Chapter Text
Snuggled in the warmth of his empty bed, Wilson was lying on his side, chest expanding against soft cushions before deflating as breath left him. It had been an average day of work, though House had seemed sort of… jittery. Nervous, even, as his eyes darted around and his fingers kept twitching. Something about the case, Wilson assured himself, though he knew that was a lie.
It was fine. House would tell him on his own time.
Now, he was thinking instead of sleeping, though nobody could tell if they were watching. His face was placid, muscles fixed in faux relaxation as he practiced his act again. After all, you never know when you might need to fake sleep.
Always prepared, House had whined once, on that road trip to his father’s funeral. The sky had been cheerfully grey, painting House’s hair in that fuzzy, haloed way and Wilson knew that there was no way he wasn’t falling back into his orbit.
Was it a mistake?
Whatever. He chose not to dwell on it.
He stretched a little, reaching light arms towards the headboard, groaning a little at the pull, at how his mattress cushioned his body just right. Satisfied, he murmured a small sound of content and dragged his arms back down, sinking his fingers into thick covers.
Fiddling with the fabric for a few moments, he blinked clear eyes open at the first ring of Say You Will by Mick Jagger.
House.
Smiling, Wilson reached an agile hand over to his nightstand to grab the vibrating device and hold it to his ear. “Barney’s Pizzeria. How may I help you?”
“Willl—hhh!”
His fingers tightened around the phone and he sat up, already moving to get out of his comfortable cocoon. “Where are you?”
“H, hommm…” A shrill, serrated hiss. “I oper—operated—”
“I’ll be there in ten,” Wilson assured, stumbling over his pyjama pants towards his bathroom and the medicine cabinet inside. Morphine, alcohol, the suture kit and gauze—
Fuck. Bring it all.
Shoving the bottles and vials and syringes and other clinical, surgical paraphernalia, they fell into his emergency backpack. The all-terrain, bulletproof, foldable, waterproof bag he almost never used, except for when House…
Don’t think about that now.
“Knew you… c’dn’t stay away,” House slurred, breaths coming cold and sparse through the phone. The metal chilled Wilson cheek from where it was lodged between his shoulder and his face, but the frost was probably nothing compared to House, who was fucking open. Wilson couldn’t help but picture it; his leg — because where else would he operate? If not on his mottled, maimed parchment of flesh where thick, supple thigh should have been, where?
How did it look like, on the inside? Was it just as ruined and disgusting as the ridges of fibrous tissue seemed to suggest? Or was it just like any other leg — red and slick with curved structures of cartilage, the tense white of bone peeking out from underneath his organs? Was it brittle, were his joints inflamed… If he reached his hand in, would he scream?
His tires screeched as he drove recklessly, and he forced himself to ease back on the pedal. He won’t be of much use to House if he ends up dead in a desolate ditch. Mentally, he prepared himself to stitch him up like sewing together a blanket, fixing him by running thin string through his skin. House was like a patchwork piece of quilt, little pieces tied together by someone’s love. First, Stacy. Then, Cuddy.
Now, him.
All his?
He shook his head. That’s not the way to be thinking about this. House was asking for help and he was trying to exploit it and that was… well, that was nothing short of sin. The revelation made him hate himself for three seconds. Perhaps House’s companionship had inured him to negative thoughts of any kind. After all, would his blunt dagger still hurt after House diced him with his greedy knives? Compared to a halfhearted, off-hand remark from his best friend, his own self-flagellating thoughts could never win.
House taught him that it was normal to sin.
And it was, wasn’t it?
Wilson was coming, he really was, and he was reaching in ten minutes, so just hold on a little longer, just grab the porcelain tub a little harder. House gritted his teeth and yelled into the enclosed cavern of his mouth. It still felt too emasculating to let it out. Maybe, when Wilson arrived, he’d gain the courage, but not for now.
Sweaty and shaking, he was sure he was a mess. Suddenly self-conscious, he wiped his forehead against the towel he’d prepared.
Hoping to dress up for Wilson, now? He sneered at himself.
God, that was ridiculous. His leg was open, and he could feel it, feel the stale air sinking into places it wasn’t meant to be, feel the molecules nudging his arteries and muscles and femur and—
Stop stop stop
it hurts too much.
He squeezed his eyes shut as his body jerked forwards again, spine arching into the tub’s cold walls. So cold, so alone, his experiment having gone horribly wrong. This was bad; he should have known. The risks, the doses, of course they weren’t sufficient, but what could he do? He couldn’t get more and he needed to get the tumours out.
What he wouldn’t admit, until it was already too late, was that he actually needed help.
Help was demeaning and pitiful and dehumanizing. It forced you to accept your limitations and hold onto another human being for sustenance, for survival, for… oh, I don’t know. Disgusting, was what help was, and asking for it was even worse.
No, what he really needed was someone who would help without needing to be asked.
In his mind, all roads led back to Wilson. The knight in bleeding armour, the one who’d sacrifice themselves in a heartbeat, the type of person to wake up in the dead of night and speed over to his best friend’s house just because he made a stupid, childish mistake. Someone with no boundaries, no self-respect, no line between what’s acceptable and what’s not. Just a man looking to help.
They were a match made in hell.
Jerking, House curled up as much as he could, which was just a silly reflex, when his front door slammed open and the rain and the lightning flooded in. Wilson’s soggy, squelching footsteps pelted his floorboards hurriedly before he pushed open the bathroom door and carefully set his bag down on the floor.
Jaw tight as if he were forcing it up, willing it not to fall, Wilson stared at House’s shivering form. His eyes looked so dark despite the stark “surgical” lights, his pupils probably still dilated from the cold night outside. Still, in the washed-out lighting, his warm browns were decolorized, almost entirely black as they dragged down House’s exposed thigh.
Then they flicked back to House’s face, to his wide, red-rimmed eyes, and Wilson sucked in a breath.
“What do you want me to do?”