Fandom: House MD
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: R
Wordcount:540
Notes/Warnings: Yet another freakin' post-ep that I had no intention of writing. I guess you know the show is back on track when every week inspires something. Spoileriffic up to Not Cancer. ANGST ANGST ANGST! Unbeta-ed because I'm on shpilkes, so feel free to point out typos and general suckiness.
Summary-House is a man who knows how to hate.
Five thousand bucks bought a detailed report, if not somebody to come over and listen to his bon mots as he went through it, saving special sarcasm for the so-called lucky three who’d actually managed to lure Wilson into their web of matrimony.
Few of the other names were a surprise. Most had been long guessed at and only semi-denied. Wilson liked to play coy, but his reputation was no secret, at least partially by design. House noted his own absence from the list with a mixture of satifaction and regret. Those footprints had been well-covered. Everybody thought they knew, but of course it was all a joke. Wilson, the sweet-faced lothario and House, the bitter misanthrope. The Odd Couple, but never a couple.
Only one name made him wince and reach for the pill bottle as if grasping the plastic could numb the pain of that particularly memory, and it wasn’t Amber.
There should never have been an Amber in Wilson’s life, but she was as inevitable as a California earthquake, and equally destructive. The fault-line had been opened two years earlier, when Wilson walked away from something that almost looked like happiness because he couldn’t give up his image of who he was. Somehow he didn’t find the innuendoes as funny when they were hiding a real affair, while House found it absolutely hilarious to flaunt the thing, daring the world to notice. Cameron’s deliberate obliviousness was a hoot.
Maybe it was the protracted joke about inviting mom and dad over for dinner, just to see the look on the old man’s face. Give him one dose of honesty too many. House hadn’t really been joking. He wasn’t ashamed. Sex was sex. Love was love, if you wanted to call it that. It probably wouldn’t work out anyway, but the gay thing shouldn’t be the reason.
Except it was.
Wilson would risk his whole career and reputation to cuddle up with a cancer patient rather than have it known that he was fucking a man.
House felt the pain in his gut just as vividly as the night he’d sat at the poker game, putting it all together. Sure, Wilson wanted House to keep quiet about what he’d doing since he left the apartment, but House could tell what the real terror on his face was about. It would have been so easy to tell them the players everything. Full name, place of employment and oh yeah, his blow jobs are a gift from the gods.
He hadn’t said it and they’d gone on, playing the game, pretending things were all right, doing what they had to do to live with themselves.
House crumpled the report in one angry fist so he wouldn’t have to see that name again. She was probably dead, but that changed nothing for him.
Hatred for Stacy had been his constant companion for years, sometimes getting him through the night when even the Vicodin let him down. He still threw mental darts at Detective Tritter when he was having a particularly bad bout of insomnia. At the moment, he hated Wilson for being a self-righteous bastard who was still running from the truth about himself.
Someday he might forgive all of them.
He’d never forgive Grace.