’t had a chance to kosher up the kitchen.”

“I’m sure I can manage.” Not looking at House, he began to inspect the contents of the cabinets, the oven trays in particular.

Leaning against the left crutch, taking the weight off his bad leg, “I have to wonder how a gentleman of the old school is so at home in the woman’s domain.”

Fluttering his wings was a non-shoulder shrug for Wilson that also conveyed a touch of humor – kind of like a momentarily limp wrist. “I’ve been living on my own. It was a matter of self-preservation.”

“The microwave is God’s way of saying he loves guys and wants them to be happy.”

“Don’t even start. Do you have any idea what those things do to soup?”

After a few minutes consulting with Stacy, which House didn’t watch but tried to hear from right outside the doorway, Wilson took over the kitchen for the better part of an hour, shooing House away if he tried to come in. Metal on tile created enough noise to mask any conversation, and spread wings were very good at creating and maintaining privacy.

The dinner itself was worth waiting for. Stacy would cook if she had the time and energy, which meant they almost always ate take-out or something that could be thrown together with a minimum of fuss and skill. This also meant that when Wilson offered to come and cook dinner again the next day, they both agreed to it.

House watched his friend seal up the leftovers in various containers. “You didn’t hold back.”

Wilson blushed, smiling slightly. “I’ve gotten used to cooking for me.”

“By which you mean you’ve gotten used to cooking enough to feed the university’s football team right after practice.”

“More or less. But if you think this is a lot, you didn’t see how much my mother had to make when I was a kid.”

“Literal hollow legs. That’s a first.”

Later, half-hidden behind a curtain, House watched his friend head up into the sky after the requisite exchange of good-byes. Wilson showed up at four the next day, having explained the previous night that he’d needed to arrive early if he wanted to make a “proper” Friday night dinner. Not even House’s promise of visual evidence he’d be cooking for a goyish couple was enough to sway him from his position. He’d assured them he wouldn’t make Stacy light candles or anything; he just wanted to do a lot of cooking.

This time, he didn’t shoo House out of the kitchen. He didn’t even ask him for help, just letting him sit off to the side while he started his thing.

The doorbell rang while he was preheating the oven. “Oh, that’s for me. I’ll go get it.”

“What?”

House got to his feet and to the door just as Wilson was opening it up for a stock boy with a pair of full crates stacked on a small hand trolley.

“What are you doing here?”

Before the boy could say anything, Wilson cut in, all big smiles and small gestures, “It’s all right, come on in. Don’t worry, I’m paying for him – I asked Stacy about this last night, and she said it’d be all right for me to get some groceries.”

“Why didn’t you ask me?”

“Because I asked her.”

“This is a lot, even for you.”

He watched him get his wallet out of his little armband-pouch, paying the boy that looked happy to leave as soon as he could. “I wasn’t planning on using everything. Before you start, no, this isn’t some charity thing –”

“Except for the part where it is.”

“Yes, I care that my friend is in too much pain to go out and buy groceries and that his girlfriend doesn’t have the time to do it herself. Please forgive me for wanting to help them out.”

“We’re doing fine. You didn’t ask me about this.”

“I didn’t need to.” He began to put the groceries away.

“Yes, you did.”

“When did this become a Lincoln-Douglass debate? It’s done, it’s over, let’s drop it.”

“One, that doesn’t mean what you think it means. Two, I’m not going to drop this if it means you won’t do it again.”

“What boundaries did I violate? How did my doing this hurt you in any way?”

“You didn’t ask me, which is what is bothering me. Can’t you tell? Do I need to flap my arms to get my point across?”

Wilson slammed his hands down on the counter, looking away from House, wings coming up around his body. “If what I did bothers you so much, I promise that I won’t do it again. There. Does hearing me say that make you happy?”

“Ecstatic.” He made a strategic retreat – backwards advance – to the living room, and spent the next hour watching BBC America reruns while Wilson did his kitchen thing.

The dinner was, of course, delicious. Wilson and Stacy conversed and joked easily, with House sitting off on the side and sulking steadily as well as stealthily.

He didn’t apologize to Wilson, not precisely.

*

The first words out of Wilson’s mouth after opening the door and taking a moment to look his friend over were “Nice cripple stick.” He wasn’t wearing a shirt but had his headscarf on, and House had to wonder if it was bolted in place.

“Thank you for noticing.” House lifted up the grocery bag to emphasize its presence. “Wanna help me with this?”

“Not really, no.” He took it anyway. “Come on in.”

A set of shelves and a small bookcase stood next to the chest of drawers, providing a home for the stuff that had been on the floor the last time he’d visited. The kitchen was pretty much the same, except for the new pile of telephone books and several magazines on the counter under to the answering machine. Wilson set the bag down on a counter while House plopped down onto a stool.

“You brought the good stuff.”

He got a rubber-tipped push on his back in response; the full-body jerk didn’t go unnoticed. “I’ve moved up from crutches. I’d say that’s worth getting hammered over.”

“And in the comforts of someone else’s home, too. How very enterprising of you.”

“Never miss a good chance to avoid cleaning up.”

“Gonyf.”

“I believe you mean schnorer.”

That got a laugh. “Schmoozer, then.” He went to put on a t-shirt, and House craned his neck to watch. Wilson put his arms through the sleeves before pulling it over his head.

“Not expecting company, I take it?”

He kept smiling as he reached back to make sure the Velcro and tzitzit were in place. “Was I supposed to be?”

“It never hurts to be prepared.”

As it turned out, he was, and his scotch was placed alongside House’s beers. In return for asking if he had any wine, House got a long, exasperated rant on Manischewitz and the perpetuation of stereotypes. Pointing out he hadn’t actually asked if he’d had any of that variety didn’t help. It didn’t hurt, either, because within two minutes both men were smiling at the litany’s growing absurdity.

Work wasn’t something that they usually talked about, but every so often there was a story they’d both find interesting. A 1922 birth certificate needed for an insurance case qualified. House didn’t have anything of his own this time, and wasn’t pressed for it.

All right, so apparently Cuddy was asking after him when Stacy went by the hospital to pick up his meds, but that was thirdhand to Wilson and altogether irrelevant. He’d go back to work when he was good and ready for it. Maybe a few days after, just to make sure.

Speaking of his meds, it was about time for another dose. “Hold on a second.” Looking up from the bottle, he couldn’t tell if Wilson was curious or pitying. He scowled. “Am I bothering you?”

“It’s fine.”

“Because if I am, you can just tell me. I’ll be polite and excuse myself.”

“There’s no need. But I can leave, if you want the privacy.”

House dry-swallowed the pill out of spite immediately, washing the bitterness down with a mouthful of beer. Stacy didn’t like to watch him take his meds and neither did his parents. At this point, he was having a hard time caring about it – to say his meds were well on their way to becoming a new and permanent feature in his life was putting it mildly. It was excruciatingly tiring to have to tailor his needs to Stacy’s comfort.

He did need to use the bathroom later that evening, a little while after they’d started to work their way through Wilson’s meager leftovers. He didn’t pass up the opportunity to inspect the medicine cabinet, the obviously ceremonial two-handled pitcher resting on the toilet’s tank, and the handheld shower head. Wilson didn’t have anything interesting in the medicine cabinet, just some of the painkillers House had prescribed him, long since expired, sitting next to the toothpaste. The showerhead was more interesting because it clearly hadn’t come with the place. The fact that Wilson had readily adapted his shower for his comfort, but not the actual living space, was something he’d be able to ponder for at least a month.

He took a cab home, slipping into bed and staying as far away from Stacy as he could. Three weeks ago, he’d finally screamed at her to stop trying: “You don’t know what to do with me! So what, I don’t know what to do with me! But please, for the love of God, stop trying to hide it! That makes it worse! Don’t try to pretend you don’t want me fixed!”

She hadn’t screamed back, hadn’t let her voice rise up and get shrill, instead hissing like an over-pet cat. “If you would just do something with yourself instead of moping and getting in the way all the time, maybe I wouldn’t have to tiptoe around you when we’re in the same room.”

“If you’d stop acting like I couldn’t do anything, that would be a good start.”

“You could do the same!”

It was a long fight, as theirs went, and one that they both ignored afterwards instead of dropping in the middle of it or apologizing to each other. An hour after it had ended – mindless noodling on the piano for him, balancing the checkbook for her – they went back to their carefully tuned interactions like nothing had happened. He knew that it wasn’t the healthiest course of action, but all the other alternatives scared the shit out of him. The good and the bad ones, both.

Their second big one, almost a month after the first, ended with her leaving the apartment. After she was gone, House called Wilson to come over. They spent the evening eating greasy pizza and discussing why movies were best on big screens.

There wasn’t a third. He’d gone on his own to PT – his first time driving in months, something he wondered if he should be proud of, even if he’d needed a long time afterwards to feel strong enough to drive – and when he’d gotten back, she wasn’t there.

It was more than her not being in the apartment, which had happened plenty of times before, even after the infarction. She’d taken her things, and the more he looked, the more he saw how thoroughly she’d removed herself. Not just the clothes in the closet and the CDs on the shelf, but in the mug she’d always used in the morning, the framed photograph of the Seine, all her books from the shelves including the ones he’d given her. She hadn’t taken the sheets they’d bought together, or the teapot she’d given him in an attempt to lure him away from coffee. He looked and looked, and couldn’t find anything she might have wanted to keep.

Her body was gone but her smell was still here. It was strongest on the bed, where she’d been last night, when he hadn’t touched her even though he’d been able to.

He lay there, where she’d used to be, breathing in and out and trying not to focus on anything in particular. It wasn’t all that hard.

When Wilson arrived two days later, it wasn’t surprising but somehow mildly offensive. He didn’t waste any time finding the conversational high ground. “You didn’t answer the phone.”

House sighed. “If you were really worried about me, you would’ve flapped your way over earlier.”

“I called, you didn’t answer, I came over. Worry demonstrated.”

“Jewishness proved, too. Very nice.”

“Funny how concern for a friend immediately translates into a convenient ethnic stereotype.”

“It’s not like you make it hard for me – you’re about as Jewish as they come. Genetically, anyway; I don’t know so much about culturally these days.”

Wilson stopped talking, moving for a moment at that, but unfortunately started up again. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know; what do you think?”

“How long have you been lying here?”

“Since my last bathroom break, I’d say it’s been about eight hours.”

“And before that?”

“Hard to say. I dozed off for a while around two in the morning.”

“This isn’t healthy.”

“You do know I’m technically not a healthy person right now. Neither are you, come to think of it.” He looked up at Wilson for the first time, taking in his crossed arms, glare, and tucked-over wings – that last one was something new. “At least, I hope you know.”

“And your meds taste like rotten chalk. Yes, I know. Where’s Stacy?”

House let his head fall back onto the pillows with a sigh and a soft whump. It would have sounded more striking if he’d been lying on the kitchen floor, but then, that was overdone almost to a fault these days.

“What happened? Did you have a fight?”

“She’s not here, all of her stuff’s gone, I haven’t moved since this morning, what the hell do you think happened?”

“She left?”

“Hey, I know. Instead of trying to be supportive in a time of personal crisis, why don’t you stay and keep insulting me by ignoring everything important? It’ll be much more productive.”

“Do you even want me here? Because if you want me to leave, too, you can go ahead and ask.”

“I don’t care.”

“Oh, that’s right, you don’t ask. I’d forgotten. That’s as bad as ignoring, right? You hate them both so much it’s hard to know which is worse.” He was standing over House now, hands still crossed over his chest, wings now up and out. House had to admit it was reasonably imposing. “I just want to make sure I’ve got everything straight when it comes to your justifications.”

“Shut up.”

“Get up.”

“No.”

“Get up and take a shower.” More forceful this time, it was less of a request than a demand.

“And then what, talk about my feelings? Have a conversation about how I’m going to make a new life after Stacy’s left? That’s not going to make me feel better. What the fuck do you think that’s going to do? My leg’s gone, my job’s gone, Stacy’s gone, there’s nothing left to work with!” He’d pushed himself up on his elbows, all the better to get the proper leverage for yelling to Wilson’s face. “You think a shower’s going to help?”

Wilson continued to look at him. “Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because it wouldn’t do anything! I’d get wet and cold and wouldn’t feel any better. How could taking a shower help me right now?”

His wings were down. House wasn’t quite sure what that meant along with his face and tone. “Do you want to keep yelling at me?”

What sort of a question was that? “Yes!”

“Because I don’t have anywhere I need to be tomorrow. I could stay here all night.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“So really, what’s on your mind?”

“Why are you asking me that?”

“Because you yelling at me is better than you lying there.”

House glared, knowing that anything he did wouldn’t make a difference; he could yell until he was hoarse and thirsty and spitting flecks of saliva but it wouldn’t make a difference to Wilson’s serene expression. Fuck that. “Fuck you.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Why are you even here?”

“You’re my friend.”

“Then show that to me, and leave me alone.”

“No.”

“Go away.”

“No.”

Taking a deep breath, “Take your fucking pity and leave me alone.”

Wilson finally did something: a double-take, jerking his head to the side and back. It was the most bird-like thing he’d ever seen Wilson do. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me, you freak. The way you always stared at me makes me sick. So you can literally look down on everyone else, makes you feel so good about yourself, I don’t care if you think everyone who isn’t like you isn’t beautiful or complete or crap like that, take your arrogance and get out.”

“I’m not – I’m not arrogant –”

“Okay, so you’re conceited. You’re proud. You’re the most chosen of the chosen people. I don’t care what words you use, that’s what you are. I don’t like you looking at me like I’m some sort of cripple even though I’m sure I always was one to you –”

His wings flapped out with an audible smack on the air. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Don’t take my anger out on you? It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? If you’ve changed your mind, let me know, so I can flick a switch and be sweetness and light and one of the good little people stuck on the ground.”

He wasn’t staring anymore, just looking, taking deep, regular breaths and holding his wings out where they’d smacked to. “You want me to leave, House? Fine. I’m gone.” He slammed the bedroom and front doors when he left.

So that was it, then. That was it. He’d cried when he was alone at the hospital because he couldn’t do it with people around, and he didn’t do it now even though he had perfect anonymity. He kept staring at the shadows moving across the ceiling until he fell asleep.

*

When he woke up, his body wasn’t happy, his leg complaining the loudest as usual, so he waited a while for a pill to kick in and to make use of the bathroom before heading into the kitchen. Wilson didn’t turn around from the counter, keeping privacy and giving House a moment to ponder the odd cross-over applications of apron technology. He was also wearing the same clothes from yesterday. He kept stirring as he asked, “Any trouble shitting?”

“Nope. Nice and smooth.” He made his way over to the fridge, snatching the orange juice and gulping right from the carton.

“Glad to hear it.” Wilson glanced over at him, smiling slightly, before looking back at the half-full bowl. “There’s a prayer for after you’ve gone to the bathroom, you know.”

“Jews,” House scoffed. “You put the Boy Scouts to shame.”

“Essentially, you thank God for giving you parts that work. Which, you have to admit, is something to be thankful for.”

“Would I still be allowed to say it with my leg?”

“It’s more about the junk and backdoor, and you just told me you’re shitting fine. So I’d think so.” He paused. “I do know the rebbe’s home number, if it’s an urgent question.”

“I think I’ll be okay.”

And that was that. He showered and changed, Wilson gave him a brief overview on how to order groceries over the phone and kept on cooking the French toast, and House tried not to feel much of anything when he made a run for a very few essentials he’d need until the first order got processed and delivered. Wilson didn’t ask if he could sleep overnight, which was probably why he ended up doing it.

House wandered back a couple of hours later, when he knew Wilson would be asleep and his leg wouldn’t shut up for just twenty minutes. His friend was curled up on his side at the very edge of the bed occupying a very little space, his head uncovered for the first time House had ever seen and his wings spread out behind him and taking up the rest of the mattress. His arms and legs didn’t twitch, but eventually one wing jerked and slid sharply, disturbing the sheets and pulling them up off Wilson’s feet. The temptation to reach out and touch his wings was intense, but House found he didn’t want to bridge the space after all. A bit of pacing to loosen up the strained muscles and another pill with a garnish of Maker’s Mark was enough to help him finally fall asleep.

He went back to PT next Monday, not looking forward to it but looking forward to nothing even less. Frankly, doing his best to avoid Cuddy felt more like exercise than any indignities the therapists could think to throw at him. She couldn’t seem to take the hint, but then if she could, she wouldn’t exactly be Cuddy. So three weeks later he went to see her before she had a chance to come look for him.

*

She didn’t look up when he stepped inside her office without knocking. She’d always taken paperwork more seriously than she needed to. “Good morning.”

“I’ll take it.”

This got her to look up. “And what is it that you’re talking about?”

“Don’t play coy with me.” He dropped down into a surprisingly plush chair. “There’s only one thing you’re offering that I want. Although if you include wearing your lacy –”

“You can start two weeks from Tuesday.” She reached down into a drawer, pulled out a hefty folder, slapped it down and began flipping through the forms. “I’ve set aside an office and conference room for you on the third floor and your department’s budget includes salaries for three fellows. I’ll expect you to put in eight clinic hours a week, attend physical therapy on a regular basis until Puro says you’re done –”

“Wait a second, what is all this?”

“I’ll stay your prescribing physician. This,” she looked up at him with a cold steel face and hidden smirk, “is all you need to sign,” she handed over a form, “to get back on the payroll.”

“Don’t I need to read some of this?” The wording hadn’t changed since the last time he’d seen one of these forms, about five years ago. But hospital BS had that special flavor.

“Yes, but we both know you won’t, so there’s really no point in sitting here while you flip through the papers and pretend to read them while you’re imagining me naked. You can do that on your own time. Sign this and I’ll get someone to take you to your office.”

Just to spite her, he made his name especially illegible. “Done.”

“Thank you.” She put the folder off to be processed; he knew she’d been and would be pulling strings to make sure he’d be instituted as speedily as possible. She’d probably had his new department all ready on paper for the last six months and just needed this to okay the final push to make it a reality. She’d always liked him too much for her own good. His new digs had absolutely no privacy and a small balcony that looked out over the entrance and exactly as little space as he needed, right down the hall from the elevators.

He’d have to start snooping around and finding a way to pilfer the necessary accoutrements for this place. He pulled the blinds back, not bothering or needing to turn on the lights; he could get used to being here, if it got properly furnished. Besides, he needed the work. The fact that it was a struggle for him to get down and retrieve a can of soup that fell out of a grocery bag and rolled in a tight spot between the fridge and the counter meant he had a lot of anger to work through – it was that or give in to everything else, and anger was as clean and renewable a source of energy as there could be. But it could only go so far on a particularly bad day, all pent up and nowhere to go when the nausea was too bad to think about lunch or when the insomnia needed more chemical management than usual or when his leg just hurt like fuck.

He’d adjusted, somewhat. He’d keep adjusting, he knew that. Having something to do with his hands or brain always helped. That didn’t mean he had to enjoy the process, not if it meant accepting with open arms. He’d always been a conditional sort of guy. If it meant dealing with situations as they came up as best as he could, he’d always done that, so really, there wasn’t anything new going on right now. Except that Diagnostics was finally its own department in Princeton-Plainsboro, after years of pestering and speaking with three different deans.

*

Wilson stayed late the night he helped House celebrate, eating almost three times as much pizza as House while lying on the floor on his stomach like he was some teenaged girl at a slumber party. He’d brought along a bottle of real champagne and another of Knob Creek, both of which they’d finally started drinking once they were done with House’s beer, Wilson still on the floor with his feet up in the air and House lying along the couch feeling like a more degenerate Roman emperor, contentedly stuffed with cheese and grease and buzzed on alcohol and opiates.

“Top me off, will you?” Wilson held up his glass and House obliged. His friend wasn’t drinking like he was back in the bar, like he was trying to get drunk, but like he was enjoying the alcohol in shared company. Just sipping and taking his time with it.

“Enjoying yourself down there?”

“I feel like I’m back in high school.” He laughed. “Okay, not exactly. We never ordered pizza.”

“High schoolers having parties without pizza? What sort of a place did you live, Mozambique?”

“We never could afford all the pizza we knew we’d eat. Or want to eat. Or thought we could eat.” When he got drunk, he got less careful about his words. He propped his chin in a hand, elbow on the floor. “We kept joking we’d be banned for life if we ever took a place up on an all-you-can-eat deal.”

“Hummingbirds have to go into torpor to get through the night so they’ve got enough energy to start eating the next day.”

“And a sparrowhawk eats almost three hundred mice a year.” He lay his head down on his crossed arms, put his feet on the floor and lay his wings flat like some sort of blanket, and stayed like that for a while. For a moment House thought he’d fallen asleep like that, until he spoke as lucidly as ever. “We didn’t really have parties. It was more hanging out at each other’s houses when their parents were out.”

“Let me guess, pouring over Maimomedies to find the sections where he talked about how to love to a woman doggy-style.”

“That’s Rashi,” he laughed. “No, we’d hang out and talk and do what teenagers do when they need to let off steam.”

“Circle jerks?”

He laughed again, a different pitch to it that House almost thought he could identify. “We fell.”

“You fell?”

He looked up at House, still smiling, but with a mix of smugness and nostalgia. “It’s just what it sounds like. You get up as high as you can, and I mean as high as you can, and then when you’ve gotten up there, you pull your wings in and start to fall.”

“That sounds…rather impressive to watch.”

“It’s unbelievably hard. You’re up there, looking down, and you know you’re going to stop doing what’s keeping you up there, even when everything inside of you is saying you shouldn’t.”

“I can see why your parents wouldn’t approve.”

“Well, we never told them.”

“Just like the way you never told them you stole bottles out of their liquor cabinets.”

Wilson blinked. “How –”

“People don’t know how to drink as well as you do without a long history of it, and you didn’t have the usual college experience to learn. You come from an especially high-pressure life so you’d have looked for something convenient to help you cope. You drink a lot, even when you’re alone, so you’ve gotten habituated to alcohol as a part of your life. You don’t buy beer or small bottles, which tells me you’re buying for efficiency instead of experience.” He rolled his head around to look at Wilson, who was staring at him with his eyes open wide.

“I always forget how good you are at that.”

“I’m a professional.” He grabbed a pant to maneuver his leg up off the floor. “I’m paid to be good at it.”

“We also pissed on cars.” He had the uncanny ability to time statements, and deliver outlandish information so casually, in a way that never failed to throw a kink in the thought process. He went on when House made eye contact, “We’d catch a good breeze to stay up and then tried to see who could start fastest, and who was the most accurate.”

“Who is this ‘we’ you keep talking about?”

“My friends in school.”

“The only non-cripples you knew.”

“Something like that.” He nodded slowly and put his head on his arms again.

“You going to sleep down there?”

“This is an incredibly comfortable floor.”

“I know you’re not lubricated enough to want to spend the night on it.”

“You’re absolutely right.” He got up, stretched his arms and wings and rolled his neck around all at once, very smoothly. “So when will we be eating in the cafeteria again?”

“A week from Tuesday.”

“Same time as usual?”

“Same time, same place. You know the drill.”

*

The day House got back he heard no less than eight different rumors circulating about him – his reputation exceeded him, just as he’d hoped for. Then again, given how much of a history he had here already, he really couldn’t expect anything else. It gave him a warm feeling from his cockles to his coccyx that people still thought he’d done that in the orthopedics lounge. He shared the newer ones with Wilson after giving him the briefest of brief tours of his department’s offices and features.

“Did you make them up yourself?” He was munching on his own set of sandwiches. He’d carted the food off before House had a chance to say anything, leaving him to pay for both of them. Just like old times, indeed, down to the huge cone of privacy the two of them had that Wilson got them. As an added bonus, he could pretend everyone was looking at Wilson instead of him.

“Just the one with the lizards and the one with the hats.” Reubens weren’t so good this warm, but if he didn’t eat fast Wilson would start making eyes at it. “The rest are all true. For a given value of true.”

“Are they true enough?”

“You could say that. Or you could say I’m an utterly contemptible liar who would do anything to preemptively intimidate people into not interacting with him.”

“There’s no need to flatter yourself.”

“But there’s no one else to do it for me,” he whined. This got a laugh.

“Even the one with the noodles?”

“Hey!” he pointed with his cane for extra emphasis, “That was the unvarnished truth.”

*

The biggest, most lamentable fact about his office was that it was nowhere near Cuddy’s, making frequent daytrips to enjoy her couches and chairs and cleavage unfeasible. Not unless he wanted to stop there after the grueling hours of clinic duty, which meant there’d be witnesses to back up whether or not he’d been there. Most of his first week was spent figuring out ways to avoid nonessential work and which distractions were both portable and efficient. He’d need a handheld game system, to start with. Also, setting a precedent for ditching the coat; first impressions were so important.

Getting his entire reputation back took a bit of work. Why people expected him to have undergone a radical paradigm or personality shift because he’d become a cripple, he’d never know; even the people that had been working here when he’d been employed the last time seemed to think he’d have mellowed out or gotten some sort of revelation now that he was in chronic pain. Extra slacking off clinic duty, dropping the PT entirely, avoiding consults, not showing up to work at all, maintaining a carefully-coordinated disdain of all the specialty departments, all balanced with just enough of everything to remind people who exactly they were dealing with. Once they knew, he could go back to normal, which was everything except the PT.

Cuddy didn’t bite. She’d found him napping out on his balcony – it hadn’t taken much for Holt to learn he wouldn’t share – and actually poked him with his own cane to wake him up.

“Enjoying yourself?”

“As a matter of fact, I was. You were, too. Do dreams count as reality? If they do, then that means at least one –”

She handed the cane over. “Meyers needs a consult.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“It’s been three weeks and you haven’t done any work involving this hospital. She needs a consult.”

“Avoiding work is itself work. Not giving one.” He turned to his left side. She walked around, her heels making thin-pitched clicks on the tiles.

“Fever, joint pain, rash –”

“Then it’s lupus.”

“Except that it’s not. Already tested for it.”

“Did they test for syphilis?”

“Twice. Came back negative both times.”

“What about strep?”

“Still negative.”

He opened his eyes and grabbed the proffered file. “All right, fine, I’ll do it. But just this one time.”

“If you say so.”

“I do, thank you.” Just to make it fun, he set a timer on his computer for an hour, and beat it by twelve minutes. In retrospect, he’d established a dangerous precedent: letting Cuddy know she could get him to do stuff. And she didn’t even get him interesting stuff. If people bothered to do even the slightest bit of research into environments, then of course they’d see it was allergies instead of heart attacks. But no, they needed him to save their sorry asses over and over. At least that was something where he knew it was coming and also what it’d be like. The exact toll each day would take on the next, not so much.

He’d tried explaining it to Stacy once. From living with and sometimes taking care of him, she knew some days were better than others and the pain never went away. But he couldn’t tell her just how much the days were different, not in a way that she’d been able to understand. He’d told her it was like pushing yourself in a workout and being stiff the next day, but it didn’t stop there and kept carrying over, and no matter how much you rested it wouldn’t ever really go away because even if you didn’t do the workout you’d be stiff anyway. Only instead of being stiff, you were in muscle-searing, brain-killing, life-wrecking pain. On his worst days, he’d fantasized about jamming a steak knife into her thigh and duct-taping it there to give her a taste of what it felt like.

Adjusting to having a job was nothing compared to adjusting to doing the job, even if it was as cushy as thinking. That wasn’t the problem; he could still diagnose typhus and Chlamydia just fine, as long as he had a steady supply of his little white pills, which Cuddy was so gracious with. The problem lay in the work he hadn’t anticipated would be work. Even with PT gone, he still fell into bed in that weird space of exhausted and aware, pain and insomnia working together to accomplish wonders. Well, like they said, better living through chemistry. It wasn’t easy to manage, but at least it was straightforward.

Wilson helped, a bit; giving him advice and tips on laundry and cleaning services, coming by sometimes in the evenings to cook and talk and now only occasionally drink, stopping by at lunch to talk then too. He did his best not to let on how nice – and what an insipid word that was, nice – it was to have someone who’d stuck around.

*

Later, like an acid flashback, he had the exact same thought standing in the kitchen of seventh apartment he’d looked at in the past two days. He knew he’d pay for the rapid pace for the rest of the week but he just wanted to get the hunt over with. Going into this venture with a specific set of requirements meant he could cross off any number of places without even having to go look at them. So he went through the single-digit list one at a time, ignoring what the representatives droned about countertop while he looked at the toilets and their relative distances from the bedrooms and didn’t bother smiling. He’d wanted to bring Wilson along, but he’d maneuvered his way out of it on the grounds that he used his sick and vacation days for emergencies and religious holidays that weren’t covered by this country’s federal government.

Movers were easy enough to wrangle to his bidding. One look at his cane and almost everyone bent over backwards to help him out. He usually let them. It was fun to see the faces people made when they realized they’d been treating him like a normal human being and not some delicate glass sculpture: perpetually hilarious. Also, without anyone to help with his stuff, he needed all the help he could get for same-day moving. He’d labeled everything the night before, packing up a very few things himself that he didn’t want anyone manhandling, and spent the entirety of the next day barking out orders and making sure everything got close enough to where it was supposed to go he’d be able to correct any mistakes himself. Or any mistakes Wilson might make in a misguided attempt at a mitzvah.

“Put those higher up. Nephrology doesn’t go near zoology.” House supervised from the couch while checking his spam folder.

Wilson did as he was told. “Why are you hanging onto all of these?”

He went back to the inbox, compulsively deleting as he scrolled down. “Ex-marine brats have a right to hang onto mementoes when their childhoods were spent getting rid of them.”

“That does explain a lot,” he mused.

“I told you I lived in Japan.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know you moved around. That’s the part that explains a lot.”

“It’s surprisingly easy to reduce someone to a few choice personality aspects when you’re not interested in them as an actual person.” After an unusually long bat of silence, House glanced over his shoulder to see Wilson’s entire body telegraphing mild unhappiness and lingering stress. “Sounds like you already know what I’m talking about.”

Wings went up, hands went back to shelving. “So where’d you live besides Japan?”

House had to admire the deflection. “Guess.”

“Tell me.”

“Awww, come on and guess.”

“Australia?”

“No.”

“Bolivia?”

“No.”

“Cambodia?”

“No.”

“Denmark?”

“No.”

“Euskadi?”

“Why are you doing this alphabetically?”

“French Guyana?”

“Is this some sort of ploy to just get me to tell you?”

“It might not be. Greece?”

“Japan, Euskadi, Holland, Egypt, Germany, and eleven out of fifty-four states.”

An impressed Wilson was, in and of itself, an impressive sight; his wings drew back and curved around while his eyes got as wide as they could go, his massive expanses of eyebrow lifting straight up. “Wow.”

“Marine test pilots: in higher demand than you’d think.”

“Obviously. That’s a pretty remarkable list.”

“Everyone seems to think so.”

“No, really, it is.”

“I know. I lived it.”

Wilson gave him a strange look, pulled his wings in all the way so one was folded over the other for maximum space efficiency, and shook his head like he was trying to get something out of it. He kept his wings that way for a while; even after six years of knowing him it wasn’t all that easy to read his body language. That night, trying and failing to fall asleep on his brand new queen-sized double-firm mattress, though no fault of its own, House organized and indexed his mental notes on wing positions and emotional meaning for this particular case study. He’d have to meet more to get an accurate picture of the group at large, but that could come later. Right now, establishing his space in the greater workings of the hospital in relation to Cuddy was still ongoing.

No matter what he did, she just didn’t seem to understand. She was relentless in her quest to actually make him do what he was supposed to, and as much of it as he was actually set down for, not just enough to satisfy her for a week or two. The number of jokes he had to make about that wouldn’t be exhausted for at least another seven months.

*

Still, they’d gotten something of a rhythm down, and when she disrupted his side of the action then the whole thing got thrown off for the rest of the day. The whole thing was very pesky of her. She wasn’t in her office, and as nice as it was to catch a nap in there, she didn’t have any full-afternoon meetings this week, and could be back at any time. Nothing set down on her planner, or scribbled on a post-it. So she probably was out wandering and gabbing and treating sick people herself before getting back to whatever she’d been doing – pediatric oncology funding, as her e-mail client told him once he’d logged on.

He found her in the lobby, which wasn’t so odd. She was talking to someone, which was par for the course. She was talking to Wilson, which gave him plenty of reasons to hang back for a moment, which turned into several as he kept watching as they kept talking.

Wilson’s personal space was well and fully intact, people moving around him the way they always did. Cuddy wasn’t so close to him, either. Wilson’s wings weren’t moving much but his hands were fluttering around. Cuddy wasn’t moving her body much at all; she’d nod or shake her head and not much else. Neither broke eye contact. There wasn’t anything wrong with the picture, but nothing much was right about it, not the least being his personal and professional lives intersecting like this. It wouldn’t do at all.

He poked Wilson right in the middle of a wing with his cane. Unfortunately, he didn’t let out a squawk, but his cry of surprise was about as good, as was the overt attention it got. House regretted nothing, even with both of them glaring at him. This was going to be fun.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Cuddy stepped off after wishing Wilson good-bye. All right, maybe not.

“You’re here early,” House noted in the elevator up, trying to get over the throb of a lost opportunity for mischief. Wilson kept his hands on his frontpack’s straps. “Laid off? No, you don’t even need bike insurance, they wouldn’t do that. There isn’t a holiday coming up, so…”

“Do I need to have a reason for everything?” They stepped off, Wilson adjusting his pace to match House’s uneven stride.

“You’ve always had one before. If you hadn’t, then this wouldn’t be so out-of-character.”

“Is it really inconceivable that I might not just take a little time off work to see you because I like the company?”

“Yes.” Wilson sighed, dropped his pack on House’s new napping chair before they went outside, and he sat on the edge of the balcony like he’d used to sit on the edge of the roof. “You don’t just do things because you want to do them. It’s not how you roll.”

“I went to the drive-in without planning to last Sunday.”

“Only because there wasn’t anything conflicting with that on your schedule.” He maneuvered himself into the lounge chair. “What was it?”

“Michael Caine double-bill.”

“Sweet.”

“They’re doing Sandra Fredrici next week.”

“If you wanted to invite me, you didn’t need to come all the way over. They have this newfangled device called the ‘mobile phone’ now.” Two weeks earlier, they’d spent a couple hours testing how high Wilson could get before the signal stopped working.

“So I’m taking it slowly coming back from New York. So what? It’s nice here today. I was thinking about going over the lake later.”

“What’d they need over in the city they couldn’t get faxed?”

“Some mock-up posters for Jay-and-Jay’s new baby shampoo.”

“And they trusted a Jewbird with them?”

“Why shouldn’t they? I’m practically their personal messenger pigeon.”

“Speaking of which, when do you have to get back?”

“I can fudge for another forty minutes. It was pretty windy today.”

“How much of a difference does that actually make?”

“It can be a lot.”

Thirty minutes and much discussion about navigating around during harsh weather later, Wilson took off by launching himself off the ledge – a jump into the air with a huge beat of his wings. House was left as he always was, watching him disappear off into the sky. When he couldn’t see him anymore, he went back inside. Cuddy had been pretty well blown over by Wilson, the way almost everyone was, so she hadn’t gone harping after him about anything. Wilson had that effect on first-timers.

*

The next morning she was at her desk, where she was supposed to be, alternating between the papers in front of her and her computer screen. He didn’t bother knocking.

“So that’s your friend.” She twiddled her pen between her palms.

“You thought maybe he was imaginary?” He returned the gesture by twirling his cane around, once he’d plopped down on the chair closer to her desk.

“I’ve seen him when he’s here for lunch. He isn’t easy to miss.”

“I’d say he is, if you never came over to chit-chat. You seemed pretty chummy yesterday. Moving in on a crush once I was out of the picture?”

“I’m more curious as to how you two met.”

“After he left, I knew I’d never have that much fun doing clinic duty again, so I decided to end on a high note.”

“That’s the single most creative excuse I’ve ever heard you use.”

“Thanks. I’d like to say I was up all night working on it, but I don’t want to make you feel bad about yourself.”

“How thoughtful. There should be something on your desk for you.”

He looked back at the doors and to her for comedic effect. “I’m sure there is, but I’ll have to go upstairs to read it, and then I’ll have to come back down to argue with you about it, so why don’t we skip the whole business and say it’s all done and stamped?”

“You’ve put off hiring a fellow long enough. We both know you’d like someone to do your dirty work and heavy lifting. The paperwork’s all on your desk.”

“Do you have a good reason for not making me do it in here?”

“Two, actually. One, by putting my trust in you to do it without adult supervision, I’m establishing the sort of contract you hate to go back on. Two, you’ll go to your office at least once this week for a genuine work-related reason.” She smiled. “I guarantee the CVs have plenty of entertainment value.”

“You’d better not be pulling my leg on this.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it. Say hi to James for me the next time you see him.”

*

He hated it when she was right. About the entertainment value, at least. Reading the cover letters wasn’t so much an exercise in futility as it was a delightful romp through the land of youthful delusion with several side trips into the forests of sheltered innocence. He briefly considered sending a personal statement of rejection on the grounds of someone’s confusing their, they’re, and there, but it’d be hard to hit the right note of playful sarcasm and brutal honesty.

Six of the applicants looked promising enough. He managed to schedule the interviews for a two-day block next week, and would have enjoyed seeing the would-be lackeys squirm if he hadn’t gotten a phone call from the world-famous rheumatologist – at least as world-famous as rheumatologists could get – two days later.

House still went through the interviews. It was hard to say if it was as much or more fun when he knew more than they did.

As tempting as it was to make Chase 2.0 do his own paperwork when he got here, House saw no reason to break tradition, and sent the forms off to have Cuddy deal with them. He also invited Wilson over for a long Thursday night. To celebrate, sure, but also to spend some close time with him. He’d been acting a bit off in the same way he’d been right before he’d moved into his own apartment: standoffish, cautious with his words, even more private than usual. It was like the Great Wall of China, in a way. House couldn’t actually see in to what was being guarded, but it was clear there was something big in there.

Wilson accepted the invitation on the typical provision that House call ahead for groceries. This time he doused a chicken in brandy and set it on fire as per the recipe’s instructions, and even if he had been the one who paid for the ingredients, House couldn’t feel badly towards any recipe that involved setting things on fire.

“So tell me about this fellow gig. How does it work?” House lounged in a chair designed for just that action while Wilson spread himself out over the couch, working on finishing off the remaining brandy.

“We hire someone who follows me around like a duckling and does all my dirty work and gets to call it a learning experience.”

“Like an apprenticeship.”

“A simplification, but close enough to the general gist.”

He didn’t mind continuing on about fellowships and what they were like, not when Wilson was so eager to learn about them. He couldn’t be faking it, not with the way his eyes were open like that and his wings had perked up. Why he was interested, he found that out after about ten minutes, when he up and asked Wilson directly.

He raised and held his hands out, palms-up. “It’s something new.”

“Good answer.”

“Is that sarcasm? I’m almost too drunk to tell and I just want to make sure.”

“If you have to ask, you don’t deserve to know.”

Wilson smiled and said something in Yiddish. House assumed it was pithy.

Still, to clarify, “Was that a joke?”

“In this context, yes.”

He checked it out on Google the next day, and found that it wasn’t a joke unless the person that said it could fly. Very interesting. He had to wonder about its applications in the post-Kitty Hawk world, and the Jewish tendency towards technicalities. Eruvs out the wazoo.

*

The next time he had the chance to ask Wilson any of the follow-up questions he’d gathered, he dropped them in favor of ruffling Chase’s hair. Or making the attempt. Chase had come in just as they were leaving, doing whatever he’d decided on to occupy his time, and to his credit, hadn’t frozen or flinched when he saw Wilson standing next to the coffeepot. House introduced Chase as his lackey and Wilson as his token Jewish friend. Chase kept an almost forced nonplussed look on his face the whole time. Realistically, given immigration and population dynamics House knew that Chase would have dealt with more than his fair share of flying-related injuries in the ICU back in Melbourne. It was still weird to see someone who wasn’t all that bothered by Wilson on their first time out.

Now he knew he should have insisted on Wilson coming along for the interviews; having him around would have done wonders for weeding out those who were week and feeble-minded in the face of strange peoples. Not all of them would be freaks in the same vein as Wilson, but the fact that the bizarre cropped up in this department more than any other made being able to go pro right along with the weird a top priority.

Chase seemed to be able to hold his own well enough. Self-occupying, which meant he didn’t have to monitor him every hour of every week; self-reliant, which spoke of any number of possible historic factors that House narrowed down with some background research; self-assured, when there was something House needed help with bouncing ideas around when a complex case would surface every couple of weeks or so.

Thankfully, he was almost as lazy about paperwork as House himself, but not about answering phones. Having a human shield between him and other cases went a long way towards hours of blessed silence and catnaps.

Cuddy interrupted a lucid dream about swimming in the Mediterranean to talk about it. There really wasn’t anything new on either of their ends, even if it was a new phase of the same old conversation. She wanted him to do more work, he didn’t want to do anything if it wasn’t interesting, he had a contractual obligation, she didn’t have anything to complain about if he had a fellow to help him out.

He didn’t want to admit, even though it was true, that even the boring cases were somewhat diverting now that he had someone to help him out. Having someone around wasn’t as taxing as he’d thought, or anywhere near as distracting. And not just someone to help him out by trying new insults and gags on for size, but someone that knew what he was talking about if he said something like sarcoidosis or polycythemia vera.

“No, I know what that means.” Wilson was sprawling face-up on the couch, a tangle of limbs with one leg hooked over the backrest. It looked uncomfortable, but then, House couldn’t really judge. He had his own leg elevated; the afternoon rains hadn’t helped. Wilson went on to explain, “One of my friends had the same condition.”

“How very relevant.”

“Well, we are a high-risk group for it.”

“And without any regular bone marrow, too.”

“Oxygen sacs only go so far.”

“You said ‘had.’”

“Yeah.” He looked up at the ceiling. “He died a couple of years ago.”

“How old was he?”

He kept staring up. “Thirty-four.”

“Any chance I could meet the rest of your friends before you all die of natural causes?”

“It’s always possible it could happen.” House could tell from Wilson’s tone and posture that while that was true, he’d be happier if it didn’t. It was the sort of tone that didn’t lead anywhere in the conversation.

*

When Wilson opened the door late on Friday, savory smells wafted out from behind him, and he froze, surprised.

“Is something wrong?”

House shrugged. “It’s been months since I’ve been here.”

“And that’s wrong, how?”

“It’s only fair to let me visit you once in a while.” He moved forward, and Wilson stepped aside to let him in. House turned on the light, noticing and ignoring Wilson’s flinch. Still no decorations anywhere, not even on the bookcase, but then, that was about half-full with what it was supposed to hold to begin with. He went over to check them out. “The whole give-and-take nature of relationships.”

“And this is my chance to give.”

“Must be a blue moon.” A couple of cookbooks, some travel writing, what looked like the Jewish shelf.

“I’ll set another place.”

He took down a book. “You want some help with that?”

“You don’t know where the meat dishes are.” The heavy words managed to lilt their way out of his mouth; not in a mood for jokes, then. House didn’t look up from the photos when he could hear Wilson in the kitchen, and when he finally glanced over at him he kept his eyes on his friend when he watched him unfolding a prayer shawl. He didn’t look up at House.

“This isn’t bothering you, am I?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“Because if it is, I won’t mind if you leave. You can wait in the kitchen until I’m done.”

House leaned against the nearest wall. Wilson turned east, wrapped his shawl over his head and around his wings and started the same ritual he’d done thousands of times. Wrapped in the same garments his ancestors had used, repeating their exact words down to the proper inflection. All of it asking an imaginary being up in the sky for mercy and favor and offering up thanks at the same time. House took a pill while Wilson swayed, going on and on for almost fifteen minutes. There was no way he’d skip anything or speed up. This was serious business.

“You’re not doing all of this for my benefit, are you?”

“No, I do this pretty much every week.”

He’d never said this many prayers even when he’d spent most of Friday over at House’s. He’d never asked Stacy to light the candles, either, even though it was a toss-up as to which of them was more appropriate for the job. Of course, there wasn’t any sort of woman around right now, Jewish or otherwise, so Wilson brought the light towards his face himself, neatly cleaving his week in two. House hung his cane on the counter’s ledge right next to the candlesticks and sat down at the table.

After they sat down he poured House some wine, reciting a prayer giving thanks for the fruit that made it in the first place and then a much longer one of general thanksgiving and praise. Immediately after that, he was off to the bathroom to say a prayer thanking God for the commandment to wash one’s hands – using the pitcher for it, too, very hygienic – and then, finally, thanks for the bread of the earth. And not a moment too soon. House didn’t know how kids could stand it.

It was a good meal, like all of Wilson’s. Demonstrating exactly what part of the world his genetic quirks came from, he’d made a wonderfully unpretentious Eastern European meat-and-potatoes feast. The token vegetable was a dark green leaf that had been so heavily cooked and flavored it took House a moment to figure out it was spinach. There was no question at all that it was the sort of meal to put flesh on your bones, or in Wilson’s case, calories in his system.

“Got any butter?” The challah was too gummy to be homemade, and salt wasn’t cutting it.

He hesitated. “Some.” His wings shuddered just a bit as he got a new knife and plate, and took the butter out of the fridge. “Just be careful with this, okay?”

The playground story of Jews breaking their plates after gentiles used them echoed in his head as he took the offered condiment. “Wouldn’t dream of seething a calf in its mother’s milk.” The butter helped a lot towards making the bread palatable. “Can’t say much for avoiding lizards. Somewhat of an occupational hazard when you’re dealing with salmonella poisoning.”

“Doesn’t that come from chicken eggs?”

“Reptile feces have it too. Chase had to do a B-and-E on some idiot who didn’t know how to clean up after his iguana.”

“Breaking and entering? Is that legal?”

“Dubiously.” House looked as innocent as he could manage. Wilson gave a small smile and poured him some more wine. He didn’t quite want to, but continued on for some reason, “I thought it was Erdheim-Chester’s.”

They kept talking and drinking, Wilson being the one to ask the bulk of the questions and drink most of the wine. After a final song of thanks after the meal was over – how many of those did one person need, anyway? – House didn’t help clear the table, but it was such a small kitchen he’d just have gotten in the way.

When House announced he was ready to go, Wilson asked, with the guilelessness he got when he was buzzed, “Could you turn the lights off?”

“You can’t do that yourself?”

“It’s…dubious.” He grinned and shivered his wings out as he handed House his cane.

He didn’t stand up yet. “So what’s the going rate for a Shabbosgoy these days?”

“It depends on the services provided. Turning the lights off when you turned them on in the first place, that’s just a favor for a friend who was kind enough to share dinner with you.” House made a show of grumbling but went to turn off the lights anyway.

“Night,” he called out as Wilson disappeared into the bathroom. He took the brief window of opportunity to check through the pile, find what he was looking for, and filch the catalogue under the cover of darkness. It was last year’s, anyway; Wilson wouldn’t miss it.

Teaneck. Damn. He’d been sure it was from Brooklyn.

On some level, he’d expected these sorts of products to exist. The demand for them wasn’t as high as it was for, say, basketball sneakers, but it stayed pretty consistent. On another, it was like the time he’d taken a radio apart to see exactly what was inside it: he’d had a general idea of what went on in there, but hadn’t actually seen it until then.

It was, in design and execution if not concept, virtually identical to any random mail-order catalogue. Like any other niche market publication, the needs that the products it advertised filled were specialized. While House hadn’t specifically imagined something like the backless strapped bra or the flat-bedded stroller imported from Denmark or the array of pouches designed to fit around arms and legs, it didn’t exactly surprise him, the way he hadn’t been too surprised to find out portable televisions used Tesla circuits. Still, why the only company in North America that made snow boots designed for people who could fly and had a built-in market needed ad copy, he didn’t know.

The books caught his eye as he flipped through it, the parenting guides in particular. A small, specialty press run out of the same offices in the lower East side for over a hundred-twenty five years was the sole source of the four pages of books, which ranged from children’s versions of Bible stories to parenting guides to the same Shoah memoir on Wilson’s bookshelf.

During business hours he called the toll-free number on the back cover and put down what would be a way too indulgent order for anyone who wasn’t planning on charging the books to his own two-person department.

*

It was something of a surprise when that changed. He’d been minding his own business, reading up on the latest exploits of the undertalented and overpaid, when Cuddy barreled into the exam room and told him on no uncertain terms that the only way she could justify his hundreds of dollars spent on ‘research materials’ in the last week was if he hired another fellow. House didn’t want to go through that process again, and he was fine with just Chase, but he didn’t want to cross Cuddy when she was in full lioness mode and he really wanted those books.

Still, no sense in giving in right away. “On two conditions.”

“Bikini Wednesday is out of the question.”

“One, you help with the hiring process again. Two, you get this to me in writing.”

She smiled that smile which meant there’d be trouble.

*

The letter-headed, embossed contract with phrases like “of a time frame of at least and potentially exceeding two months or six solved cases, whichever occurs first; case, defined as” got hand-delivered to his desk by Chase, sent straight from legal.

“You have to sign off for it, too.” He held out the clipboard, as cool as House could hope to ask for. Four months ago, he’d have been bemused, at the very least. Fast learner.

“We’re all slaves to tradition.” He scribbled his name out and sent his now primary fellow back on his merry way. His secondary fellow selection process started as soon as Cuddy helped arrange for the interviews.

He didn’t give a rat’s ass if the new fellow liked Chase, the other way around, or both at once. He wanted a good investment of the next three years. So he made sure to hire the prettiest girl in the bunch because taking her CV into account along with her hair made it obvious she worked hard when she didn’t need to. Also, the way her face practically melted off her skull when she shook his hand meant the fun of putting her through a real wringer of a learning experience. It helped that the first case Cameron worked on involved lying about child abuse, and the second had her investigate a home and come back with the sort of drugs that House fantasized about on particularly bad days.

“See what I’m talking about?” He posed the question, watched her steel herself behind her ethics and morals. “This is why we don’t trust what patients tell us.”

“They’ll tell the truth if they don’t have a reason to lie.”

“I think by now you know the inherent flaw in that assumption.” Maybe he’d been a little bit meaner than absolutely necessary, but he’d almost slipped on the ice that morning and wasn’t in any mood to modulate his tone.

*

“You know how it is – one and they get lonely, two and they can keep each other company.” He licked a gob of mustard off the side of his hand. “But it takes a while for them to get used to each other if the first one’s already staked out its own territory.” He’d checked Cuddy’s schedule the day before; when he saw she hadn’t budgeted any time for lunch, he walked in during the midday time she’d set aside for drafting grant proposals, bearing sandwiches, fruit cups, coffee and tea. Statistically, she was half as likely to throw him out of her office if he brought food.

He could smell the peppermint from here. She sipped along, seemingly oblivious to the perfume. “Rolled-up newspapers tend to come in handy for discipline at this stage.”

“Are you actually suggesting corporal punishment?”

“You could also lead by example and act courteous towards others.”

“You know that saying about flies and honey? It’s not actually true. Flies are more attracted to vinegar than honey.” He took a big bite, chewing smugly as she groped around the cup with a spoon for the grapes at the bottom. It was kind of weird to eat with someone and not have them eyeballing his food when it wasn’t actively being consumed. Kind of nice, too.

“Let me guess: you watched pots to see if they’d boil.”

“I’ve seen birds catch worms at ten o’clock. Even Spain doesn’t count that as early.”

“Any other proverbs you plan on violating?”

“I like to think of it as homemade mythbusting.” His mobile went off: Chase had finally gotten the biopsy back from oncology after two days, and it was negative on top of the wait. Maneuvering up off the couch with a groan and a definite pang of regret he couldn’t stay longer, “Of course, I’d prefer a flyswatter any day.”

*

Winter was roaring out after it’d crept in, three snowstorms in two weeks and a sudden cold snap in the middle of March, and April just a washed-out November. Still, slush was a damn sight better than ice – no fear of slipping now, of misstepping and slamming onto hardpack. Slush just led to ruined pants and forced him to take twice as much time getting to his car.

“Look, you know how hard it is to walk in snow, much less land on it. And thanks.”

The bartender poured both of them new fingers over the slowly melting cubes. “But is it really dangerous?”

“It’s like rain, it all depends. How fast it’s all going, how well you can see, how cold it is. It’s always pretty dangerous. A flurry won’t hurt because it’s not going so fast. It’s like…” He smiled and laughed quietly. “I was going to say it’s like a lizard crawling on your wing, but that really doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“How would you know what that feels like?”

“One of my nephews has a pet gecko.”

“And if it’s a blizzard?”

“Then you’re not going outside because even if you’ve got sleeves on you’re screwed because you can’t see anything.”

As informative as this all was, the conversation was going nowhere. “What do you want to tell me?”

“Excuse me?”

“You called me and said you wanted to go out, specifically, you wanted to go out to a bar, which means drinking. We could do that at either of our places, so like you told me the last time we did this, the big reason you have for going out and getting hammered is in celebration of something. So what is it this time?”

Wilson looked at him for a moment, still all over except for his eyes. “I’m getting married.” He delivered the news very plainly, without any fanfare that usually came along with that proclamation.

Of all the things House could have said, for some reason, he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “What, again?”

“Yes.” Time for the double-take. “Wait, what do you mean, again?”

“You got divorced almost seven years ago.”

“How do you know that?”

Working with fellows helped him practice his ‘well, duh’ voice. “There’s no way your parents would have wasted any time getting you married; they probably hired someone to pick your wife out for you by the time you were fifteen. About seven years ago you got your own place, which you’d have gotten at some point by twenty-eight unless you’d gotten married right off the bat. Sure, there could have been some communes or shared living spaces in there, but you also got very antsy and antisocial a few weeks before you moved in, which is behavior consistent with getting a divorce.” He took a sip. Wilson stared at him. He took another sip.

“Is there anything else about my life that you should tell me about?”

“That depends. What’d you want to hear?”

“Why my best friend keeps invading my privacy like this.”

“It’s not an invasion of privacy if you’re basically screaming it.”

“I never said anything about this.”

“You didn’t have to. All I did was listen to what you weren’t saying.”

Wilson gave a half-laugh, half-sigh, and rested his head in his hands, elbows on the bar. House shrugged, “You knew what I did for a living when you met me.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Did I ruin the surprise?”

“No, it’s…” He pulled his wings back in and sat up straight, composing himself. His head dipped slightly as he swung around to look House eye-to-eye.

“It’s that your wife won’t be as age-appropriate this time. Given when prime fecundity sets in –”

“It’s that I’d really have liked you to be happy about this with me instead of reminding me why I’m going through this all over again.”

“I am happy for you. Just as happy as I’m supposed to be.” He finished the drink. “Unless you expect me to go dancing through the streets.”

“Well, I was hoping for a summersault, but if you’re out of practice, I’ll take a set of jumping jacks. And another drink.” The bartender – who really deserved every single cent of tips he got – topped off their glasses. Wilson swallowed with more enthusiasm than he’d had all night. “So.” He wiped his mouth when he was done. “Do you want me to invite you to the wedding, or will you show up unexpectedly in the right place at the right time thanks to your astounding powers of deductive reasoning?”

“You want to invite me, I won’t stop you.”

“All right.” Wilson made a show of clearing his throat, preening his hair, and fluttering his wings. “House, would you like to come to my wedding?”

“As a matter of fact, I would, thank you.”

“Good. I’ll be sure to send you an invitation with all the appropriate information.” He stood up and bent over to say softly, “So happy I was able to see you tonight,” before leaving House to pay their tab. And of course Wilson was gone by the time he got outside. Even if he’d had two good legs to skedaddle on, Wilson would already be up and flapping by the time House got his wallet back into his pocket. He was just in that kind of mood tonight.

What the hell. House called a cab. Twenty minutes later, he was lying on his couch, not having switched drinks.

Wilson delivered the invitation in person next Monday, presumably because he could. He was all smiles again, the way he got when he came to see House and play hooky for a little while. In their longstanding tradition, neither of them talked about last week.

“Are you going to quit?”

“I might. They have branch offices all over; I could probably put in for a transfer.”

“You actually like this.”

“What can I say, personal incomes are nice.”

When Cameron came outside to talk to House about Lehr’s bloodwork and electrocardiogram, it just went to show that some people didn’t know how to behave around freaks. Thank god for Cuddy and her inability to see him as anything other than a jackass. He was tempted to bring her as a guest, but went alone. He did give her the courtesy of telling her he’d be taking the day off in advance, mostly to see how flustered she’d get when he remembered the rules for proper workplace behavior. As it turned out, not much. He’d be sure to tell her on the day of, next time.

*

The drive was short and the directions were good, so he got there with plenty of time to spare. The problem wasn’t navigating into the shul, either; all he had to do was follow the rest of the Y chromosomes. Judging by the outfits, it looked like everyone was gearing up for a funeral; adding in the grinning faces and hubbub of conversation led to a twenty second spat of disorientation. He snagged a skullcap in a basket by the door as he kept going, all the better to blend in, using the time-honored techniques of avoiding eye contact and talking to anyone in order to maintain his forward movement to get outside without any disturbance. His leg wasn’t terrifically cheerful right now, so he took a pill and kept walking to ease it out.

House caught snatches of English, Yiddish, and even a bit of Modern Hebrew; he didn’t stand still long enough to follow any conversation, but managed to recognize a clutch of words here and there. Besides, it was a wedding. All the conversations would be the same. Sort of like how in Los Angeles and New York City there would be the same sort of skinny-faced athletic girl who liked small furry dogs and Greek take-out.

Once his leg calmed down, he laid claim to one of the better seats by sitting in it and keeping his cane in plain view. It wasn’t enough to hush the request he got to turn his Game Boy off, even if there wasn’t any sound on.

Pretending to reread the program flyer provided for his information and entertainment, he kept listening to the conversations, stacking them up against each other and what he already knew. A little girl peeked at him through a gap in the giant curtains, and they made faces at each other until she got pulled away. Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain, and still another thirty minutes to go, with House trying not to spend all of it thinking of Johnny Cash lyrics.

Right about now, Wilson would be coming out of a small powwow with his close male relatives to check on his bride. Just to make sure, because Jacob hadn’t been, and there was no reason not to learn from his mistake. This might be the first time he’d seen her face, or the fourth. And right about now, they’d be signing the ketuba. Entering the sacred covenant of marriage with the added bonuses of contractual obligations and outmoded dowries, probably with added legalese what with Wilson being divorced, right as everyone entered the sanctuary and House had to scoot out and let everyone else get in before he got his aisle seat back. The Rabbi started, and didn’t show any signs of stopping. House kept looking around at all the suits; good thing he wasn’t ever one to feel underdressed, even in an ER.

So many wedding traditions mirrored each other, no matter where the home culture was from or which set of mores was enforcing them. The bride gets given away; there’s a procession or parade to showcase everything; property gets joined together for the sake of breeding purposes. Some just seemed ubiquitous but actually weren’t, like the ever-so-sweet flower girls that showed up in every sitcom House could think of. Not a single one to be found here, thank God. No pipe organs or blaring orchestras or even a tasteful jazz quartet. Just the bridegroom’s men walking him down the aisle.

Seeing Wilson in all the ceremonial get-up called for by this occasion wasn’t quite as unexpected as seeing the three other guys with the same sets of appendages. The groomsman without the wings was his brother, obviously – the same sort of fine nose, soft dark hair, and high cheekbones. Their parents coming, that was typical, and while he was glad to see what they looked like to track them down later House had a sudden stab of sympathy: there’d be a lot of standing around the huppah, and he knew how much that’d hurt Wilson’s ankles, imagining the dozens of tiny bones put under extra stress.

Then the bride herself came, flanked by her parents. Fantastic dress, even if it wasn’t the sort the wedding industry tended to promote: too modest. He couldn’t see any square inch of her skin or a single hair. Okay, he knew that was the point, and it still seemed a little weird to cover her up all the way like that. Not even her hands free, in white gloves like the ones his grandmother wore when she’d take the train into the city. Virginal, pristine, clean, dead white. She’d be all decked up for a funeral if she was Chinese.

House had never been to a wedding like this, but he knew that what they were singing right now wasn’t typical. Thank Wilson for that, son of grace that he was; he’d be singing these songs with just the pronouns changed if he was female right now. He went around his bride a full seven times, building up the walls of their own little world around her. When he lifted her veil, House wasn’t at the right angle to see her face, but he could see even from a distance the way a smile appeared and disappeared almost momentarily on Wilson’s face. He couldn’t decide if Wilson re-using his first wife’s wedding ring this time, and if so, would raise any of his family’s prodigious eyebrows.

Reminding everyone that the Temple was still broken and not to place even a wedding day above the memory of Jerusalem, though, that was a gesture that had managed to work its way so far into popular culture it showed up in Saturday morning cartoons, even if it was filtered through Hallmark by the time it got there.

There wasn’t a chance to elbow or cane his way to the middle of the crowd where Wilson’s father was most likely soaking up all the compliments and hidden spite. While everyone else partied, or in House’s case swallowed another pill, Wilson was behind closed doors with Louise, probably too nervous to do anything more than hold hands. House’s guess as to what went on in those private rooms just consisted of high school-style fumbling over words. Inexperienced groping in the dark would come tonight.

The food was good, he had to give credit for that. So good, in fact, that when the doors burst open and the happy couple were escorted to their proper sides of the divided room, he only glanced up from his blintz momentarily before going back to the little ricotta-filled pancake. It was just dancing and fawning, and he didn’t want any part of that. Watching it, that he could do very comfortably and even somewhat happily, once he was done with his food. Leafless salads, now there was something he could get behind.

It only took his father and brother to hoist Wilson’s stool up off the ground and over their heads, up and down like a butter churn. Everyone was smiling and laughing, and House couldn’t help but think about going native, just for a few minutes.

From the way he held his wings in, he was doing his best not to flap, and when he got down, he was obviously relieved. His three friends clustered around him back at the table, pulling over stools of their own. If anyone had asked, House would have been willing to bet good money they’d have off for some sort of Blue Angels-style aerial celebratory choreography. Instead, he had to make his way over to see them pointing fingers and slapping hands, elbows on the table like six-year-olds, laughing at rapid-fire English and Yiddish mixed together. Wilson’s brother was sitting with them, smiling and looking slightly lost, and noticed House first. No one else did, so there was only one thing to do.

“You guys really know how to host a party.” Everyone turned to stare up at him, take a good long look at someone who was typical and abnormal at the same time. “Of course, you’ve already done this before. Does it get easier the second time around?”

“I’ll let you know tomorrow morning. House, this is Asher, Rami, and Evan, and my brother Reuben.”

“Like the sandwich,” House observed.

Reuben’s expression stayed still. “No.”

“Like the tribe, then.” House pulled a chair of his own over, pushing himself in between Wilson and Evan, who half-twisted to the side and pulled a wing back to give him room.

“He’s the friend I told you all about,” Wilson went on.

“Well.” Rami smiled with his cheeks at House. “We were wondering if we’d ever get the chance to meet you.”

“Funny, I was wondering that myself.” He reached over and tried to snag a triangle of spanakopita from Evan’s plate, only to have his hand slapped at by Asher. He jerked it away and went on, “Afraid I was imaginary?”

“We’d’ve figured that out by now,” Evan replied. “Jimmy’s never had a big imagination, he really couldn’t’ve come up with all those details.”

“All the medicinal tidbits he’s got when he shares stories,” Rami elaborated.

“Did you like the service?” Reuben suddenly cut in.

“Oh, yes, it was fabulous. That one prayer Jimmy sang, what was it? About being a son of Hannah, it’s absolutely fascinating the way you structured yourselves to be matrilineal.”

“We’re quite proud of that,” Asher drolled, keeping one elbow on the table and the other in his lap. His wings were close in and raised up, and it suddenly occurred to House to check – everyone was in the classic defensive position, even Wilson, and none of their faces reflected that. Well, except for Reuben, but he could hardly be blamed for that.

Time to have some fun. “Well, you should be. The way your religiousness gets passed through the mother, you’d think it’d all be like that.”

“All being ancestral names, or cultural heritage?” Rami asked. “Because most of it does come from the mother, the way that they maintain the households and have their children get proper educations.”

“So it’s the women’s responsibility, and the men just provide income.”

“Women and men have different places, they’re both important,” Evan sighed.

House wasn’t perturbed. “You know, not every group with –”

“Didn’t you want some spanakopita?” Wilson asked, very lightly, like he was walking across a frozen pond. “Reuben could get some with you.”

House wasn’t one to avoid confrontation or shirk away from a challenge, but going by the way he was being looked at, in all the wrong ways, he bid them good-night and followed Wilson’s brother away from the freak’s table.

They kept walking past the buffet tables until they were far enough away from the celebrations that they could speak quietly and still hear each other. Reuben gave a long sigh, leaning against a convenient wall. “If we were in a movie, this would be the perfect time to offer me a cigarette.”

“I don’t smoke.” Well, not anymore; he gave that up years before Stacy started again.

“Neither do I, but it’d be appropriate.”

“I’ve got some pills.”

“It’s fine.” House shrugged and took one anyway. “I just want to be sure about this – you’ve got six of these to look forward to?”

“Seven, in eight months.” He smirked at House. “And yes, I know it’s a lot, but in the wake of the worst systematic ethnic cleansing experiment in human history, having a few extra kids doesn’t seem like much.”

“Nice,” House murmured.

Reuben stopped smiling, slowly. “I’m just glad to be out of there for a while.”

“Didn’t like sitting through it all over again?”

“Not the service,” he explained. “Just sitting with James and his friends.” House stayed quiet, and Reuben kept on. “Even if it’s just two of them, they way they focus on each other…”

“It gets tiring?”

“Well, for everyone else. Why am I talking to you about this?”

“Because I’m here, convenient, and not a part of your family so there won’t be any backlash if you say what’s on your mind. So it’s tiring.”

“It was easier when they were younger,” he shook his head once, hard, “when James’ friends would come over, watching them play with each other.” He looked at House with the clarity that House could hear, in the quiet, was a little beyond tipsy. “And it wasn’t the flying, that never bothered me. The way they look at each other now, and then how they talk to you right after that.”

“Like you’re the cripple.”

“Yes, that’s exactly it! Like – oh. Sorry.”

“Eh, don’t be. You get used to it.” He really hadn’t, even after four years, but no reason to tell him that. “It’s easier if it’s just one of them.”

“Yeah. If there’s more than one, they just talk to each other and you disappear.”

“But you got over that.”

He snorted. “I like to think I did. But when they get together, it’s…I mostly feel sad for them.”

*

Cuddy didn’t, when House asked her about it next Monday, crashing her office in that crucial after-lunch window when she didn’t have anything pressing and felt generous with her time as a result of just having eaten. Technically, he was keeping his word. Gossiping to someone who’d never meet the people mentioned in the conversation wouldn’t result in any backlash, to them at least. That he had to explain this to Cuddy took a bit of the edge off his flow, but they got back on track soon enough.

“It’s not that I feel bad for them,” she leaned back in her chair. “Not them specifically. It’s more how they grow up, that whole system. I’m not one of those people who thinks it’s terrible that they haven’t caught up with the rest of the world yet, but I’m not all that proud of them either.”

“You don’t resent them, their greater attachment to the message of your god?”

“No. It’s not that.” Something flicked across her face. “I didn’t meet anyone like him until I was fourteen, and I still don’t know how to act around them.”

“He seemed friendly enough.”

“He was nervous, I could tell. I sure was. The right protocol for that situation isn’t covered in Wednesday afternoon Hebrew school.”

“Maybe it should be. Write to the shul board, tell them to get better volunteers.”

The phone rang right then, proving the incessant encroachment of the industrial age had no concept of personal convenience. “Right after I deal with this – hang on. Hello, Lisa Cuddy speaking.”

Knowing he’d have a better time waiting for something to happen in his office, he got up and left. The chance to pick the conversation back up didn’t happen, with a twenty-three-year-old female turning up in the clinic who, three days of testing and theories later, turned out to have contracted hepatitis from harvesting her own sea salt in California a few months ago. It was more than enough to make House feel good about eating something as gleefully artificial as a Mounds bar.

Even Chase was somewhat surprised when there was only a one-day gap in between her and a forty-seven-year-old male who presented with breathing problems. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were actually looking for cases.”

House glared up at him from his tabloid. “And that’s why you’re still a fellow and I’m the one in charge.”

A half-hour later, Cameron came in. “Oncology wants you again.”

“Always wanting. Why can’t they ever need me? It’s much more gratifying to hear that.” He went anyway, mostly so he’d have a favor to call in sometime in the future. At the moment, he had a well-inked notebook of them in the far corner of his desk’s bottom drawer, right next to his work pistol.

It was a simple nephroblastoma, but Brown was one of those people who always wanted an expert’s opinion of things, no matter what he thought of it himself. House never held that sort of behavior in any sort of esteem; it was the sort of thinking that brought departments down and raised the general levels of mediocrity. If Wilson was around, he’d gossip with him about that, but he wasn’t, and wouldn’t spend more than roughly thirty minutes on the phone, either. The life of a newlywed, made fresh all over again.

*

Sparing an afternoon to loll about in the park, as well as either of them could, wasn’t anything new, even with the recent lull in it. Recounting a recent case of figuring out the root cause of a woman’s ink sacs’ sudden overtime had several complications thanks to her being in the second trimester was as entertaining as it ever was. The difference now was in Wilson. He still listened intently when House went into teaching mode, and even though he was working part-time he still had plenty of freedom to stop by, but it wasn’t the same anymore.

It ranked House fiercely that just a few weeks ago, Wilson wouldn’t be talking about getting home, about planning tonight’s dinner with his wife, or how she was getting on in the pregnancy. Or that he’d actually present this much happiness. Not just feel it, but show it off to the world at large. More than once, House got home irritated and more than a little upset at something he didn’t want to think about, and over and over again, chemical management proved a welcome remedy to introspection.

For some reason, Cuddy took his willingness to accept another case as a sign that he needed a full hat trick’s worth of fellow slots filled up. Four cases in seven weeks didn’t seem like very much, but it was enough that she wouldn’t let up on trying to convince him he should hire someone else.

He was halfway through the second interview of the day when she came in, startling the hopeful out of his recounting seventh-grade traumas. That she was storming in like Juno didn’t help.

“Do you have a need to invade my space as much as possible?”

“Aww, man,” he whined, “Why’d you have to say that? I had him convinced this is my office!”

“This isn’t?” Beiser asked.

Cuddy gave him one of her looks. “The fact that he taped a piece of paper with ‘Diagnostics’ hand-written on it over my name wasn’t a big enough clue?”

“I thought it was just…maintenance or something.” He was clearly scrabbling for ground.

House smiled. “Sorry. And thank you for playing. Enjoy your flight home.”

After Beiser left, House kept Cuddy’s seat behind her desk. She took the couch. “I can see why you like it back here. Seat of power and all that.”

“You said you’d get someone by now.”

“Already did. He’s on his way.”

“On his way to my office, or to Princeton?”

“What would it take for me to get one of these chairs?”

“You couldn’t afford it. Have you even met him?”

“Didn’t have to, after I ran a background check.” He leaned back, spinning around in half-circles with his eyes towards the ceiling. “He’s got a juvenile record as long as my c-”

“And you think this would make him a valuable addition – not his medical experience, but criminal history?”

“There are more real-world applications for knowing how to break into someone’s house without kicking down a door than there are for identifying Klüver-Bucy syndrome.”

“When it comes to the way you practice medicine, it’s hard to say.”

“You say that even though I haven’t gotten a patient with that yet, but had Chase and Cameron investigate the last three patients’ homes.”

“Do you have a checklist of rare and exotic conditions you’re hoping to diagnose tucked away somewhere?”

“It’s more of a Bingo card.”

*

In what House hoped wasn’t going to be a recurring trend, Cuddy managed to get him to take a case. Yes, it turned out to be interesting in the end, parasites eating brains always were. No, it wasn’t pleasant the way she’d managed to undo the years of carefully avoided clinic duty by using his once taken-for-granted privileges of being a hospital employee as an end reward. Although any excuse to yell at Foreman for missing the obvious was worthwhile. It’d be like overlooking ET in the closet of toys.

He got his petty revenge soon enough, watching her unravel as the hospital followed suit along with the infected babies, and sending the teddy-bear pusher to have a nice chat with her. It wasn’t the same sort of prank as mixing ceiling fans with packing peanuts, but a lot less energy-intensive to set up.

Completing his own hat trick of introducing his bestest best buddy to everyone working for him, he paged Foreman to come down to the cafeteria when Wilson was sneaking unguarded fries off his plate. It was somewhat unfortunate that on the surface he was slightly more plussed than Chase at meeting Wilson, and the only way to tell he was fighting to keep his cool was if you knew him pretty well already.

*

Every so often, his fellows would look up when Cuddy came in, ostensibly to check up on House’s progress – she really wasn’t fooling anyone, not the way those heels worked with that blouse, as he often reminded her gleefully – and offer her own insights on the state of his current patient. Somehow, it worked best when she was wrong: it got his fellows to work that much harder, knowing there was one less possibility open for them. It didn’t work so well when he was the one going over to her office, if for no other reason than she didn’t keep any sugar in there.

“Do you listen to the gossip about us?” He didn’t stop walking towards the pharmacy counter. “It’s all wrong. Every single piece of it. No, there is not a thin line between love and hate. There is, in fact, a Great Wall of China with armed sentries posted every twenty feet between love and hate.” Then, to Mark, “Thirty-six Vicodin.”

“Who’s the –”

“I am,” Cuddy cut in with a sigh. “You’ll lie, cheat, and steal to get what you want, but you can’t lower yourself to kiss my ass?”

“Nobody’s perfect.” Marcus handed the bottle over, and she grabbed it before he got the chance.

“House. Take one of these, wait for it to kick in,” she pushed it into his hand and he’d never admit just how much he liked it when she smiled like that, “and then come and kiss my ass.”

That day was one he recounted the following week when he finally took up one of Wilson’s invitations to come over for dinner, having turned them down for the past seven months, even after he’d called barely a month after his wedding to declare Louise was pregnant with a smile House could hear over the phone. As he kept being reminded at the end of every conversation, he could head over to Wilson’s any time he wanted, even if Wilson wasn’t there, even without calling ahead.

The first time House had brought up the subject, there’d been a lot of laughter and a long explanation that, Hollywood blockbusters aside, the Hasidim were not the Amish, being Orthodox didn’t mean you were Hasidic, and marriage didn’t have anything to do with whether or not he was supposed to grow a beard. Besides, he’d tried one with his first marriage, and that hadn’t turned out so well. Still, on some level, House expected to be surprised at Wilson’s sudden growth of full facial hair since the last time he’d seen him. Really, anything to hide that smile. “Come on in.”

“Hello, there.”

House could only follow propriety so much and didn’t hide his critical sweep over Louise, from the same sort of headscarf both she and Wilson wore to the three-quarter sleeves and stylish ankle-length skirt to the seven-month bulge in her torso. Anything he might have said about her being the little woman got hushed by the way she met his gaze when he got back to her face. “It’s good to meet you.”

“Don’t worry.” He grinned fiercely. “I make it a point to live up to the hype.”

“James warned me to have very low expectations.” She took a glance at his cane, just for a moment. Against a pair of wings, it wasn’t all that much. “I hope you’ll disappoint.”

“That seems to be his specialty,” Wilson cut in.

It was a one-story place, just a few blocks from the local shul. The tour didn’t last long, and the urge to ditch the hosts and go exploring under the sinks and through the dressers had to be quashed in the name of propriety as Wilson went on about the oil painting his parents had bought in Israel and Louise explained the antique desk that had belonged to her grandfather the cartographer. Their bed was low, as queens went, but very, very wide.

Louise Rosa Wilson was a young woman in an old job and wasn’t fooling herself about anything, from why she was picked for this gig to what she was supposed to be doing once she got hired, and was somehow very proud of herself – that much was clear just from the way she stood next to her husband, how little she fidgeted during the dinner conversation, how her voice lifted when she talked about her cousins and their children. It was amazing how little professional geneticists had on shadchanim.

“We’ll be trying again soon, of course,” she said, throwing House slightly off-track for his musings. “Just as soon as we can.”

“No sense in wasting time,” Wilson offered.

“Trying,” House repeated. “And what you have coming right now isn’t good enough?”

“House, you know how happy I am to be a father; of course I’ll be happy with her.”

“She’s a perfectly normal, healthy baby girl.” For the first time that night, Louise touched her bump.

“We found out when we did the ultrasound,” Wilson explained.

Preemptive disappointment; this was a new one. “I guess the first one really is for practice.”

Louise stared, Wilson glared, and House went back to his dessert. He could only imagine the sort of yelling conversation about him that’d come later tonight after he left, and hope it was epic. As he found out when Wilson called him two days later, it wasn’t, and for some reason that seriously disappointed him. Yes, Wilson had needed to apologize on his behalf, but he’d already given Louise plenty of warning so no, there wasn’t a big fight about their friendship, and he could still come over if he wanted. Recently, since about two months before his wedding, Wilson had started to become the one to suggest or initiate their get-togethers and meetings.

House knew by now that Wilson divided the world into three categories. There were the people who were almost identical to himself, that also had six limbs and hollow bones. Then there was the rest of his ethnic and cultural group, who had a shared global history and set of traditions. And then there was everyone else, the goyim who didn’t have penis cuts or knew what it meant to keep kosher. He’d never asked Wilson about this. He didn’t need to, in just about the same way he’d never needed to ask Stacy if she’d been having a bad day when he’d been in the hospital.

Having watched him with his wife, at his wedding with his old friends and relatives, House could imagine, very clearly, the circumstances that had driven him away from the first two groups into the third. Not many things were enough for that, but a divorce from an arranged marriage was no laughing matter. There wasn’t any way his parents or Wilson himself would have taken any chances, not with his projected lifespan, and gotten him married right away. House had entertained a few pet theories as to why it hadn’t worked out, and Wilson’s delight at Louise narrowed it down to one. Now that it was all going according to plan, the way it’d been supposed to work nearly ten years ago, Wilson was so happy he really couldn’t take anything and be sad about it.

In all the years they’d been friends, Wilson had always looked at House in the same way. It’d been a little weird when the rest of the world had caught up with that pity, but in a few cases with intense exposure, the pity could be overcome with the force of his personality and constant reminder he was a human being in addition to every other label someone might slap on him in a frenzy of simplification. Take Cuddy, for example. The fact that she’d known him since med school went a long way towards helping her get over the cane, limp, and pills, and yell at him like he was any normal slacker.

He attempted to return the favor by inviting her to a monster truck rally, which backfired when it turned out to be something she’d actually say yes to. Even with her day ruined, she’d had a look of unholy glee he didn’t see, well, outside of being offered tickets to monster truck jams. Or possibly hockey games. It’d be too embarrassing to back out, so after Hank Wiggan signed a couple of small pieces of cardboard he found himself sitting next to her in the bleachers, like some high school student’s fantasy on acid.

“This isn’t an elaborate put-on, is it?” He had to yell over Gravedigger making short work of Hangman.

“I figure with you, this is as close as I’ll get to a Broadway play!”

It was easy and familiar to laugh and clown around with Cuddy, who’d let her hair down and worn an old t-shirt he wouldn’t have guessed she’d held onto after all these years. “Now, now, let’s not ruin a perfectly fine evening out.” She looked puzzled until he offered her some of his cotton candy. “The only way to defeat the evil urge is to give in without a struggle.”

“You can resist anything except temptation.”

“More or less.”

“Should I be worried?”

“Fear of you ripping my head off and eating my brains halfway through mating is more than enough to ward me off.”

“That’s an urban legend. I’m planning on laying my eggs in you so you’ll be the one to give birth.”

“Just call me Mister Seahorse.” She grabbed at and tugged down the brim of his baseball cap; he returned the favor with a light thwack to her calves.

Things didn’t change back at work, not quickly and not all that dramatically. She got more willing to bargain away clinic hours, and that was about it. Well, that and how she started to smile around her eyes when she saw him in the morning, even before her first hit of caffeine, and how she started to keep small squares of very rich domestic chocolate in a jar on her bookshelf. He counted them each time, and he was the only one eating them. Nice.

*

By the time dear Ed Vogler showed up, Louise had given birth to six pounds and eleven ounces of screaming ugly who loved it when her daddy took her up on rides, which pretty much made her the luckiest kid in the world.

“Probably when she’s six.” She and her mother were napping inside, and Wilson had spread himself out on the lawn in the backyard while House enjoyed a patio chair’s aggressively pastel cushions. “That’s about when Reuben’s kids all got too big.”

“Peter Pan has nothing on the Wilsons.”

Wilson smirked. “I wouldn’t say that – I’m still going up.”

“Well, if we’re going to extend this, then it’d be the idea of Peter Pan being the one to carry the young children to a place of perpetual youth and innocence, as symbolized by effortless flight, which really shouldn’t amuse you so much.”

“Anyone who thinks flying isn’t work knows nothing about it. Really, you’d be surprised how many people think it’s just sunshine and rainbows.”

“Not really. People seem to think walking’s easy and always remind me about that.”

“Weirdos.”

“How eloquent.”

“Anyway. That new chairmen you got, that doesn’t worry you?”

“Nah. Cuddy’s got my back. Even if something happens, I’ve got her to vouch for me.” Vogler seemed to take the fact that they could almost be seen as something close to friends as a weakness of theirs to be exploited. House refused to budge.

“Didn’t he replace her as the one in charge?”

“He’s the chairman of the board, not the dean of medicine, so the difference would be subtle for someone not cued into office policy. He cuts the checks, she actually runs the place, so he can’t fire me directly.”

“Well, as long as you’re not worried.”

“I’ve been through three regime changes. I’m staying put.”

“You’ve almost been fired before.”

“The guy wants to run the place like it’s a business. It’s a flawed way to approach a hospital, but even he can see I’m a valuable asset. Who else gets asked to cure CEOs of world-famous cosmetic companies?”

“The same person who treats kids who get poisoned by pants. What was wrong with her, anyway?”

House considered for a moment, with doctor-patient confidentiality warring against anything, and then went ahead and told someone the truth of what he’d found out. Wilson kept staring after House finished talking. “Oh, don’t look so hurt. People do bad things to themselves all the time.”

“You generally don’t hear about things that extreme.”

“That’s a very polite way to say it horrifies and disgusts you.”

“It’s not something that tends to come up in conversations.”

“It comes up where I work all the time. You’d be amazed what the clinic turns out.”

“No, you would be. You kept staring at me, remember? Besides, you’re a special case. You treat, I don’t know, African sleeping sickness and leprosy. You’re not the best person to talk to about normal workplace conversation.”

“This is coming from the guy who works part-time flying unfaxable documents from Point A to Point B to hand-deliver them. What do you do when you’re not working, anyway?”

“Making a family. I’m not going to ruin it this time around.”

Of all the things that could amaze House, the level Wilson had convinced himself it was his fault his first marriage hadn’t worked out didn’t make the list. Humans had a fantastic capacity for personal illusion. The way Vogler thought he could quash House down was another; he didn’t seem to get that House might be a brash, insensitive, shortsighted, misanthropic, curmudgeonly, bastard of a man, but he worked, produced results, and he rescued people that nobody else would have a chance at saving, which was why he was still here and should stay.

Well, those were Cuddy’s words, not his. She really should have listened when he told her to wear that little pink number; it’d have been much more effective.

*

The day Shawn and Naomi’s baby managed to grab a hold of life and Olive was reunited with her parents was the day he thought he’d be out of Princeton-Plainsboro at last, and the first night where Cuddy showed up at his door.

“Can I help you?”

“I don’t think so. Can I come in?” He stepped aside to let her. She looked around, “It’s very nice.”

“It’s a place to sleep,” he parroted, words she didn’t know.

“I want to say –”

“You shouldn’t have to explain yourself.”

“But I want to.”

“You shouldn’t. Do you want something to drink?”

“Yes.” She sat down on the couch, head in hand. “Thank you.”

He poured them both double fingers of scotch, not bothering to splash any water in. She drank it fast and thoroughly; he’d always liked that, how well she could drink. He’d always joked that real ladies were supposed to sip French port daintily with a pinky extended, not slam back twelve-year-old highland scotch like it was a tequila shot.

They weren’t supposed to offer apologies like men did, not looking people in the eye. He cut her off: “It’s your baby. You want to make sure it’s cared for. I know that, but this isn’t how to do it.”

“I’d like to believe that.”

“I would, too.”

The next morning, after they’d fucked, she let herself out. A couple of days later, when he was lying in bed and trying to pick out patterns on the ceiling, she let herself in, huffed, and didn’t say anything as she left. He heard water running, and when he finally mustered the energy to look up she was coming in and threw a pitcher of ice water all over him. He hadn’t even known he owned a pitcher.

“The fuck!”

“You’re not working for me anymore, which means I get to do this.” She tossed some more water on him. “Get up.”

“Make me.”

“‘Make me’? What are you, five? Have you even moved since I left last time?”

“I had to use the bathroom a couple times.”

“Marvelous. Get up.”

“Give me something to get up for.”

She shook her head, curls bouncing ever-so-slightly. “House, I’ve spent the week dealing with the board practically shitting themselves each time they looked around a corner and a quarantine situation for bacterial meningitis which does not constitute a good day for anyone,” she disappeared and yelled from the bathroom over more running water, and he braced himself as she came back in with a full glass, “and I’m not in the mood to deal with your moping too. So get up.”

He pushed himself up onto his elbows. “You did what?”

“Busloads of people, all of which had to be tested and treated – thank God for nurses, that’s all I want to say about it.” She handed over his meds and the glass. He’d long ago stopped even thinking about trying to find water to help wash the meds down; he’d gotten over himself and his taste buds and took the damn pills.

“Sounds delightful. And by delightful, I mean boring.” He sat up and started to take off his shirt. When she didn’t flinch, he kept going for his shoes. “The same thing, over and over. This is why you should’ve kept me around. I provide variety.”

“I managed to convince Vogler to keep Foreman and Chase. It’s not their fault their old boss was insane.”

He moved into his shoes. “No, but it’s a plus on their résumé. What’s happened to them now?”

“They’ve been quietly shuffled off to the ICU and neurology.”

He nodded slowly. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He started to wiggle out of his pants. Cuddy didn’t move. He called her bluff and finished, and she didn’t leave the room; instead, she went to the dresser, rummaged, and tossed him fresh clothes and underpants. “You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen before.”

She got him up, dressed, and eating reheated soup through sheer force of will and interesting conversation. Guilt was a primary motivating factor for her right now, like it was with most of his relationships with people in the last few years. He wouldn’t be going back to the hospital anytime soon, and didn’t have much to look forward to given how eminently unhirable he knew he was.

The next day she cooked oatmeal he’d forgotten Wilson had bought for him, and she went to work while he tried to figure out what he was going to do with himself now. It actually didn’t take long at all for an egress from the fugue to present itself, but of course by that time all his stuff had gotten shipped home to him on Vogler’s dime, and then it got shipped right back out again. Very nice. One last hurrah on the big guy’s account.

*

“See,” he explained to Wilson, who’d spread himself out on the couch again – Davida had been sleeping through the night for months, but now it didn’t matter so much for both parents to be there to mind her – and clutched a glass half-full, “he was all about clinical trials, and following guidelines and rules down to the letter. Which doesn’t make much sense for a billionaire because there’s no way he could have gotten to that point by following the rules. Anyway.” He took another generous drink. “One of them was for a breast cancer drug, and there was this one recently-admitted patient, in otherwise good health, the right age and everything, who’d have been perfect for it. Unfortunately, for some reason, when Vogler heard Stacy Russel had gotten onto the list of potential drug testees, he couldn’t stand the idea of it and had him taken off the list immediately. Brown’s not much of a fighter, what can I say.” House grinned. “So when Mister Keach’s family and their well-connected network of lawyers got wind of this, well, they’re going to be making Ed’s life very unpleasant for a very long time.”

“And that was enough to get him to rehire you?”

“No. It was enough to get him to step down before the shit really hit the fan and got out to the public, and this let Cuddy get enough clout to restore my department.”

“Very nice.” Wilson nodded slowly. “All three fellows?”

“Yep. I’m feeling generous tonight. Tell me about Davida.” He wasn’t, really – there wasn’t much to hear – but sometimes it was nice to hear Wilson talk, especially if they were both in various stages of drunkenness. He got that dopey smile of pride and happiness, and didn’t say anything. “What?”

“Just thinking about her, that’s all. Well, that, and I should revise my will soon.”

“You have a will?”

“Since I was fourteen. My parents had me draw it up.”

“That’s a little paranoid of them.”

“Ah, they were just planning ahead. But there’s a lot going on – you know we’re trying to get pregnant again –”

“Please, don’t use the plural with that.”

“All right. Louise wants to get pregnant again.”

“Better.”

“And there are a few things I’ve been thinking about adding to the document for a while.” He shifted his weight, flapped slightly, and a light breeze went through the room.

“What sort of things?”

“Just things. What the funeral’ll be like.”

“I thought that was all in the handbook.”

“Most of it. Not everything.” House knew Wilson was thinking out loud again, and didn’t make a move to stop him from talking. “I’ll need to see a couple of rebbes to be sure about what I want to do. It’s a very gray area.”

“Let me know if I can help with anything.”

“I will,” he smiled.

House didn’t stop wondering what Wilson would be trying to learn about – everything from tablecloths to hors d’œuvres got covered in Leviticus. Maybe he needed permission for Wagner or a Rogers and Hammerstein piece that called for trombones. It was something to occupy his time when he needed to speculate wildly and idly, which, thankfully, he didn’t get so much of now that he was back in business. Out with the senators, in with the domniatrices. And, as life would have it, old live-in girlfriends.

Watching her in the hallway, coffee in hand made just the way she liked it, he knew exactly how he missed her, and why he’d been trying so hard to keep moving forward.

She and Cuddy still looked as friendly as they’d ever been. House noticed the way they stood apart from each other, how they didn’t try to talk over each other’s sentences. She sent over a nice stuffed bear, and House called Wilson up to come over and get drunk without revealing more than he had to about his current situation, which was still more than enough for ample commiseration.

*

“Does it ever bother you when you see your first wife with her husband?” This time they were at a restaurant-bar House had grown to like, one that was a lot shinier and better-lit than the one Wilson had taken him to sometimes. House was a semi-regular and didn’t attract much attention; Wilson was out of his element and didn’t notice the way people looked at him when he was this engrossed in a conversation.

“That’s different. We got a divorce, we didn’t just move out.”

“She’s got kids now. That’s gotta hurt.”

“Something changed. I’m not going to stay bitter about it.” He finished his drink and sucked down an ice cube. “Are you?”

“I’m not bitter. I’m happy. And I know I’m not supposed to be, but I am.”

“That’s a tricky one.”

“He’s my patient. I’m sure he’s a good guy, he’s probably a great guy. Probably a much better guy than I am. And some part of me wants him to die. I’m just not sure if it’s because I want to be with her, or if it’s because I want her to suffer.”

To that, Wilson didn’t have anything to say.

*

Stacy was probably at Mark’s bedside, cuddling with him and whispering sweet nothings in his ear; Wilson would be at home, talking to Davida and telling her how much she meant to him. House couldn’t imagine what Cuddy was up to, and that was probably for the best.

She tried to act the same way around him as she always did: getting indignant when he guessed a password as obvious as “password” and trying to get him to take on the Littlest Cancer Patient and figure out why she was hallucinating. When her guilt came out full-force in the hand of her immigrant workforce, at least it was proved he could work with both her and Stacy in a nigh-professional capacity. Wilson didn’t agree, but House wasn’t interested in listening.

“Why are you doing this?” They were arguing again. Friends were allowed to argue, right?

“It sounds fun. Do I need a reason?” House got up and went inside, Wilson following. Dang.

“You’re not at all worried about how things are going.”

He flopped down in his chair. “Am I supposed to be?”

Wilson stayed standing, hands on his hips, wings pushed out. “The way you’re worming yourself into her life and Mark isn’t at all worried, yes, you really should be.”

“Well, forgive me for not seeing the downside to this situation.”

“Right, free pet rats for all.”

“As a bonus to learning more about her life and finding a way back into it, yes. And please don’t quote the good scrolls at me for advice on how to conduct myself around a married woman. We both know it won’t take.”

“You don’t have to be religious to be ethical.”

“We already had this conversation about needing people and getting her to trust me so I can use her. Isn’t this just a logical extension of that?”

“Getting her to trust you is one thing; kissing her is another.”

“It’s so close to sex.”

“It’s still infidelity.”

“And you’ve never cheated on your wives.”

“Of course not!”

“Before or after. They’re probably the only people you’ve ever slept with. You let people match them up for you, didn’t offer any input, and went along with what everyone else decided for you even though you hated it.” He got up to glare at Wilson from the same eye-level, pitching his voice down. “So what grounds do you have to give me relationship advice?”

“I’m your friend, and I’m trying to stop you from making a very bad set of decisions.”

“Trust me. It’s not gonna work.”

As it turned out, the only thing that did was forcibly removing all sexual tension that remained between him and Stacy, and having Wilson yell at him on the roof about being miserable was the lovely cap to a week. He didn’t yell back, even though he wanted to – yell back about how miserable Wilson had been for years and still was, and at least House had the guts to admit he wasn’t happy instead of putting on a good face for the crowds.

*

In Euskadi, he’d learned a lot of the same pithy sayings he’d come across later, the identical sentiments parents wanted to pass onto their children to make them into happy, industrious members of society. Even when he’d been twelve, trying to catch vowel sounds that weren’t made anywhere else in the world, he’d already known how not to overlook his own flaws. Thank his father for that – brutal honesty was just as bad as outright lying to young, sensitive children.

His father had never laid a hand on him. He’d just been honest. His mother’s support could only go so far against that.

It was pretty much why he allowed himself to ask Cuddy for the morphine, and the way her eyes lingered on his face this time instead of on his leg, he realized she was getting beyond her guilt for him. And it had only taken just under six years.

He knew, on some level, sleeping with his boss was a supremely bad idea, up there with goldfish swallowing and phone-box stuffing and sleeping with his married ex-girlfriend. He also knew that sleeping with one of his oldest friends when they both wanted it wasn’t such a bad idea in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it got her to vouch for him and get him an extra minute to find a tick in a teenager’s vagina with a really stupid idea. It also wasn’t great he couldn’t tell Wilson about it, gossip-monger that he usually was – he’d never let House live this down, and there was the chance he’d actually do something drastic, like not have him over for Passover dinner or tell him his wife’s unborn child was everything they’d hoped for this time, or let House finally teach him to juggle.

Like die, for example, but House had nothing to do with that. He’d been minding his own business on an ordinary Tuesday morning, getting ready for work, when he got the phone call. He hadn’t dropped his mobile, or gone weak in the knees, or heard his blood rush anywhere. It was Reuben, calmly explaining that in the event of his younger brother’s death, House was the first person besides the family they were supposed to contact.

“Are you going to say why?”

“He wanted you in charge of the autopsy.”

That was a surprise. “In charge of his what?”

“An academic autopsy to be performed at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, to be recorded and documented for – you know, this is bullshit, you know what it is, right?”

“Yeah. I do them all the time.”

“He got Louise to agree to this months ago. I don’t know how he did it, he never told me anything about this.”

House didn’t know why he would. “Do you know why…”

“He just died, House. That’s all. His heart gave out sometime last night.”

“So when will it happen?”

“Thursday – that’ll give us time to get the death certificate, send him over, and alert the media.”

“Why the media?”

“Well, not the media – you know what I mean, right? Journals and shit. He wants photographers to be there.” When House’s grandmother had died, it’d taken years for his mother to stop using the present tense. It’d been hours for Reuben, he really couldn’t blame him.

When Wilson – Wilson’s body arrived, it was done with a minimum of fanfare and a maximum of fuss. The catalogue had a small section for coffins and other funereal goods, but nothing for transporting a body that couldn’t be kept on its back like a good corpse should. He was being kept on his side and stomach, alternatively. Coming from a desert-based culture wasn’t the only reason he was supposed to get stuck in the ground as soon as possible; it saved a lot of fuss to have to deal with the body if you got rid of it right away.

*

“You really should’ve gotten an FMRI.” Vivid dreams were good for this, at least: talking to now-deceased friends in their kitchens two days before they got cut open. Never mind that Wilson hadn’t known what an FMRI was; as long as House did, he did too. “You know my brain’s just full of all sorts of goodies to keep Foreman entertained for months.”

“If by goodies you mean really cool developmental patterns that present in less than two percent of the world’s total population, then yes.”

“What else would I mean?”

“Childhood exploits. Like the time you ripped open a pillow and glued the feathers to your wings to be a goose for Halloween.”

“Did I ever do that?”

“Damned if I know. Maybe it was for Purim. Should I ask your brother?”

“I won’t stop you.”

“That really isn’t helpful.”

“What, is it bothering you to see me like this?” He was fully dressed, up to his scarf and tzitzit, the same way he’d been when House had seen him sitting in the exam room. He got up, walked over, “Would it be better for you if I looked like this?” Suddenly wingless, dressed in a labcoat and tie with a name badge from the hospital, with hair flopping down over his forehead, he looked like some bizarre alternate universe version of himself where he’d come out of his mother just a bit more average than he had in reality and tried to get everyone’s approval and need by becoming a doctor.

“Ugh, no.”

He was back to normal before House could blink. “It’s your dream. Maybe you could ask Evan about a brain scan.”

“He’s just going to follow your lead like this?”

“He was my first best friend. Anyone could see that, the way we were talking to each other.”

“I feel so loved.”

“Not everyone would be able to see we’ve got such a deep history, but then, that’s why you do what you do, and I just had a glorified paper route.”

“A few genes over, and you’d have drowning in your own lungs from cystic fibrosis.”

“I could have had Tay-Sachs.”

“Or Canavan disease.”

“And I got this instead.” He laughed. “Purebred. And then there’s you – a pedigree mutt.”

“Hybrid vigor, the gift that keeps on giving.”

“I swear, House. You eat whatever you want, drink as much as you want, down Vicodin like it’s going out of style, you could probably start smoking again tomorrow and you’d still live to eighty-three.”

*

People traded off waiting in the morgue by the drawer. House recognized some of them from the wedding, sitting in the aisles or dancing around in jubilation. He kept checking and didn’t go in until that afternoon, when it was Wilson’s father, sitting on the stool and looking down at the floor.

House wasn’t subtle about coming in. “Hello.”

“You must be House.”

Pulling up a chair of his own, “We didn’t get a chance to talk at the wedding.”

“James told me so much about you.”

“Not everything, I hope.”

This got a faint smile. “I’m sorry we didn’t meet then.”

“It’s all right. You had other things to think about.” He really should have been an actor. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

House waited for a few minutes. It wasn’t going anywhere, and he was just about to start asking some semi-personal questions when Wilson’s father sighed and said, “This is the second time I’ve had to deal with this.” Knowing a confessional tone when he heard one, House stayed quiet. “But with that one, we didn’t have a choice – we couldn’t just bury Michael, not after they’d found him like that.” He looked at House. “Of course James didn’t tell you about him. He hated talking about him.”

“Do you?” He sounded seven, but couldn’t help himself.

He didn’t get everything, but enough that when Wilson’s mother came in – a woman with eyes too dark for her face who didn’t wear her headscarf with the same inborn ease her son and his wife did – she was able to tell him more, and from that, got a clear enough picture.

So that was why he hadn’t come over those weeks. To be fair, sitting shiva was a time-consuming practice. Doing it for someone who’d left the family in the middle of the night and then reappeared very dead years later in Pennsylvania by an apple orchard couldn’t have been pleasant.

Cuddy went down a couple of times to see the relatives and express how sorry she was. She spent more time in her office dealing with the different journals and photographers who wanted first crack at the body. Autopsies of any sort were a big no-no for the orthos, and gave House plenty of information to piece it together, that this was what Wilson had seen the rabbis about to make sure it’d be okay for people to cut him open to get an idea at what was inside everyone else like him without having to rely on out-of-print, badly translated German folios from the camps. Sort of like bringing democracy to the Far East, if you looked at it really cockeyed.

When it was time for the actual cutting, keeping Wilson face-up with a very carefully-placed set of supports that usually just went under the neck, the floor was pretty well-staffed and the observation decks were madhouses. House looked up at the mix of science reporters and students who’d managed to draw the lucky straws or guess the right lotto numbers or got lucky enough to get into abnormal physiology years ago. Everyone had a camera or a notepad. Some had both.

“Preliminary report for the autopsy of James Raphael Wilson, May second, two-thousand and six –” House drowned out Spencer’s buzzing, focusing on the way Wilson looked – head uncovered, no fringes at his corners, body lain out and being sliced open for future generations. It wasn’t worth it, not even if it saved a life or seven down the road; not the way they were treating him like everyone else. Even when they got to the internal organs, the nubby lungs and way-too-large heart – it was amazing an organ that big had kept pumping for thirty-seven years. They didn’t usually last that long. In retrospect, he should have made more jokes about the size of it.

That night he began researching anthropology journals’ publication guidelines.

*

“Why’d you do it?” They were in Wilson’s tiny apartment, with House on two whole legs and Wilson standing around with his scarf and shirt off and arms over his chest.

“Would it sound good if I said it seemed like a good idea at the time?”

“No.”

“Well, then, that must not be the reason. Why am I here?”

“Because my brain has a mind of its own. Do you need a reason to be in my dream?”

“Generally, yes. It’s a pretty good thing to know.”

“You’re supposed to be the one telling me things.”

“You know everything about me that’s medically relevant.”

“Up to and including your mother’s two miscarriages, yes, I do. But that doesn’t have anything to do with why you wanted an autopsy.”

“I didn’t, really.” He walked over to stare out the window. “I thought it’d be a good thing to do. If I had a choice, my funeral would be over two days ago by now.”

“You did have a choice. You put it on your will.”

“No, I didn’t. How well do you think you knew me?” Wilson laughed. “I never had a choice about anything.”

“Come on, you can’t mean that.”

“About the only things I picked for myself were my divorce and my friendship with you. You’ve done the reading, you dug up all my family’s dirt in their time of mourning when they were ready to tell everyone everything. When did I have a chance?”

House thought for a moment. “I guess you’re right.”

“Did you ever pick up on how jealous I was of you? You can go anywhere, you can do anything.”

“You can fly.”

“Yeah.”

“Are we going to get to a poor-little-rich-boy pissing contest? Because that’s really not how I want to spend the rest of this REM cycle.”

“No. We’re going to commiserate on how you’re never going to know what it’s like, and how that makes you very sad.”

“It makes everyone sad.”

“It makes me sad for everyone else.” Wilson pulled his shirt over his head, tied up his scarf.

“Do you know why David left?”

“Of course. He was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Being trapped. So I let myself get trapped for him.” He smiled, and they were outside in the park. “I really have to thank you, for giving me a way out of it.”

“How’d I do that?”

“You know.” His eyes twinkled. “You’re my friend.”

House rolled over in a too-soft bed. Cuddy shifted her weight; he threw an arm over her in the dark and she made a noise in her sleep. He lay like that, thinking about what he did and wouldn’t ever know.