Archive of Our Own

“There it is!” House said aloud to no one. No one continued to whisper. “There it fucking is!” he repeated, and the whispers carried on their ghostly chorus beneath the material, measurable, scientifically provable physical sound waves of House’s vocal chords interacting with atmosphere.

Adrenaline tumbled him down the hall, not winning in a foot race against the (imagined? real?) susurrations, smacking him like a cartoon character leaving its silhouette in brick against Wilson’s door. The cheap twist handle squawked and gravity admitted House to the room, flat on his face.

“House?!” Wilson bolted upright, hair stuck up on end, jammies ruffled. He had a hand held automatically out in half-conscious helper-mode.

“You have to hear it,” House insisted from the floor, scrabbling against stupid slippery hardwood.

“Hear…the sound of you ruining a good night’s sleep?”

“There is no good night’s sleep!”

“For you. And so, not for me, either.” Wilson sighed but was already throwing back the comforter and heaving himself out of bed. He bent slowly, bewaring the creaks of middle-aged bones, to grasp House’s elbow and help him up. “I think your narcissism is getting debilitating.”

“Don’t,” House snarled, making it as much a threat as he could, because otherwise it might slide into begging. “Don’t get psychiatric on me.” Wilson snagged the back of House’s skull with a fish-hook glare of hot concern and House batted back without meeting his eye, “If you’re jealous of my intimate relations with Doctor Nolan, then go back to school and get qualified to fuck my brain.”

“Sleeping with my patient jokes, can never get enough of those.” Wilson yawned. House stole a peek. Wilson had reset to ordinary levels of miffed, which demonstrated either Wilson’s exceptional tolerance for House-related bullshit or that House’s bullshit had been exceptionally subpar of late and Wilson had gone soft.

House closed the door of his bedroom, previously a study in name and shrine in practice, previously-previously a bedroom shared by his best friend and his best friend’s late lover. House trapped Wilson in with himself and her ghost—and possibly the ghost’s whispering cronies, brought back to punish her trespasser. House pointed at the bed. “Sit.”

“Okay.” Concern about either House’s sanity or his own masculinity drove Wilson to sit rigid and wary at the very edge of the bed. House would’ve rolled his eyes if he weren’t so fucking scared.

“Stay,” House reupped the command as he hurled himself across the bed. He paused, listening hard. Nothing. He reached out and twisted the lamp switch.

Darkness flooded in. For a second, he thought Wilson’s indulgently resigned breathing a few feet away would keep them at bay. Then the whispers crawled out of their shadows. They were so quiet as they slithered around the midnight baseboards, hissing and snickering at House, impossible to decode—as if they knew how hard and how closely he was listening and modulated their meaning just out of his specific aural range.

“You hear them?” House demanded. “It’s some…fucked up late night show, right? Maybe one of those podcast things that nerds like Foreman listen to?”

“I don’t hear anything, House,” Wilson replied. Not even a stray B-flat of empathy. Just sharps of irritation. “And as pranks go, this one’s just…nothing.”

“It’s not a prank!” House’s volume spike silenced the intruders. He waited. Nothing—

“Goodnight, House.”

The bed creaked as Wilson stole his already reserved weight fully away. House remained frozen in the dark. Silence. It was golden. Or mere pyrite?

He heard the click of Wilson’s bedroom door closing definitively. House began to slip himself cautiously back beneath his comforter.

It probably had been a radio. Drifting through the old, crappy building’s pipes. Maybe a husband and wife somewhere upstairs were arguing over the volume and their turn-it-up turn-it-down tug of war had produced the unconscionably spooky effect—

Whispers.

House leapt out of bed. Except he was fifty and tangled in sheets, so it was mostly just a shout and a thump and maybe a foot of air gained. He crawled for the door, pulse racing, made it to shaky feet, pain impaling his thigh alongside the dull throb of new bruises gained from his ill-advised acrobatics, pulled himself along the corridor walls and thrust his hand out for the—

“House.”

House’s fingers found no handle, passed through empty air, and swiped Wilson’s waist.

“Come with me,” he hissed, grasping Wilson’s waiting sleeve like a child, “you have to hear it.”

Wilson followed with only sleepy slowness, no grumbles or remarks this time. House was too fucked up to notice that his fucked-up-ness was working its magic on Wilson. All he knew was that trying to keep mum on reality-hiccups hadn’t kept him out of the loony bin before—he was bringing in a damn outside observer if this merry-go-round was cranking up again.

His room was still dark and the whispers were still waiting just beneath the bass of his own heartbeat.

“Listen!” House’s throat was raw with the force of low volume. Wilson’s hand landed on the center of House’s back as he led them both with quivering steps to the bed. House scrambled (ow, and also, ow) across the mattress to snap on the light.

Quiet.

“Why would sound be afraid of the light?” House asked, before it could occur to him how bizarre the question would seem to someone not privy to this cheap haunting.

But Wilson just asked, “Does ‘because seven eight nine’ work as the punchline here? I’m too tired to come up with something better.” And he sat on the bed right next to House, evidently also too tired to keep up the earlier distance.

“It’s voices. Not numbers.”

“You’re hearing voices?”

“Most people hear voices. That’s how auditory perception works.”

“Okay, rephrase: are you hearing voices that no one else hears?”

“That’s just how phones work.”

“Are you hearing voices on a phone or by yourself in the dark?” Wilson patiently followed up, entirely unrattled. It vaguely annoyed House, which as a side effect (or intended effect), calmed him considerably.

“I’m not imagining them. They were there,” House insisted.

“And I believe you.” Wilson stood, but he didn’t leave. He shuffled the bedclothes up and then crawled in beneath them. House looked across the hetero-spectable distance separating their shoulders. It was all of four inches on the slender double mattress.

“What are you doing?”

“Listen,” Wilson fluffed the spare pillow into his preferred shape, “the way I figure…it’s like when the printer breaks down.”

“You’re saying I’m having a break down?”

“No,” Wilson held up a finger, “let me finish. You love metaphors.”

House did. He also was a sizable fan of story time, delivered at the perfect volume to calm his racing heart and cover up the skittering snickering somethings. He snuggled down in the covers and batted his eyelashes. “Go on.”

“Okay. So, printer breaks down. You call the IT guy. And as soon as he shows up, it starts printing just fine. You can’t replicate the problem. As soon as he leaves, bam, the printer prints no more. The solution—”

“—is to throw the printer out the window?”

“You won’t fit out the window,” Wilson replied easily. “So, the other solution is to chain the IT guy to the printer. Then, he’ll either be forced to bear witness and prove the problem is real, or the printer will be forced to behave under his watchful eye. Win-win.”

“Huh. I assume you’re the IT guy. Should I be chaining you to some part of my anatomy?”

“If that will help you sleep.”

“I can think of a few things that would help me sleep, if you know what I mean.”

Wilson fake-snored in response.

House watched him pretend to snooze for a minute. The whispers were distracted by Wilson’s presence—a different kind of light, softening the harsh yellow-orange (dare he say, Amber) of incandescence—but there was another voice in House’s head. Getting louder. This one had always been there, though, he couldn’t blame it on the biochemical aftereffects of Vicodin. Whispering things he couldn’t listen to if he wanted his life to remain un-imploded.

But the implosion was in the rearview mirror. His life: kaboom! Ash raining down, call FEMA, women and children first, SNAFU dialed up to DEFCON 1. House had lost everything, gotten locked up, and then let back out again. And Wilson was still fussing along beside him, like always. Would tossing another stick of dynamite into the spider’s web of their relationship really matter? Wilson was in his bed. (Technically, House was in Wilson’s bed, and Wilson had invited him there.) House was in no right mind to be held responsible for whatever actions his hands may get up to.

If this crashed and burned…Wilson might buy that explanation. Insanity. The voices made me do it. A Get Out of Homo-Jail Free card. Deeply politically incorrect from multiple axes, which merely increased the proposition’s luster.

Before one of those voices could break off and lecture him with a ‘hey, just a minute now, don’t you dare take advantage of your evidently still deteriorating mental health as an excuse to chase forbidden ass,’ House darted forward and pressed his lips to Wilson’s.

He didn’t get more than a heartbeat of feeling (heat, humidity, a twitch of pressure) before Wilson jerked away and nearly threw his back out trying to seesaw off the bed. House grabbed at Wilson’s flailing limbs and kept him from an ignominious concussion.

House was ready with his explanation (“sorry, the voices said they’d shut the hell up if I molested you”) when he found Wilson’s lips against his again. This time, Wilson was behind the wheel.

House closed his eyes. The better to focus. He enjoyed a long, dry beat of distinctly awkward contact before opening his mouth and letting Wilson inside. The first brush of Wilson’s tongue was electric and not at all shy. House reached, hands closing properly over Wilson’s biceps. He tried to tow Wilson in but House found his arms hollow and bitter again, the mouth he’d just been getting acquainted with a brutal pillow’s length away.

House considered lodging a verbal complaint. Then he decided to retort action with action: he dove forward and played the third move in their match with another hard kiss. Check, maybe mate if he got lucky.

It was Wilson’s turn to open sesame and he added a moan to the mix that made House tingle all over, gripping now at Wilson’s waist as he forced their mouths into a hotter angle, a more athletic scrape of teeth and muscle.

Twisting their mouths free but not their bodies, Wilson whispered, almost pained, “Why are you doing this? Why now?”

“Why are you?” House immediately tossed the grenade back over the net.

“You kissed me!”

“You kissed me back.”

“I…wanted to kiss you,” Wilson admitted, gaze wild.

“I think that—” House jaw worked until he admitted, “I have the same answer.”

They settled back, just far enough to talk without crossing their eyes.

“But why now?” Wilson repeated, several flavors of frustration icing his words. “Why make up this thing with the voices?”

“I didn’t.”

“Oh.” Wilson regarded House’s features, checking for signs of deceit that only he knew. “Okay. Then, what part of ‘onset auditory hallucinations’ says ‘jump your best friend’?”

“All of it. The whole chorus.”

“I don’t think your voices told you to do this.”

“Those voices are cowards. They won’t even show themselves. Just more proof that I’m broken. Which explains why you’re so horny. Is that why you’re into this?” House demanded to know, more accusation than ask. “Because my need turns you on? Or are you going for it because I’m a warm body in Amber’s room?”

Wilson, to his credit and House’s disappointment, reacted with a wide-eyed thoughtful blink rather than rancor. “I miss her every day. But…she’s not the one I’m thinking about right now.”

“You must be thinking about her,” House needled. “This is the girlfriend guilt and grief special. I may not be hearing Amber’s voice, but you should be.” (Poke. Poke. Please, something, anything to ruin this moment.)

“You are not Amber. And she wasn’t you. She…she was someone who understood me better than anyone else ever has.” The wordless ‘including you’ jabbed at House’s necrotizing insides but then Wilson ruined the arterial slice by stroking his index finger down House’s features like he wanted to learn how to sculpt them. “I know, better than other people in my situation could, that she wouldn’t want me to wallow in misery. She’d want me to be happy.”

One final strike: “But if she were still alive…?”

“If Amber were here, you…wouldn’t be.”

House nodded. Satisfied, devastated. Still curious. “But if, somehow, we were both here?”

“And you’d just kissed me in front of her? She would execute you.” Wilson playfully tapped fingers over House’s jugular. “And I’d be weeping over your corpse.”

“But you’d still help her bury my remains.”

“Naturally.” A pause. “What, no necrophilia threesome joke?”

“Used up my last one at the clinic earlier. Gotta restock.”

More tracing, microscopic whorls feeling out the sins hidden in House’s features, making him feel grotesquely desirable.

Wilson broke House’s silence. “Don’t say you’re sorry.”

House zipped his eyes back and forth in a parody of confusion. “I wasn’t going to. It’s troubling that you think I’d ever say that.”

“Amber brings it out in you. You didn’t like her and you didn’t like her with me. But you care about me enough to feel bad about what happened to her. And I can’t deal with us both being sad, not right now.”

“Not when we’re trying to fuck?”

Wilson closed his eyes and sucked in an unsteady breath. “Yeah. Jesus.”

“You seem more upset by the idea of me touching your dick than by your dead girlfriend.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve had time to get used to one of those ideas.”

House grinned. “Need a three to five business day waiting period to wrap your head around me wrapping my fingers around you?”

Licking his lips, Wilson took House’s highly advertised (and well-reviewed by past customers) hand. He brought it slowly, shivering, but surely down to the soft front of his pajama bottoms. His excitement was too early to trace out a meaningful shape through the cotton but House still felt up the tender territory gladly.

Their decision—the give, the take—polarized the uneasy molecules between them and their focus snapped into alignment. Wilson’s expression matched what House felt: dash of terror, sprinkle of humiliation, basic flavor of unbelievably aroused overwhelming the bouquet.

Voice low and honeyed, Wilson suggested, “How about we do some…on the job training.”

House agreed. House agreed enthusiastically. House considered asking for advanced lessons on account of his surely precocious talent, graduating to oral and anal and whatever other orifices they could dream up—

Snap out of it, a voice unconcerning in its familiarity rose from the heated furor of House’s brain. The task at hand requires your full attention. Wilson’s breath was hitching with nerves. House had to make it do that with pleasure.

He rubbed Wilson’s cock as sweetly as one could rub any cock. “First time?”

“Shut up,” was Wilson’s response, before climbing on top of House and kissing him into rough silence.

Wilson ground his hips down and oh, House hated pajamas, worst fucking invention ever, humans were meant to sleep in the nude and ideally pre-lubed for maximum smoothness.

He went for Wilson’s waistband but Wilson spread his legs over House and stopped the downward trend (though this did nothing to slow House’s upward trend, if you followed his drift). “I. Uh. Don’t know if I’m ready for that.”

“For taking your pants off? I suspect you’ve done it before.”

Wilson’s eyes trickled downward. “It’s not that I…I just…” He swallowed hard and what, was House not supposed to imagine what that throat would feel like around his dick? His hips rose of their own lusty volition and they both groaned at the clumsy friction. “Fuck. House. I’m worried what’ll happen when I—see. It.”

“‘It’ being…my penis? Or your penis? Or two penises together—?”

“The plural is so much worse—”

“—I can say cocks, if you prefer. Dicks. Dongs. Wangs. Johnsons. Stop me if I’m getting warm—”

“—Stop!” Wilson rolled off, confidence deflating. “I already thought I was going to die of exposure once today.”

House pursued his warmth. Wilson let him. Then, House processed. “Oh! This morning. I knew the doctor doth protest too much. When you saw me doing a little under-blanket stroke, you weren’t horrified, you wanted to join in.”

“I was horrified because I wanted to join in.”

“That’s kinda homophobic,” House murmured, tracing the shell of Wilson’s ear with his index finger and enjoying the resultant shiver.

“I’m kinda homophobic. Package deal with a lifetime of being the butt of gay jokes.”

“Ha. Butt.”

“Thanks.”

House tried to tilt his head in examination and just buried one of his eyes in the pillow. “You know that’s not how I think of you. Some bully’s victim.”

“How do you think of me? Your personal victim?”

“I think of you as the hot single guy in my bed. With currently idle hands.”

Wilson’s tough candy shell cracked, revealing the tempting chewy desire repressed within. “I assume you’re looking for some devil’s work.”

House decided that was as much a quid-pro-quo invitation as he was gonna get. He took Wilson’s hand and brought it in for a fondle of House’s own sweatpants-restricted…meat? Junk? Still hadn’t decided on an acceptable euphemism for Wilson’s delicate sensibilities. In any case, Wilson wasn’t being delicate. He was squeezing.

“This is a terrible idea.” Wilson murmured it while working up a rhythm, feeling out every inch with a ferocious concentration that set House’s toes curling.

“I’m sure they said the same thing about the Ford Pinto.”

“House—”

“—but it’s unlikely your dick will erupt in flames if we attempt a rear-end collision, so to speak.”

Wilson silenced him with an aggravated noise and another kiss in a move House would be happy to incorporate into their regular repertoire.

House tried to kiss him down into the pillows and Wilson got feisty, so House reversed the maneuver, pulling Wilson back up and on to him. “Fine,” House faux-sighed, “you can be on top. Just be gentle. I’m very vulnerable right now, you know.”

Wilson may have been able to fight his body’s instincts, but he couldn’t beat gravity. The swell of his flesh had nowhere to press except the waiting cradle of House’s hips. They were both erect and no paltry pajamas could hide it.

“Okay,” Wilson said. He reached out and switched off the light.

In the darkness, pants were allowed to be rolled over waist and ass (by House), a hand could wrap around wanting flesh (House, Wilson, respectively), hips could jerk forward with physics-fueled hunger (all Wilson). And no one needed to know who was involved.

Except for how Wilson kept saying House’s name.

“House!” he moaned, the sound filled with enough potential energy to light up the close, humid night. House tightened his grip, upped his speed. In the curtained vacuum, it was like the velvet flesh sliding between his fingers was his own, it felt like their pleasure was being pumped into his veins, except it was pouring into his ears with every grunt and gasp, each of Wilson’s rib-shuddering hiked breaths, the squeeze of his thighs as he dug his knees into the mattress for leverage to fuck himself into House’s grasp.

House had a free hand. And then, he had a hand full of soft, squishable oncologist ass. Excellent. He kneaded with one and jerked with the other and focused on breathing and listening and you know what? The voices may still be tossing peanuts from the gallery, but they weren’t the main act.

“House…House, oh, yes, just like…that.” Precome damped House’s hand as he shifted into high gear. Wilson’s lips settled against House’s cheek, leaving his breathy begging right against his skin, where House could savor it.

“That feel good?” House asked, as if Wilson weren’t throbbing close to climax in his palm, just because he wanted Wilson to say it.

“God, House—!”

“I asked,” House said with the easy calm of someone giving—not receiving—a very practiced handjob, “if that…” (twist) “feels…” (dig the thumb in) “good?”

A scream muffled into a sob, no part of it language, forced into House’s neck as Wilson came beautifully, absurdly hard, no illumination of reality around to intrude on the intensity of sensation. House didn’t slow, working the tactility of hot warmth into his palm, his payment, his due, if Wilson wouldn’t let him see, then goddammit House would feel every drop.

“Please…”

Wilson sounded pretty pitiful. House waggled that happily spent cock (not his own, Wilson’s, because he’d just jerked Wilson off, that was a real thing that had just happened, even if neither of them had technically seen it) one final time and released his prisoner.

Wilson collapsed immediately onto House, driving the breath from his lungs in a cranky, “Whomphf!”

Pushing, smacking, and finally pinching drove Wilson to rockslide half off of House’s stomach, still wrapped deeply into and around him, beyond undoing. His sleepy hand traced over House’s chest and then, to House’s surprise, under the worn cotton of his shirt. Wilson felt up House’s stomach, his ribs, the pop of pectorals, he fingered his nipples and scratched the hair that grew haphazardly between and House felt insane with it.

“Touch my dick, you freak,” House snapped on the edge of panic, scrabbling with Wilson’s exploratory fingers.

Wilson laughed into his lungs, mouth closed, but his hand went south. Breathing turning shallow, he fumbled numb fingertips at House’s waistband, wriggling his digits with excruciating care beneath the elastic until his whole hand was in House’s pants, which was ridiculous, there shouldn’t be pants in this equation—

House pulled his own sweats down to his knees with a huff. Wilson gasped. And he took his first full feel of House’s cock.

“Wow,” he exhaled, and gripped way too hard.

“Uhhng,” House wheezed.

“Sorry.” Wilson loosened his hold, overcorrecting.

“You have touched your own dick before, right?” House griped. “I know, empirically, that you have a cock installed between your thighs. This isn’t entirely new ground.”

“I…forgot. This is. Uh.”

“Shut up,” House recommended Wilson’s own advice. They were already in the dark. Maybe if it got quiet too, Wilson could get a handle on himself and then get a handle on House.

House twitched away at the unexpected lips brushing his jaw. He forced down his base fear and let Wilson kiss him with a wary want. The hand on his erection gained confidence as Wilson started to fuck his tongue into House’s mouth.

Okay. Shit, yeah, House could definitely work with this. He teased open his body language and Wilson eagerly pressed into every vulnerable spot. His knuckles rubbed against House’s stomach as he stroked, his knees grew inseparable from House’s joints, his lips nipped and dived in a dizzying display of hunger.

Wilson had definitely committed the sin of self-defilement before, because he was defiling House’s body with aplomb, at last. His fist flew over House’s prick, drawing noises he swallowed directly out of House’s lips. Muscles jumped beneath the friction of his hand dashing back and forth. The instinctive fuck of House’s hips startled Wilson with their first jolt and House almost froze. But then Wilson was on him, again, urging House to meet his violations halfway, and House eagerly moved in and against him, sensitive cockhead brushing the tantalizing coolness of Wilson’s loose shirt on the downstroke.

“Oh my god,” Wilson murmured, reaching a point where he could speak just as House tipped over the other side into speechless groans. “Oh, god, House…your…you feel…”

House’s desperate noise snipped Wilson’s thread of thought and House felt a mouth take his again while sensation tightened, tightened around the throb of his cock, and then there were more words, “Are you going to come? Am I—is this gonna make you lose it? I want…I want to feel it.” Stuttering, helpless, both lost in the dark and the heat, finally Wilson broke through, “Fuck, House, I want to feel you come all over me,” and House immediately, graciously complied.

“Oh—oh…god...”

Possibly, they both contributed to that stream of noise, House experiencing the best orgasm he’d had in months (given the living-room-celibacy preceded by the mandatory-asylum-roommate situation, only briefly interrupted by German dalliances) and Wilson radiating awestruck bliss at being the complete causality of House’s consciousness-dissolving ecstasy.

More kisses brought House back to center. The soft laugh huffed against his cheek and the scrape of a palm wiping sticky and wet against his shirt completed the journey back to reality with a dull thump.

“Do you take credit cards?” House asked.

He imagined how Wilson’s brows would draw together, could feel the relaxation as he rolled his eyes. “No way. Cash only.”

“Forgot my wallet in my other underwear.”

“You’re not wearing any underwear.”

“Good point.” House rearranged his pants over his bare hips. Wilson self-consciously did the same.

“Do we—”

“Now’s the part where we don’t talk about it,” House suggested.

“Okay,” Wilson agreed, far too quickly.

The light was still out. Orgasms dispensed. Voices muffled, sleep in reach.

House rolled away from Wilson, presenting his cold back. As expected (hoped for?), Wilson reached out to touch. When House didn’t flinch, Wilson scooted in closer, until his chest molded against House’s back, until his crotch pressed gently against House’s ass, until their legs were stacked together like a set of bowls in the cupboard. It was strangely-strange to feel their clothes back in protective place—like any amount of rayon and plaid could shield them from their actions.

Now, House put up his token protest: “Did I sign up for a spider monkey situation?”

“I made you come. I get to cuddle after.”

“Fair enough.” House grinned privately in his victory.

If hearing voices meant he got Wilson painting himself all over House in every way he could imagine…

No. He curled ever so slightly further back into the security of Wilson’s embrace.

House didn’t want to hear voices and he didn’t want to have Wilson wrapped around him just because he felt so bad for House’s recurring non-opioid crazy that it activated his neediness glands and what if the voices really were just one voice and maybe despite his denial it was actually real and belonged to the person who was supposed to be lying where he was—

Fuck. If Wilson weren’t physically holding House down, and if she-who-must-not-be-named hadn’t blocked every early effort to hide Vicodin in her apartment, House would 100% be throwing seven weeks of intense therapy directly into the shitter and mainlining as many milligrams as he could get down before his limbs stopped working.

“Are the voices keeping you awake?” Wilson asked, earning an irascible twitch from his captive teddy bear.

“Yeah. They keep telling me to smother you with a pillow.”

“At least then I’d get some sleep.”

“You are extremely insensitive to my delicate condition.”

“You’re hallucinating, not pregnant. Which only makes you like, three percent crazier than usual.”

“The pregnancy does? That’s your fault. You just knocked me up with Wilson Junior.”

“Handjobs are the leading cause of pregnancy in middle-aged men.”

“Never mention a lady’s age. Especially when you’ve just fondled her dick.”

“Noted.”

House wrestled with that handhold-less response for a moment and finally tried a near-whiny, “You really aren’t worried I’ll snap and kill you in your sleep?”

“Again, not more than usual.” A kiss against the back of House’s neck, right at the line where hair blurred into delicate skin. “House, and House’s voices, let’s all agree to a ceasefire. You can be crazy just as well in the morning.”

“Improved crazy, even, on a good night’s sleep. Maximize my insan-efficiency.”

“Yes. Good.” Another kiss. House was pudding in Wilson’s arms. His voices weren’t immune either.

Sleep arrived, and House didn’t even have to haggle for a discount.

“Mmm…” Wilson hummed a sleepy, contented noise into warm skin. He felt good. He felt so good, it was an instantaneous shock to his system as consciousness slotted into place and lit up the motherboard of logic.

He hadn’t felt good in—a long time. Not good like this. Not the happy, human-heated bliss of sharing a bed with someone who didn’t mind your morning breath and pre-coffee brain haze.

Though, he hadn’t yet discovered if House would mind those things. Knowing House, he’d kiss Wilson with an onion ring actively in his mouth, but there was always the chance this was one of his secret sensitivities and he’d faint onto a chaise lounge if Wilson tried to lay one on him without toothpaste.

Jesus. House.

House, in his arms, House, whom he’d kissed— Oh god. He had jerked House off last night. House had jerked him off last night. And then Wilson had been the one to initiate an all-night snuggle-fest and oh fuck of course he’d woken up with an aggressive case of morning wood, body ready to rumble, round two.

His dick poked stiffly into House’s backside, two layers of fabric keeping him from actually screwing House in his sleep, but still, the metaphorical finger was threatening to exert pressure on the metaphorical launch button on the not-at-all metaphorical missile.

The thing was, if House woke up, he’d probably be totally cool doing something about it. He’d almost certainly jack Wilson off again, maybe—maybe he’d even—maybe he’d even offer to use his mouth—

Wilson rolled inelegantly out of bed before the fantasy of House pulling Wilson’s worn pajamas down and going to town with his talented tongue could start rendering in full glitzy color and 3D. Before—god forbid—Wilson saw or touched anything that would be scalded into shameful smithereens by the unforgiving light of day.

He stumbled immediately towards the shower. He twisted the handle to a heavy boil, ripped his guilt-stained clothes off and buried them at the bottom of his hamper while it heated up, then dove in under the pounding water and started to frantically stroke his totally inappropriate but totally inarguable erection. Forehead pressed to cool tile and eyes squeezed shut, Wilson tried to call up The Right Kind of images. Breasts, he thought a little desperately. Tits, even! Where were they when you needed them?

The thing was, men had breasts too, and he now knew what a certain masculine chest felt like all pressed up against his—

No. No!

Women: Julie. (Guilt. Disinterest. More guilt.) That random hot woman from the bar. (Also guilt.) Amber. (So much guilt, nuclear stockpiles of the stuff). Okay, there was a theme here, and it wasn’t helpful.

When those fantasies wouldn’t come (and he couldn’t come), he tossed open the figurative lockbox and went dumpster diving for the forbidden fantasies—the ones with men, he could be honest about that—but only the random masculine bodies of porn and imagination. Not…him.

If Wilson, triply divorced and basically-widowed at forty, was hitting some sort of gay nexus and was gonna be into men-more-than-women instead of genuinely-women-but-guiltily-a-little-bit-men, then fine. There was therapy and support groups and Showtime for that. But he absolutely could not be on the cusp of turning into a 100% House-sexual because that was a short, fast road to absolute ruin the likes of which he hadn’t seen since—

Ever? Amber’s tragedy had ultimately been one he could understand, share with others, and work through. Agonizing but legible. Even the worst divorce, the first, losing Sam and seeing all his dreams of a perfect normal life get turned inside out and ripped at the seams, had been immediately softened by meeting House. This huge, overwhelming force, who so quickly imbricated itself into every facet of his life until House was the glue that held Wilson’s days together. Amber had understood what that meant. What he meant to Wilson. She was so like him—House. Except she wasn’t jealous. Not really. Well, she was, of course, but only to a shallow annoyance because she understood exactly why Wilson would always choose her. She knew what it felt like to want things you knew you couldn’t have. To deny yourself those things every day in the name of getting and keeping the life you wanted. She was the only one he’d ever told…

Aaand fuck, he was thinking about House again. House. House, touching him, being touched, under the cover of sheets and night. That had been the explicit opposite of his goal, but House was abruptly monopolizing all his erotic real estate and it made his balls tighten, and ohfuckingshit it was too late, he was remembering the hot splash of House’s come on his skin when Wilson’s touch had brought him to climax the previous night and that was what made him spurt wildly against the shower wall now.

“Fuck,” he said aloud, and it echoed grimly back at him in the confined space.

It had been a long time since House woke up alone and found the condition anything but situation-normal.

His eyes opened to his own hand splayed out on the bed beside him, fingers reaching for an absent human warmth. Years had passed since House expected to find any body but his own in the vicinity, but here he was. Expecting. Wanting.

Not getting it.

Wilson was gone. Unless he’d hidden under the bed? House tossed his sleep-tufted bedhead over the edge and checked. Nope. Definitely gone.

Wilson had been in House’s bed…he had, right? He’d been there. He’d crawled in between the sheets to keep House company after the—incident—became unmanageable and he’d ended up giving House a lot more than mere companionship. Briefly luxuriating in the memory, House let his shoulder blades dig in to the mattress with a wriggle as he grinned. But the recollection of unexpected and unexpectedly invigorating sex was chased by the ghost of Wilson’s arms wrapping around him and prickled painfully in the contrast of zero comforting arms present in the current line-up.

The question nagged to the point of biting: If Wilson had been here before, why wasn’t he here now?

Grumpy verging on something much worse, House shoved back the covers, swept his cane up and off the hook of the wall sconce, and stomped out to track down his prey.

The apartment was empty. He could feel it not just in the silence but the air, extra room to push around with none of Wilson’s warm stuffing buffering his corners. Because he couldn’t trust his damned senses, however, House did a quick inspection of each room. Kitchen, minus any signs of people or breakfasts. Living room, nada. Wilson’s bedroom, sad and lonely. The bathroom—a bit damp and steamy, indicating recent habitation. Wilson had been here. Showering off his sins? Or just normal showering, sin contained to House’s permanently damaged imagination?

It wouldn’t be the first time House’s stressed subconscious rustled up a hot ‘n heavy fantasy of getting it on with a forbidden figure.

“Fuck,” House said aloud, just to hear it echo off the beige drywall. “Shit,” he tried, just as loud, but it didn’t sand down the edge of his brimming panic.

What were the chances that he’d leapt overnight from hallucinating a few itty bitty voices in the walls to making up full-five-senses handjobs with his bestest and most platonic friend/roommate?

Probably about the same chances as Wilson crawling into House’s bed and deciding hey, while he was in the neighborhood, he might as well jack House off.

Breathing hard, House scrambled back into his bedroom, wishing for a full detective’s kit: microscope to identify hairs on the pillow, DNA sample collector for any stray semen, perhaps a conveniently hidden security camera to provide decisive footage of the deed.

He found a rumpled bed. It looked…like a bed. Felt like a bed, when he prodded it. Sounded like a bed (silent when empty) and it probably tasted like a bed, but he would leave that to the experts. Final sense…yes. The sheets smelled of Wilson.

They always smelled of Wilson! It was Wilson’s fucking apartment (his dead girlfriend’s apartment). Even if House could trust the evidence of his compromised body-mind, this data didn’t mean shit. Except to reinforce the possibility that if House was hallucinating/dreaming/deluding himself into believing he’d just fucked his best friend, the fact that he’d fallen asleep with his nose buried in the goose-feather equivalent of Wilson’s hair at least offered a logical explanation for why his neurons fired along that particular life-wrecking pathway. Scent was a powerful conductor of memory. Not that he had any memories of Wilson-sex to build on.

Jesus fucking Christ and all his roadies. Wilson had left. Wilson, who House knew mimicked a medium-sized catering service with his morning-after breakfasts-in-bed to impress his lady of the moment. Either Wilson was severely breaking his hook-up pattern or he was following his totally normal pattern of going to work after a normal night of gay-sex-free sleep.

House’s phone blasted a bar of Johnny Cash—his ringtone for Foreman.

“The patient died four hours after we released him,” Foreman said before House could even crack first gear on bad-boss-mode. “Collapsed in his laundry room. Apparent heart attack, just like his dad. I’m having his body brought straight to our morgue, argued that an autopsy is medically urgent given the likelihood of his son inheriting the condition.”

“Great.”

“Great?”

“Obviously, a humiliating failure for us.” House’s voice was all over the map. He was sinking into the hardwood and dancing on air. “And not so dandy for him. But the mystery…is exactly what I need.”

Foreman hung up. Probably disgusted, but that was nothing new. Comforting, actually.

House jammed his legs into the nearest pair of jeans and began to button a dark blue shirt over the tee he’d fallen asleep in and—nope. On second thought, he ripped off the shirt stained with one or more people’s jizz (exact quantity and donors unknown) and dragged on a slightly cleaner article scrounged from the floor.

He had bet his patient’s life on medicine being right and superstition being wrong. And less than a day later—bang! Bolt from the blue. It was appalling. It was infuriating.

It was the perfect distraction.

Wilson’s plan to avoid House was working perfectly. Wilson’s plan to avoid thinking about House required…revision.

Skipping the cafeteria and then lunch entirely hadn’t been the boon he hoped for. Mostly, the absence of a noon meal left him starved, skittish, and even more prone to drifting off into fantasies of feeding House peanut butter on celery sticks and watching him nibble and lick off every gob of delicious ground legume and avoiding even a hint of vegetable and—yes, Wilson was aware how many dimensions of fucked this fantasy was, the least concerning of which was the sexual.

Burrowing into his office after rounds was a weak, unconvincing ploy. Wilson may as well have borrowed Lady Gaga’s meat dress and lounged outside the wolf’s door, cooing, “oh, I hope no one takes a bite out of me!” (There was a little red riding hood fantasy cooking just past the celery one. Don’t judge him, he’s in crisis.) But did the big bad wolf come knocking to blow Wilson’s whole life down?

No. No, he did not. Which directed Wilson to the inevitable conclusion that House was avoiding him. Which led to no further conclusions except oh god oh fuck I screwed up so bad even House doesn’t want to come near the smoldering remains of our relationship. House! House, who historically couldn’t be stopped from jamming salt in wounds and pursuing his curiosity under threat of deadly infection, gunshot, or imminent explosion.

Wilson was the atomic bomb of hook-ups.

He was scribbling notes, writing prescriptions, checking scan orders, anything productive but unimportant enough that he wouldn’t kill anyone by screwing it up since that was him, Doctor Screw-Up, batting a thousand in the Fan Shit-Hitting Olympics (taking bronze in Mixed Metaphors). The scrape of his pointedly unlocked and unbarricaded office door (hint-hint, House) clanging open had Wilson’s head popping up like a gopher hearing her husband coming home from war.

It was not House in Wilson’s doorway.

“Wilson.” Cuddy leaned her arm against the jamb, “Why did I hire you?”

“Good looks? Charm?” Wilson tried one of his winning smiles. Then, tried again. “Excellent references? Medical expertise?”

“Getting colder and colder,” she stalked forward, heels snapping against the worn-thin carpet. “I hired you, among other less important considerations like publications and experience, because you have a measurable calming effect on this hospital’s most incendiary asset.”

“You’ve been at a board meeting, haven’t you?” Wilson deduced from her language, but Cuddy just picked up the nearest non-breakable gizmo from the lip of his desk and threw it with the prejudicial arm of a life-long benchwarmer, barely grazing his shoulder.

“House just ate a goldfish in the lobby!”

“…I assume you don’t mean the cracker.”

“I mean an alive pet.” She held one palm cupped in front of her and mimed the incident with the other, “He just plucked it out of the bowl this kid was carrying and swallowed it right there in front of the intake desk. Now there are half a dozen sobbing child witnesses, twice as many infuriated parents, plus all the puke.”

“He didn’t keep the goldfish down.”

“No, Wilson, he did not keep the goldfish down.”

“But that’s not the important part of the story,” Wilson self-censored.

Cuddy slammed both hands down on the burnished oak and burrowed deep into Wilson’s soul with her mascara-and-red-fury-rimmed eyes. “Wilson. I cannot have House swallowing sick children’s pets in the lobby.”

“Is a fish technically a pet?”

“Do you want me to lose my job? Or just go insane?” Cuddy pushed off and away, crossing her arms. “Because trust me, I’ve looked into giving Mayfield a visit myself, but I don’t think my insurance would cover House-related trauma.”

“Lisa, I’m sorry.” Wilson hadn’t really heard anything she said after “House swallowing.” It was making his vision tunnel. “Obviously, House shouldn’t be swallowing live animals of any kind in the lobby. Or any children’s possessions. Or patient possessions. House shouldn’t be swallowing anything, really, in the lobby, or anywhere else in the hospital.” Wilson was sweating. Was it visible? He felt extremely overheated. He was not-seeing images of House swallowing things only by fiercest dint of mental effort.

“I don’t know what bug House has up his ass this time, but I’m calling in SWAT if you can’t contain him. Do your job,” Cuddy commanded, tapping his name plate. “Hold House’s leash.”

Wilson barked out a near-hysterical laugh and Cuddy growled, “What?”

“It’s just—never mind.”

“Never mind what? If you know why House is risking his tenuous career to act outside even his usually wide bounds of crazy, I need you to tell me.”

“I. Well.” Telling someone, anyone, suddenly sounded like a good idea. “I held his leash. If you know what I mean.” The House-ism made his tongue go dry.

“No, I don’t. I—oh. Oh. Oh.” Cuddy fluttered backward, sitting down hard in the patient chair, ankles akimbo. “You. You and…House?”

“Just last night. It was…I truly have no idea. But it. I’m. We’re.”

“That is crazy. Though…what’s the connection between gay sex and fish consumption?”

Wilson tried to bury his spinning head in his hands, but his hands couldn’t begin to cover the task. “I don’t know. Things are…weird between us.” (Wilson’s entry for understatement of the millennia.) “No one can predict how House will act out when he’s scared, least of all House.” That was actually a moderately comforting thought—maybe House was just having the same regular-edition gay panic that Wilson was weathering. But did House experience ordinary anything?

“This is great!” Cuddy burst out, making Wilson leap (probably not unlike that goldfish) in his seat. “You are literally holding House’s leash. And you can tell him you’ll stop holding his leash if he doesn’t stop shitting in the neighbor’s flowerbeds.”

Continuing the fish act, Wilson paddled for the far-off verbal shore, “But I don’t even know if I like…”

“Dogs?” Cuddy offered the metaphor but Wilson just floundered more.

“I think I like…dogs…fine, but I don’t know if I like…dogs.”

“‘Dogs’ being men, and dogs being…when women say, oh, men are dogs?” Cuddy hazarded.

“Sort of. I think…I think I could deal with being…gay, or—or the other one—”

“Bisexual? Wow, I guess I need to schedule another diversity training—”

“—but in what world can I deal with being in love with an unmitigated jackass like House?”

Cuddy’s eyebrows went up and her jaw went down. She collected her features and slotted them back into place. “Okay, so that’s where we’re at. Not just a…friends with benefits thing.”

“Was that an option?” Wilson asked, a little desperately.

“I suppose it wouldn’t be, with you two.” Cuddy reached out and patted his elbow, an awkward play at sympathy. Wilson appreciated the gesture. “But that’s…good? It wouldn’t be right to sleep with someone straight out of psychiatric treatment unless you were serious about them.”

“Oh my god—” The voices, the voices! “—I didn’t even think of that—!”

“Then don’t!” Cuddy threw up both hands, fingers splayed, “Un-think it!”

“I can’t un-think it! Just like I can’t un-fuck House!”

“None of us can! But you need to stop shouting!”

“Okay,” Wilson lowered his volume. “Okay. This is bad. Not sleeping with a patient bad, but…close.”

“It’s bad but it’s not…bad,” Cuddy tried on Wilson’s prevarication for size. “House has always had one foot in a mental institution. There is no ethical way to fuck that man.”

“Right. Well. I’ll just go irradiate myself then.”

“Hey,” Cuddy put out her suicide-watch palms. “I’m just saying that you didn’t do anything wrong, because House doesn’t leave an option to do right. But I think that falling in love with your best friend is actually as normal as things can get, given the circumstances.”

“Lisa.” Wilson leaned across his desk, as if a whisper could keep him safe from his own words. “What am I supposed to do?”

“You want my advice?”

“No, I want your grandma’s rugelach recipe.”

Cuddy bopped him on the nose with a handy file folder. “Smartass. You don’t need my advice. You’re already the only one who can ever make sense of House. You’re perfect for each other.”

House had not had a productive afternoon.

Following that impulse to put the kid’s goldfish down the hatch got zero out of four stars. Choosing the most statistically unlikely action available to him had done nothing but produce predictable results: tears, shouting, gastric upset. No revelations, no reality check, no contrast through intensity.

Either he was still in Mayfield swallowing technicolor dream fish or House could at least know that some pet fish was having a worse day than him.

Shock treatment failed, House invaded the hearing lab and towed off the first expert he could hook around the elbow to one of their little testing cells—better sonic foam insulation than the psych ward’s padded walls. But the utterly no-nonsense hearing specialist strapped him in to heavy duty headphones and pinged all kinds of bizarre sounds into his ear canals and pronounced him completely in line with hearing norms for his age. A little fading after fifty years and too much loud music (stay metal, kids), but nothing remotely in the realm of spontaneously producing humanlike vocality.

Dr. Know-It-All even shot down his neat little Gilligan’s Island theory—what if my old tooth fillings are picking up radio Philippines!—without bonus points for creativity. He was left with exactly one evidence-based hypothesis: the calls are coming from inside the house. (Inside the House. Haha, get it? Get it?!) “Psychosis,” the ear doc suggested curtly, with about as much tenderness as House would’ve used to deliver the news to one of his own patients (small mercies).

It was probably time to give Doctor Nolan a call. But that would mean admitting…House didn’t even know what, which was precisely why he could not/would not press that speed dial. He knew, though, that internal diagnostic malfunction required external input. He needed to talk to someone. Ideally, some just a little less brilliant than Nolan—House couldn’t abide such incisive wit while he was flayed so raw—while still skating above the neanderthal threshold.

Wilson was the obvious answer. And an unshakeable no, for equally obvious reasons.

Thirteen would’ve been his preferred secondary confidante. Bisexual and unwell, just like daddy! But she was inconveniently located on another continent (rude). In hindsight, Kutner wouldn’t have been a bad call. Kutner. Another dead fellow. Was there something wrong with House or with the world? Had Kutner heard these voices too? Did they urge him on when he—?

See, this was exactly why House couldn’t talk to Nolan. One word about voices that suggest touring rooftops and gun shops (though House’s set were currently and stubbornly sub-vocal) and it would be a mandatory 72-hour hold. House’s patient would die, and more importantly, House wouldn’t be able to continue investigating the twin tracks of his conundrum.

Okay. What was next? Brain scan? Mechanical failure might’ve bypassed the hearing apparatus and gone straight for the auditory cortex. Human brains were like ticking time bombs—

Oh.

Well.

Don’t get too excited. House still didn’t know from whence the whispers came or whether he’d done a little nighttime sausage shuffle with his super-straight bestie. But scratching at his own grey matter had lit an epiphany for his patient: aneurysm. Specifically, intracranial berry aneurysm. Little genetic bugger formed on the brain stem, grew at a rate roughly consistent with the human aging process, until BLAMMO. Certain age hits, certain size reached, certain death achieved.

Cool.

House had fun telling his patient that he wasn’t going to die, and more fun saying he was gonna slice into his brain to prove his point, and the most fun needling the schmuck about his relationship with his surprise-son.

But patients couldn’t be tormented forever. House sent his team off to confirm that lil’ aneurysm wasn’t a hallucination (or a strawberry stripper situation), which left him exactly as alone as before. It wasn’t like Taub or Foreman would be any good in an—repress gag reflex here—emotional context. Chase was only operating at about a quarter of personhood since that little kerfuffle with a dead dictator and Cameron was trailing after her husband with that Florence Nightingale lovelight in her eyes—no thank you, House would be steering clear.

Which left one person.

“No aquarium in here,” Cuddy announced when he slipped into her office. “Though I could have some betta fish imported if you’re peckish.”

“I’m full, thanks,” House patted his belly. “Had a couple of hamsters on the way over.”

“You better not be here expecting me to rubber stamp your practicum papers.”

“I assume those went the way of the goldfish.”

“Glad to see you haven’t got mercury poisoning.”

“Ooh,” House considered carrying around a little notebook and pen, it would make jotting down these inspirations much more visually appealing. “That’s a good one. I’ll follow up on heavy metal toxicity.”

“…Something I should know about? Maybe something that explains why you escalated from hijinks to highway robbery?”

House shook his head. In a single, casual sentence, Cuddy had reminded him why he needed to keep his trap shut. She was his boss, not his buddy. If he wanted his license back, she was the first person he had to convince of his mental stability. But did he want his license back? Could he be trusted to doctor all on his lonesome, minus his kiddos there to double-check every dicey decision?

“It was an experiment,” he answered with typical evasiveness. “Failed.”

“What was the hypothesis?”

Swinging his cane with a dash more merriment, House approached her desk. “Just checking how reality responded to a more intense provocation.”

Cuddy’s fingers curled around the cover of a folder, pausing her signature assembly line. “Has reality…not been playing nice?”

“My patient died, then woke up during the autopsy,” House pointed out.

Cuddy bobbed her chin, hair bouncing a reluctant assent to the judgment.

“I’m waiting on further evidence re: reality. Until then…” House didn’t realize he was going to say anything more until the words were tripping grimly from his lips. “I’m not ready to be a doctor again.”

The weight of his admission pinned him in place. Long enough for Cuddy to absorb it and melt out an expression that made House want to chuck himself back into Mayfield just to avoid dealing with the words that would inevitably follow.

Then, her soppiness applied the brakes and skipped into a puerile snort. “Wait. Wait. This is about Wilson, isn’t it.”

“…What?” How could she know? Relief cracked the chrysalis, sun shards illuminating hope.

“First, Wilson whines to me about—about things—and now you’re here playing some elaborate mind-game, and you know what? I’m sick of being a pawn. For either of you.”

“But—”

“Go.” Cuddy pointed out the door with all the significant menace of a kindergarten teacher in a red state—armed and dangerous. “Talk to Wilson.”

“Just—”

“I’m your boss, not your marriage counselor!” Cuddy’s voice peaked with her irritation. “I can see how you’d be confused.”

Optimism had House by the throat. “Just tell me…when Wilson was here before…” House smiled, bright as phosphorous. “Was it to ask you for my hand?”

“Yes,” she deadpanned, “I sold you to him for one goat.”

“C’mon. I’m worth multiple ungulates.”

“I’d have taken a packet of unsalted sunflower seeds.”

“Would you at least share? I’m hungry. Haven’t been to the pet store in over an hour.”

Cuddy threw a pencil at his face. “Go away. Bother Wilson, not me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” House trilled, flouncing off with pep in his step and a heretofore unknown eagerness to comply with orders.

Traipsing up to Wilson’s office cooled his jets. The bounce bled away, the confidence crumbled. His steps grew gelatinous and panic marbled the sharp silver text of “Doctor James Wilson” in his vision.

What if Cuddy was just using a figure of speech? It wouldn’t be the first time she implied a little Boston Marriage on their premises. No definitive proof yet that Wilson had done anything more newsworthy than vent generically with his friend and colleague. They could’ve been discussing the Yankees or that ER nurse’s new boob job or mindfulness yoga practice. Not the explosion of possibly-hallucinated homosexuality that may or may not have taken place in Wilson’s dead girlfriend’s apartment last night.

Wilson pulled the door to his office inward and offered House a blank stare from beyond the threshold. “Would you just burst in, already? It’s worse for you to stand there and…wait for me to break.”

“But you did break.”

“Yes. Congratulations.” Shaking his head, Wilson bobbled back to his usual seat, loose-jointed and faintly sad. As data went, it was fucking obscure.

Enough playing possum.

House barreled in and jammed an elbow down on Wilson’s desk to shout at face-level, “Did we have sex last night!?”

“No!” Wilson blanched. He shot up and squirreled over to the open door, shutting it and, after another glance at House, locking it.

Eyes closed, House slammed his cane once, hard, into the ground.

“It doesn’t…count.”

House’s tunnel vision glitched. His tongue went dry. “…What?”

“That’s—I mean, what we—what happened last night wasn’t…it doesn’t count as the whole thing. It’s, it was, sexual, but not…” Wilson pushed both of his palms out in front of him and did a jerky nod-head-shake combo, punctuating his incoherent babble.

“You son of a bitch,” House whispered.

“I—”

“You son!” House didn’t care that his voice went up an octave with relieved fury. “Of a bitch!”

“Hey!” Wilson was nearly cowering, the real kind, not the playful little faux-curls of shoulder he did to let House feel like a big bad predator. He was scared.

Well, bully for him, House was goddamn scared too, and his fear was real.

“I have spent all day increasingly convinced I was going insane. Actually, fully, balls to the wall insane—again.” House ground that glassy word into sand. “Not just hearing a few measly whispers but all the way back to hallucinating entire sexual encounters, and you—”

Wilson interrupted, “You’re still hearing those voices?”

“Not the headline, Wilson!”

“Okay, okay.” More hand-waving, higher tenor of confusion. “I didn’t get this edition. What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about how we fucked—and don’t try to rate sex acts at me, I touched your dick and made you come—” (Wilson cringed like some homophobic god was plucking vertebrae out of his spine) “—that’s sex in my book. Anyone’s book. We had sex and then you pulled a disappearing act to leave me questioning my reality.”

Mouth popping open and shut like a fish tasting for a lure, Wilson visibly recalculated his day’s actions. He paled. “House. I’m—listen, for the record, I had no idea that you would—that you’d think I wasn’t ever…with you. I knew I was being a dick by leaving, but I never intended to make you think you were seeing things.”

“Right. Just regular dickery, not top shelf.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay. Fine. Sure.” House tossed out a gesticulation of compressed rage with each syllable. “Now that’s cleared up, let’s address the conventional asshole behavior.”

“All I did was…go to work.”

“You ditched. You skedaddled to avoid talking about the issue. But you love talking about the issue. I usually couldn’t stop you from talking about the issue with a hot poker and tongs.”

“Talking isn’t the problem. Being…in bed with you. Would’ve been a problem.”

“My snoring never scared you off before.”

Wilson’s mouth wrinkled up in annoyance, crumpling his cheek, accidentally highlighting a dimple. “I think there might have been more than snoring going on if I had stuck around.”

“Oh?” House’s fingers spasmed around his cane. Teensy little dizzy rush as he imagined another round of happily fumbling hands. Hell, why not dream big: the promised land of oral! “So, why not stick around? I give great head. If you don’t believe me, call Stacy. Or Cuddy. Or any woman in animal print you find at the corner of fifth and main.”

“I’m not checking your references.”

“Trying to tell me I didn’t score the gig?” House carefully hid how terrified that thought made him under a painstaking application of fake disappointment in reality star beige.

“There’s no…job opening.”

Before House could make the obvious joke—really, Wilson should’ve just said ‘hole’ and been done with it—he was cut off by a flustered butterfly of a hand wave.

“House, I can’t talk about this. Not with you. Not here. Maybe not ever.”

That earned a genuine House-original eye-roll. “I think I have a ‘never’ open next Tuesday.”

“I’m being serious.”

“No, you’re flipping your shit. Is it because I’m a man or because I’m me?”

Wilson, creditably, took a moment to think. “I mean. The maleness isn’t…not a thing. But I think it’s more the…you-ness.”

“But you’re the reigning expert on my me-ness! Just add the pe-nis, and you’re good to go.” House grinned, very pleased with his rhyme.

Wilson’s expression was indecipherable. Mad? Sad? Horny? Scared? Confused? Neapolitan scoop of the above?

House interrogated, “Wilson. Are you looking at me like you want to eat me with a spoon or disembowel me with a lobster fork?”

“I don’t know. The feelings exist on a narrow spectrum.”

“Take me home. We’ll grab some cutlery and experiment.”

For the snatched, gravity-tip of a penny balanced on its copper ridge, Wilson looked like he might say anything other than what he did say: “I’m forty, House. It’s a little late for experimentation.”

“That’s an insult.”

Wilson scoffed, “No, it’s—”

“It is. To Amber.”

House enjoyed his nuclear wasteland. Wilson gripped the edge of his desk. “You…should really not be bringing her up.”

“If she were here, she’d—well, first, she’d probably be filleting the flesh from my bones,” House admitted. “But the general principle. She’d be pissed as hell at you for throwing away the life she doesn’t have.”

“Seriously. House. Stop.”

As if. But House lowered his voice, since he didn’t know how to soften his tone. “One of the worst things that can happen to anyone happened to you. And instead of taking life by the horns—or horn, if you know what I mean—you’re just gonna lie back and die alone?”

“There’s a pretty big gulf between dying alone and moving to Massachusetts with you.”

“No need to pack up yet. We can just live in sin. I know it’s a foreign concept to you, Mister Marriage—”

“—House—”

“—sorry, Doctor Marriage. But we really could just have a fun fling. You don’t have to commit to living out retirement with a recovering drug addict.”

“And more importantly, an unrepentant ass.”

House nodded.

“Don’t I?” Wilson asked. He knew how to soften his tone, but it didn’t help. “Is there any version of this conversation—any at all—that doesn’t change our lives forever?”

“Nope. But you could say that about any conversation, or any cup of coffee, or any…accident.”

“Do you have to keep stabbing me with that particular knife?” Wilson muttered, covering his eyes.

“Penetration joke,” House said bleakly. Wilson didn’t look at him. House rallied—he was best in losing battles, ask any of his exes. “Listen, I hate change as much as the next egomaniac control freak. But one of the lessons I learned in the crazy cooler is that change happens whether you want it to or not, so you might as well fight to make it the good kind.”

“And you think—” Wilson added another panicked hand movement to his encyclopedic collection, wriggling outstretched thumb and pinkie between his heart and House’s, “this would be the good kind of change?”

“What part of having sex on tap at home is bad?”

“I’ll make you an alphabetized list. Three marriages, remember.”

“I wouldn’t be your wife. I wouldn’t be Amber. I’d be same-old House, plus optional orgasms. The math isn’t rocket surgery.”

The malapropism earned House a kind of sighing smile. But he could tell Wilson wasn’t won over.

“House. I…just can’t deal with this right now. I mean, at work, in the middle of the afternoon, after I skipped lunch.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Yours, definitively. I need a sandwich and a nap and probably a few beers and then…” Wilson scrubbed a hand down his face but didn’t use the move to camouflage his gaze. He let his eyes scythe into House. “Then we can talk.”

Past-House would certainly not have accepted this. He would’ve thrown a tantrum, or mocked Wilson’s words, or blown up the whole relationship to avoid what came next. But current-House had gone through weeks of agonizing bullshit therapy to be the kind of guy who doesn’t do that. He wouldn’t be true to his cheapskate scientist’s soul if he threw away all that money and time and data for nothing.

Very calmly, House said, “That’s reasonable.” And then, “In a really dumb way.”

Wilson smiled, bursting into a laugh, and House tried not to invent tripping and falling on his face while being completely stationary. “Yeah,” Wilson nodded, sat down in a flurry of relief, laughed again. Began to shuffle paperwork. “I’ll see you at home, House.”

“Okay.” The dismissal freed House to dash from the room, and he did so, rubber heels scorching. Lingering aftertastes of turmoil and dread cooked into a heady kind of glee. He was, if nothing else, not crazy. Not clinically. Or at least, not seriously. He may still be picking up UFO sonic signals or some such shit but he wasn’t making up wholesale sex acts with colleagues and that was a victory. Plus, House had had a grown-up conversation about it all! Dr. Nolan would be so proud. House decided that if he survived the next twenty-four hours and emerged with some kind of fuck-buddy-soulmate situation, he’d send Nolan a nice big edible arrangement—including a thank you card with a pair of penises drawn on it so he’d know who it was from.

Wilson was a coward. He knew that. He didn’t like to advertise the fact, but he was aware. It was part of why he’d fallen so hard for Amber: she could protect him. In so many ways.

There were things he could be brave about, of course, oncology wasn’t for wimps. He wasn’t a complete sad-sack doormat. But reckoning with how it felt to see House sporting one of his evil smirks and want to lick it off his face? Not one of those James “Braveheart” Wilson moments.

His courage had always been directed outward.

As evening and all its connotations approached, Wilson managed to average his competing impulses. One: to stay at work forever, since there were always dying patients, after all, and it would hardly be the first time he’d napped on his too-short office couch to avoid domestic difficulties. And Impulse the Second: go home immediately, turn off all the lights, and do things to House that he’d only glimpsed in the most shameful pornography and wouldn’t be glimpsing now because, hello, lights off.

Nothing counts in the dark. Wasn’t that what last night had been all about?

The mathematical mean of these desires manifested as Wilson arriving back at the apartment only moderately later than usual and standing just inside the doorway with coat and shoes intact, mind a total blank, observing the scene. Observing House’s profile, mostly, where he reclined on the couch.

House watching TV was normal. House skimming a dirty mag was equally normal. House doing both at the same time, thus violating his intent to comply with current research indicating the neurological impossibility of multi-tasking…not normal.

“Still hearing voices?” Wilson asked. (Congratulations, Doctor Smooth, you’ll be getting the gold on romantic opening lines this season for sure.)

“Nope.” House opened the centerfold with a cavalier flick of the wrist, twisting the glossy stock ninety degrees to inspect its contents. “Because I can’t hear them over the TV.”

“Oh. Good.” Wilson dropped his briefcase, hung up his coat, carefully unlaced and set aside his shoes. No more delaying.

He wandered around the end of the couch to find House’s feet where Wilson usually sat. He stared at this conundrum for the last few seconds of the KFC ad clucking in the background before reaching a solution. He picked up House’s ankles, lifted, sat down, and rearranged said ankles in his lap with a tidy pat.

“Huh.” House stared at his own feet, cozy in Wilson’s grasp. “Not sure if your burgeoning foot fetish means I’m gonna get lucky or you’re trying to let me down easy with a little toe play.”

“Close, but no dice. Would you like to try again, double or nothing?”

Forcing himself into House’s protective jocularity worked. House smirked and tossed the mag onto the ground, letting Wilson have the whole of his attention. “You’ve had your time to think. We’re home, now, not on hospital grounds. Any other excuses up your sleeve?”

Wilson checked both sleeves. “Hmm. Nope.” And he reached out. He took House’s hand. It was so easy. “Let’s go to bed.”

House followed the gentle tug against gravity. He followed Wilson. They hovered in the hall for a moment, Wilson waiting to read House’s body language, catching the cringe lit up in neon at the impending scene of last night’s varied crimes. Wilson pushed open his own bedroom door instead and led House inside.

“Hey,” House protested when he was left propped on the edge of the mattress, abandoned in favor of Wilson wrestling the bedside lamp switch on. “Sex at our age is best unilluminated.”

“I disagree. And, I’m younger than you. And, this isn’t the sex part yet.”

“Yet? Do I have to pay the feelings toll first?”

“You really are very quick.”

“Do you need me to drop the L-word before you drop your pants?” House only half-sneered, presumably in deference to the possibility of getting off in the near future. Wilson appreciated the effort. “Because if that’s the case, I might be limited to over-the-clothes stuff.”

“Hi, Greg House? James Wilson,” he mocked a handshake, “I think we’ve met before. Which is why I know you’d sooner go vegan, celibate, and tee-total all at once rather than admit to having an emotion.”

“Then…why the pre-sex check?”

Wilson decided to try tact, for novelty. “I talked to Cuddy.”

“Copycat,” House muttered.

“And she reminded me that you are a recovering mental patient living under my care.”

“Nice. Kinky.”

“Bad,” Wilson corrected. “Bordering on immoral.”

“C’mon, Wilson,” House gave one of his full-body eye-rolls and, in a new addition to their relationship’s repertoire, used the move as camouflage for getting deeper into Wilson’s personal space. “By that logic, I can’t have sex with anyone. Your so-called ethics are impinging on my fucking freedom—literally, my freedom to fuck.”

“You’re free to fuck whoever you want. But you told me last night that you’d started hearing voices and this afternoon you said you were worried about your sanity and just now I saw you drowning out something I couldn’t hear.”

“So? I can’t be too damaged for your libido. The hearing-voices wrinkle must be setting your needy juices bubbling.”

Wilson made a vaguely disgusted moue as a matter of course. “House, it’s not a problem for me. I think it’s a problem for you.”

“It’s not a feature I’d recommend,” House replied tightly. “But I’m fine.”

“Right. Should I dig up the regurgitated goldfish as Exhibit A?”

“Objection! That was evidence in a prior case, namely, the prosecution dicking and dashing!”

Wilson tossed up his hands in easy surrender, “I’m just saying, it’s alright if you’re scared. Not being able to trust your own senses…it’s frightening.”

“Of course, it’s scary,” House snapped. “But I’ve been tricked by my own mind before. This is different. I’m hearing things that aren’t there when I’m not on Vicodin.”

Wilson didn’t smile, because that would be cruel, but he warmed at the hearth of House’s cracking armor.

The discomfiting silence spurred House on. “Accepting a life of pain without highs was the price of sanity. I paid it. So, why am I getting my psychological car towed?”

“This isn’t karma ticketing you.”

“Then what is it? Because I’m not crazy. And I don’t just mean that in the condescending, ‘oh, we don’t use that word here’ way. Crazy is real and I have been it but I’m not crazy now. I know what’s real. That’s how I know the voices…aren’t.”

“Okay. Maybe you need to embrace a shade of gray. You know as well as I do that auditory hallucinations are more common than most people think. It’s not some sign of being dangerously unbalanced, it can be caused by all kinds of factors.”

“I ruled out most of those factors before lunch. During lunch, if the goldfish counts as a sort of clinical aperitif.”

Wilson dug in, “And even if that factor is mental illness…well, it’s just another symptom. Like headaches or dry mouth. Do we assign moral value to dry mouth?”

“Well, if we’re talking oral—”

“Not yet.”

Silence.

Wilson tried again: “Something like one in ten people will hear voices at some point in their life. And of those, a significant number will keep hearing them.”

“Yes,” House deadpanned, “the crazy people. Like I said.”

“You don’t care when people call you crazy,” Wilson switched tack. “You just keep on being brilliant or rude or some combination of the two. Why do you care about this?”

“Because I can’t be brilliant if I can’t tell what’s real!”

“Except you can. You came to me last night because you were worried about hearing whispers that weren’t there. You don’t get scared when you hear people talking in the next room.”

“That’s because they’re actually in the next room.”

“But now you know they’re not. So, what? You don’t make important decisions based on whether or not someone’s muttering in your ear.”

Pain creased House’s features. “Except when I do. Except when strawberry body butter sends someone who trusted me to the ER. Except when the next time could put someone in the morgue.”

Following maybe forty percent of this, Wilson posited a conjecture thorny enough to hurt and ergo, whetted enough to lacerate House’s sheen of excuses and exceptions. “Is the problem that the voices aren’t real? Or is it that they’re telling you things you don’t want to hear? Because I think it’s the second one. And the good news is that you can do something about that.”

“Let me guess, more therapy?”

“Yes,” Wilson said firmly. “You can talk to me, too.”

House shook his head violently, “I can’t hear what they’re saying this time. But I know what they said before and…you don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to listen to them. You…you wouldn’t be here if you knew.”

Wilson laughed. House’s gaze, averted under the weight of shame, snapped up to field anger and disbelief.

“House…” Wilson’s shoulders rose in a buoyant shrug, “you think I don’t know you? You think I have no clue what runs through your mind? You think you’re the only one who has fucked up thoughts?”

“I’d bet on mine against yours in a depravity match, any day.”

“Really.” Wilson repressed the urge to crack his neck like a pro wrestler going in for the KO. “Because just this morning, I got cut off in traffic by this old guy driving a midlife-crisis-mobile and my first thought was to gun the engine and see whose car won in a head-on collision. Later, one of my patients ate up half my afternoon whining about side effects I specifically warned him about, and I wondered, ‘how badly would he freak out if I substituted that diuretic for an emetic.’ Pretty much every day, I contemplate dropping a tongue depressor down the front of Cuddy’s blouse to see if her breasts would snap it in half when she shouts. Everyone has intrusive thoughts. You’re just experiencing them in a way you didn’t before. And it’s fine to be scared by sudden change but you need to know that different isn’t wrong.”

Stone crumbling into high tide, House tried to declare, “I know that.”

“Do you? None of us should be defined by the random nonsense our neurochemical-soaked brains churn out. We’re defined by our actions. As long as you don’t try to kill anyone—again, apparently—then it doesn’t matter if some of your synapses are always firing off murder plots.”

“But how do I stop my actions from being affected by those synapses?”

“Do you feel like you’ve been acting differently?”

“No,” House admitted. “They’re not—they can’t do anything. They’re just…bitching in the corner of the room.”

“Well, then. That’s that.”

“No, no,” House wagged an elegant finger and Wilson’s libido lurched into ill-timed gear, “that’s just what I think. What if I’m wrong. What if it is changing me? What if the voices are changing me and I don’t notice until you wake up dead?”

Wilson couldn’t stand the distance anymore. His hands broke rank. He clasped House’s face, keeping them both from spinning out like a popped balloon making for the atmosphere. “What if your voices are on your side?” he pressed the hypothetical, forcing House to listen. “What if they’re an early warning system? What if they tell you to sprinkle rat poison on my cornflakes, so you know that means you’ve got something seriously bothering you? What if instead of ignoring the things that scare you about yourself, you deal with them, and even if they don’t go away, they don’t have power over you anymore?”

House’s hands covered Wilson’s, fingertips brushing over where Wilson’s thumbs were leaving white halfmoon indents among the crow’s feet lining House’s too-bright eyes. “Two hypotheses. Insufficient evidence. You know what that means.”

Wilson’s grip relaxed. “I guess we’re back to experimentation.”

“Now you’re talking,” House shifted into Wilson’s grasp like a recalcitrant cat begging for scritches right after nipping at your hands. “I thought you brought me to bed to violate my honor, not psychobabble at me.”

“I can do both.”

“Prove it.”

Wilson tackled House down onto the sheets before his tongue had finished flicking against his teeth in that final plosive T.

His plan—that if he jumped House fast enough, the no-homo terrors wouldn’t be able to catch him—was actually working. (No one was more surprised than him.) The lights were on and he was sucking on House’s lower lip and trying to get a hand under his tee to feel up more of that forbidden skin and no judge had yet subpoenaed him for the capital crime of acting on his desires.

“You wanna know what my number one intrusive thought has been today?” he murmured against House’s cheek, sensations dizzy and unreal, like he was watching this unfold through the warm static of an old TV.

“Was it the one about Cuddy’s boobs hulking out on a tongue depressor? Because I think that’s permanently embedded in my brain.”

“I’ve been imagining you opening your mouth to say something annoying and me stopping you by shoving my cock down your throat.”

A quiet, angst-riddled wriggle against him. “For fuck’s sake, Wilson,” House whispered, “you can’t say something like that and then not do it.”

Confidence ebbing but monstrous lust boiling up to take its place, Wilson took House by the shoulders and pushed him down the length of the bed. He reached for his pants, undid all the annoying clasps keeping him from feeling House’s breath directly on his skin. He freed his erection (probably, he shouldn’t have been getting so hard while talking about serious issues of reality and morality, but that ship had very firmly sailed) and held it with a lightly trembling hand before House’s mouth.

“Go on,” Wilson ordered. “Say something annoying for me.”

House licked his lips and Wilson’s life flashed before his eyes. “Something annoying.”

As House’s lips parted on the final syllable, Wilson fulfilled their shared psychosis and forced his flesh into House’s wet heat.

House eagerly gagged himself. His hand flew up to clamp onto Wilson’s waist and his neck surged forward as he choked the clench of his throat around Wilson’s throbbing tip. Wilson wondered if etiquette forbad him from coming. Right now. Possibly screaming.

He settled for a tormented panting, digging his fingers into the rough rabbit fur grey-brown of House’s hair, not offering any useful guidance with the hold, just helpless directionless endless want manifesting in locked knuckles and bitten off cries.

This at least answered one question Wilson hadn’t been brave enough to ask: had House been with men before?

Uh, yeah. 

Possibly, House had been getting tips from his 10-dollar tricks in technique because his mouth wasn’t just the intrinsic pleasure of being on someone’s tongue, it was educated.

“House—” Wilson’s first coherent word, not a shocker. “House, please…” Two words! Not SAT vocab, but he was getting there.

Dragging his lips down Wilson’s shaft, lingering in the slow pull over the swell of the head, House traced his tongue over Wilson’s slit just as it met chill outside air. 

The sound Wilson let out didn’t count as a third word.

“Something I can do for you?” House inquired pleasantly, pumping Wilson’s length with a fist. 

The galling lines of his expression, all primly complacent in his expertise, had Wilson pinwheeling at the edge. He slipped his thumb in at the corner of House’s mouth and pried that smirk back open. “Swallow.” He followed the command with a thrust and House choked hard and wrestled with his body and composure but as Wilson poured into him House met his orders with honor. He sucked and licked and oh, he swallowed with a hunger that left Wilson’s all-day fantasies seeming tame and unimaginative.

“Excellent service,” House purred while Wilson dissolved into the mattress, brain blown to a fine puree. “Low wait time. Five stars.”

“Hmgh.”

“You sound too incoherent to return the favor. Should I go catch the end of Mall Cops while you recover?”

Wilson may have been incoherent but his limbs were still (mostly) responding to central authority. Importantly, the soupy custard masquerading as his muscles wanted very badly to be near House. Wilson had no difficulty hurling himself onto House and snailing his face down into soft tummy bared by rumpled shirt.

“TLC will have to wait,” House deduced happily.

Infuriated each time fabric interfered in his journey, Wilson wrestled House’s tee fully off with maximum clumsiness but ultimate efficacy. He kissed down the trail of hair from House’s navel to hover just above X-marks-the-spot at the end of that treasure map. Getting House’s pants open was actually slightly easier than doing the same on a woman, since they were simply belted-and-buttoned rather than sealed skintight and clamped shut with half a dozen invisible and finicky closures. Pulling denim down and out of the way to expose House’s briefs—already sporting a flattering if slightly nerve-wracking tent—hammered home how deeply Wilson had waded into his inexperience.

Well. It’s not like he’d improve his technique by lying there and waiting to die of humiliation-induced heart failure.

With great care, Wilson pulled down on the slightly loose waistband of over-worn underwear and reached inside before he could utterly lose his nerve, drawing out House’s dick with a sweating but forcibly-not-trembling hand.

Wilson stared. It had been very dark last night. It was very not-dark, now.

“Let me guess,” House drawled, “first time face to face with the one-eyed monster?”

“Congratulations, I think you found the worst possible phrasing.”

“You’ll do fine. You’ve gone down on women before, right?”

Wilson stiffened (with offense, this time), “Of course.”

“I figured the chicks didn’t stick with you for the morality lectures. So, you’re familiar with the basic principles. Lots of tongue, no teeth.”

“Lots of tongue, no teeth,” Wilson whispered the mantra, cracking his neck.

“Don’t worry if you can’t fit my whole, massive length in on your virgin voyage.”

“Uh huh.”

“And don’t be afraid to ask for directions if you get lost.”

“Both of us need to shut up now,” Wilson declared, and bent delicately forward to taste House’s cock.

Huh. Okay. Not that different than human skin, generally. Wilson sucked a little more greedily, lips covering House’s first inch and introducing prick fully to mouth. He tried for an exaggerated sexy swipe of tongue and ended up losing control of his prize, House’s dick bobbing out of range and prompting Wilson to make a wild grab.

“Gentle!” House squawked, and Wilson made a soothing motion as he south-pawed his subject back into position.

“I’ve got it,” Wilson replied, half proud, half testy.

“Do you?”

“Quiet! Let me focus.”

Okay, his dialogue wouldn’t win him any AVN awards. Tactility over talking. He’d made a mistake thinking oral was really about the mouth—it was, obviously, involved, but he’d underestimated the labor of hands.

This time, he guided House back between his lips with a loose grip on his shaft and control rushed back into place. He could do this. He could make House feel the way House had made him feel. He might not be able to silence the voices, but he could leave them tied to the ground and blast House into the stratosphere.

Wilson pulled House in deep enough to fit against his palate and tried a swallow. The suction tugged a good little sigh from House, but worlds weren’t being rocked yet. Wilson edged deeper, trying to repeat House’s stunning performance re: badgering his gag reflex into submission. Wilson succeeded only in making himself cough and reverse-slurp. His anxiety and self-consciousness bloomed in twin flares and he felt his cheeks heat. He tried to go in again but palms covered his blush and stopped him.

“Hey.” House jiggled Wilson’s face. “You look like you’re gonna blow a gasket. Not a euphemism.”

“I’m fine.”

“This isn’t a wellness check. I just don’t want you biting off more than you can chew. Or biting or chewing at all, actually.”

Wilson huffed, “I can do this.”

“I know.” House paused, tongue tracing his teeth. Wilson fumed that he’d evidently been born without any of the easy sexuality that House exuded with such careless charm. “But you don’t have to do what I did. Make this your blow job. Points for originality.”

Wilson paused. Considered what he could bring to the world of oral that House hadn’t covered in his two-minute miracle. His thumb fondled House’s foreskin thoughtfully. House made a very appealing noise, like a broken radiator getting sodomized. There’s a thought!

Wilson gave up on full-coverage swallowing for this round. Time to go exploring.

He worked his palm into the not-yet-discarded jeans and briefs to cup House’s balls.

The impossible angle made the familiar anatomy alien. Wilson’s spine tingled and his breath caught. House had shut all the way up. It seemed suddenly absurd to have ever imagined that Wilson wouldn’t be utterly electrified by access to this forbidden intimacy.

Instinct finally smeared him forward, mouth wet, grip a friction, fingers a tease. House sensed the encroaching click of their rhythm and heaved a shuddering exhale, hips flickering into the wave of Wilson’s surety.

It was a tight two-handed fit. Pumping House’s cock shallow into his mouth with the right, exploring his balls with the nimble left. Instead of illuminating the awkwardness it dialed up the intensity, drawing them both so tangled-close together. Wilson fiddled his middle finger deeper to stroke against House’s perinium in sync with a long lick from tip to base and finally felt House’s fingers close in his hair. Unthinking, just need. Incredible sounds that Wilson hadn’t ever let himself dream existed, much less imagine hearing in real life, filtered through House’s flesh to reverberate inside of him.

Where swallowing had been too technically demanding for this first excursion, the great tongue campaign charged the front with gusto. (House had been right about Wilson’s past partners—they certainly hadn’t stuck around because of his punctuality.) He slobbered up and down House’s hardness until his victim was writhing and swearing and when Wilson’s jaw began to ache he doubled down and sucked hard on House’s tip.

Having no prior experience in this particular role of the oral art, it was understandable that Wilson didn’t predict this last act would herald the splashy finale. House’s first shot of come ended up on Wilson’s cheek as he went in for another wet tour of that fixating vein decorating the underside of his thick, tender focus. Wilson scrambled to return and receive his tribute at the peak.

He rubbed an eager accompanying rhythm with his hands and sipped curiously, almost daintily, at the mess forming against the friction of his never-stilling lips. His self of not-too-long-ago would’ve been flabbergasted at how he’d gone from ‘pinned like a self-conscious bug under a microscope’ to ‘heady and vicious with newfound ecstatic talents’ in just a few minutes of cocksucking.

“Fuck, Wilson,” House finally whispered, lip-biting silence during release relenting with the rush of satisfied exhaustion. Mouth still wet and eyes bright, Wilson powered his way up House’s limp body to bring their faces level.

“Say it was the best you ever had,” Wilson ordered, molly-high on his achievement.

“Best...ever...” House breathed, quite convincing, perhaps even a shade of truth in the “ever” that was this impossible moment of theirs.

Wilson grinned and bumped their noses together. “Just want to check that you can still lie.”

Completely and carelessly happy, House collared Wilson and dragged him close, licking his own mess from his cheek before kissing him deep and without concern. He loosed his last quiver of energy into the embrace before melting back into Wilson’s pillow with an exerted sigh.

Wilson propped himself up on an elbow and smugly massaged his sore mandible musculature. Watched this new and enticing edition of House, tessellated armor of deflection gently parted to reveal so much skin and sensitivity.

House squinted blearily up at him. “Do we have to get back to our sharing and caring session, or can I just smoke and enjoy the afterglow?”

“No smoking in this apartment.”

“Right. Nicotine might clash with the water stains on the ceiling.”

“Since you brought it up first, does that mean you want to keep caring and sharing?”

House tried to scoff but he was mostly naked and tangled in sheets and that gave Wilson two upper hands, which he applied to House’s ribs and didn’t let up until he was snorfling suppressed laughter, mouth stretched in another helpless grin.

But the expression faded as autonomic facial contractions died down. House imprisoned the fingers Wilson had left behind to tease his chest. An outsider might suppose they were holding hands, but what did outsiders know.

“Sex didn’t banish them,” House reported stiffly. “Not that I really thought…but the voices are still there.”

“I figured. Even I’m not that good.”

House was required by law to give Wilson a bro-y punch on the arm, which he rolled with, smirking.

House’s eyes narrowed and his grip tightened, as if Wilson might want to run. God. Running was so far from Wilson’s mind. “You’re really calm about all this.”

“More people should be.”

“Yeah, but why are you?” House’s face smoothed. “Oh. Danny. Duh.”

“Duh,” Wilson agreed. “Danny’s always been a good guy. Being schizophrenic doesn’t change that. Just like you’re a complete and total ass, and hearing voices doesn’t change that.”

“You’re drawn to broken people, and nothing can change that.”

“You say that like I’m not as broken as either of you.”

“Hey, don’t appropriate our cuckoo culture.”

Face pinching, Wilson half-laughed, “Are you…gatekeeping mental illness?”

“You wouldn’t know crazy if it sucked your dick. Demonstrably.”

“We all do weird things, sometimes.”

“We all get road rage and have naughty thoughts about Cuddy’s tits. Those don’t meet criteria of psychiatric concern,” House lectured.

“I talk to Amber every night.”

The surprise freezing House’s face was extremely satisfying. But Wilson probably shouldn’t compose his speech purely by virtue of getting a rise out of House—he might accidentally leave something all too vulnerable on the cutting block, someday.

House buttoned his lip and wielded the silence until Wilson continued.

“For a minute, when you said you were hearing voices…I thought you might just be hearing me in the other room. But then you heard them when I was right next to you, so…” It was hard to shrug while lounging in rumpled, unzipped slacks, but Wilson made do. “I tell her about my day. Imagine how she’d react. It makes me feel better.”

“Why don’t you talk to me?” House jabbed, because his narrative loved irony.

“I do talk to you,” Wilson said with just the right degree of soothing. “It was different with her. You both push me. But she’d pull me back from the edge, too.”

“Give me a chance. I could try. You could try…”

House’s difficulty trying to drum up some decency was so charming. Possibly only Wilson thought so. Possibly the overwhelming desire to see House jammed against the wall, knife-at-throat by his own feelings, motivated way too many of Wilson’s actions.

“Yeah. We could both try.” Wilson nudged his knuckles against House’s breastbone. “You could talk to someone you miss.”

“The people I miss aren’t dead. I can just prank call Stacy.”

“What about your dad?”

House snorted. “I thought the point of this exercise was to feel better.”

Wilson conceded the point. “You could talk to Amber, too.”

“She’d probably resurrect just to kick my ass.”

“I imagine that wherever she is, she’s considered it.” Wilson pictured Amber propped on the edge of a fluffy cloud, golden legs dangling, mimosa in hand and smirking down at them. “Since she hasn’t come back to slash your tires…I guess she approves.”

House closed his eyes. Wilson realized he was listening to the whispers. House grinned. “Is that so, CB?”

Paddling between pained and resigned, Wilson asked, “Do you have to call her a bitch? If you didn’t respect her alive, at least pretend to now that she’s dead.”

“I respected her. That was never in question. And that’s not what CB stands for.”

“Oh?”

“Nope. It’s Stone Cold Bgenius. The ‘b’ is silent. And the ‘stone.’”

“I see. Posthumous honors?”

“Nope again. Title changed in her lifetime. When she won you, genius,” he answered before Wilson could ask.

“Is that genius with a B?”

“No. But Amber’s calling you a bidiot, right now. I’ve decided the really high pitched squeal tormenting me in the upper octaves is her.”

“Then…we’ll both hear her voice.”

“And both hear voices,” House pointed out the natural logic.

“You know I don’t like to be left out.”

“I promise not to exclude you from any further mental health episodes.”

“Thanks.”

“Or future orgasms.”

“Very considerate.”

“You can, too. You know. Share.”

“Orgasms?” Wilson asked innocently.

“Yes. Or breakdowns. If you’re talking to Amber—still talking to her, two years after she’s been gone—you’re probably due.”

“Between the two of us, it is definitely my turn.”

Shallow humor couldn’t paste over the unbearable pieces of the moment, so Wilson forced himself half-upright to rip his shirt properly off, tossing it over the coast of the mattress to be dealt with by a future, less physically and emotionally exhausted version of himself. He turned back and found House mirroring his tip over the opposite edge.

“Hey,” Wilson grabbed House’s elbow, “where do you think you’re going?”

“I thought this was the ‘awkward removal of hook-up from bed’ stage of ill-conceived sexual encounters.”

“No, this is the ‘get your ass back under the covers and snuggle up’ stage of ill-conceived sexual encounters.”

“Oh.” House got re-cozied in the sheets, quick-like. “There’s good science behind this, you know,” he announced, prematurely defensive considering Wilson hadn’t done anything but yawn.

“Behind…” Wilson figured repeating ‘snuggling’ might be a romantic overture too far, “bed sharing?”

“Yes. Hearing voices in an empty room is disturbing. Hearing unexplained noises in a room with a person in it gets written off as nothing, psychologically. Creaky steps aren’t scary if you know who’s stepping on them—or if you can pretend.”

“Right.” Wilson settled in nice and close, for purely medical reasons. “Is this a bad time to say I talk in my sleep?”

“Shut up.”

Wilson found House’s hands, dry and warm and perfectly clingy, caging his face. Then he was being kissed again. There was still something startling and exotic in House being so close—something delicious beyond measure, too. Wilson was finally behind the gates, not just banging his fists on the alarm box.

Impulse apparently sated, House gave Wilson a few inches to breathe but kept his face propped more on Wilson’s pillow than his own. Wilson wasn’t complaining.

“If that’s how you plan on shutting me up in the night…” Wilson trailed off meaningfully, adding a low whistle just in case.

“2 AM booty call?”

“You know where to find me,” Wilson yawned hugely, strike number two.

“Post-nut sleepies?” House said sympathetically.

“Hush. It’s bedtime.”

“It’s barely ten.”

“Double digits in the PM, that’s late enough for me. You don’t have to sleep if you’re not tired.”

“I’m not,” House said around the inevitably triggered yawn of his own.

“Uh huh.” Wilson contorted to try and turn out the light without disrupting their equilibrium.

“Hey,” House batted at his arm, “keep it on. I want to watch you sleep.”

“You can watch me sleep in the dark. Like a regular creep.” Wilson plunged them into the orangey shadows left behind by lamps and long days.

He felt House tense beside him. Wilson fumbled very carefully outward, turtling his hand over House’s, twining their fingers together.

In the dark—didn’t count.

House relaxed.

Wilson had drifted well into pre-REM when he was suddenly jolted back to awareness by a hand shaking his shoulder.

House spoke, deadly serious: “My voices are saying we should do anal.”

“Tell the voices…” Wilson felt around in the dark until House’s lips were puffing a startled exhale against his fingertips, and he pressed down gently, “…to get some lube and call me in the morning.”