Before and After (Part 1/6)

[tobiahawk.livejournal.com]

Title: Before and After
Summary: After leaving Mayfield, a sometimes-psychotic House moves in Wilson.
Ships: Strong House/Wilson friendship, no slash.
Genre: Hurt/comfort, friendship
Word Count: 2,065
Rating: PG/PG-13 (swearing)
Disclaimer: I don’t own House. Also, thanks to the TWOPer who mentioned the idea of House teaching diagnostics!

House had spent the day building a house of popsicle sticks. Actually, “house” would be inaccurate, Wilson realizes after looking at it for a minute. It’s more of a mansions—six stories tall, with a swimming pool and what Wilson can only guess to be popsicle stick stables, badminton nets, and tennis courts in the back. It’s actual kind of cool, Wilson thinks, until he notices that all the popsicles sticks have come from the industrial size bag of popsicles that he had been planning to take to the Pediatric Oncology ward tomorrow.

 

“Take a look at Kobe’s house,” House says, looking up from his project. “The scale’s a bit smaller, and termite insurance is a bitch, but has all the right stuff.”

 

“Really, House? You had to use the chemo kids’ popsicles? You were that bored?”

 

“Oh, come on. Like high fructose corn syrup is really so great for their long-term survival.”

 

“And it’s good for you? You ate a whole gallon of ice cream Tuesday. And left the melting container on the couch for me to pick up, I might add.”

 

“What? You expect a cripple to clean up after himself? God, you’re the slave driver. And psychosis is different from cancer—sugar is indicated.”

 

“By whom? The Journal of I Make This Shit Up?”

 

“I’m pretty sure I saw that in JAMA,” House deadpans.

 

Wilson glares at him.

 

“Or an ad for Ben and Jerry’s. High quality research either way,” House says, grinning just slightly.

 

Wilson knows he shouldn’t have sugar in the apartment, that even the low dose antipsychotic House is taking raises his susceptibility to rapid weight gain, metabolic disorders, insulin resistance, and diabetes. He knows that House knows that, too, that House knew that long before Mayfield, and that House knows it now and just doesn’t care. Just like how he knew Vicodin can cause liver damage and didn’t care. For House, comfort wins out over health. For Wilson, well, he just figures House has lost enough recently.

 

“Wait, since when did Kobe have a tennis court?”

 

“Isn’t a basketball court a bit cliché? I mean, where’s the mystery in that? And, damn, that would be a boring episode of Cribs.”

 

House migrates over towards the TV and turns it on, flipping to an old Baywatch rerun on a channel that only comes as part of the premium “bachelor party” cable package, a cable package Wilson had never ordered and didn’t even know about until he received his highly inflated cable bill. When he called the cable company to protest the bill, he was told that a “G.H. McHotness” had ordered it with his credit card.

 

Wilson picks up House’s house and starts making dinner, lasagna from a box. Wilson has come to like the days when he comes home to House making popsicle stick mansions, playing his PSP, and watching tacky TV shows on horrifically expensive channels. Hell, he even enjoys the mornings where he wakes up to find his toilet covered in saran wrap or eyebrows drawn on his face. Not because it doesn’t bug the shit out of him—oh, it does—but because House was like that before.

 

…

 

During the past nine months, Wilson has learned to divide the world into before and after. Before, Wilson lived alone. Before, House was a doctor. Before, House was crazy—but sane. Before, House and Wilson went out for drinks. Before, House was, in small moments, in tiny glimpses of time, happy, Before, House could do what he loved. Before, even though Cuddy sometime hated to admit it, House was needed. Before, House was right. Before, Wilson, even though he always hated to admit it, leaned on House. Before, everything seemed like it might be okay.

 

After is what Wilson hates. After, Wilson makes lasagna for two. After, Wilson knows by heart the dosage, chemical formula, effectiveness, and potential side effects of every anti-psychotic in the book. After, Wilson knows the drive to Mayfield by heart. After, Wilson has found his best friend wandering the streets, perfectly sober but not at all lucid. After, Wilson no longer has alcohol in his apartment because he knows that under no circumstances can someone on Zyprexa drink. After, Wilson goes to the hospital, and House does not come with him. After, Wilson eats lunch alone, with no one to steal his food. After, House can no longer practice. After, Wilson has to check to make sure House has taken his daily pills. After, House leans on Wilson. After, nothing is okay.

 

House had spent six months in Mayfield. First had been the Vicodin detox which didn’t help the hallucinations but just made House as sick as any chemo patient Wilson has ever seen. Next had been the medical rule-outs, the blood tests, MRIs, fMRIs, EEGs, and CAT scans, all of which had shown no tumor, no complex partial seizures, no MS, no brain damage. Then had come the antipsychotics—Geodon, Abilify, and Ripserdal, just to name a few. And with them had come the weight gain, the high blood pressure, the strange jerking of House’s face, the exhaustion, and, what House seemed to despise most of all, the mental dullness, a fogginess that, Wilson was told, feels like having a cloud wrapped around your mind. None of them really helped, though Zyprexa, which dulls House’s psychosis somewhat, had the least side effects, so that was the drug they stuck him on in the end. It was still largely ineffective, but at least they were doing something, they said. It reminded Wilson of palliative care in terminal cancer patients—nothing can be done and yet you still do something. 

 

Wilson had been appointed, via a living will he didn’t know House had, House’s medical proxy. He did little in the way of actual medical proxying, taking orders from House, who came up with one brilliant, inconceivable diagnosis after another—diagnoses that were all tested and all wrong. When it came down to it, House was schizophrenic, a rare diagnosis in its own right, considering the late onset. Just like my brother, Wilson had thought, as a chill ran up and down his spine. And from that moment on, Wilson was dead set on saving House.

 

Wilson made the drive to Mayfield biweekly, each time to see a different House. Sometimes, during the early days, he saw a House who was puking his guts out and screaming in pain. Sometimes, he saw a House with limbs flailing involuntary, a side effect of the countless antipsychotics—ironically, as it turned out, House didn’t tolerate drugs too well. Sometimes, he saw a House lost in his own world, muttering at someone—Amber? he always wondered—who Wilson could not see. And sometimes, on the good days, Wilson saw his friend, the one who made comments about the nurses’ breasts, who armchair diagnosed the other patients, who made fun of Freud, who stole Wilson’s French fries as they talked over lunch. Those days were the only things that made Wilson come back.

 

It was on one of those days when, out of nowhere, House’s face turned gravely serious, and he asked Wilson if he could leave Mayfield. The meds weren’t improving, the psychotherapy was “bullshit,” the group therapy was “sharing time bullshit,” the nurses wore uniforms with “too high of necklines,” his roommate was “not only a nutcase but a naturopath and an asshole,” his main psychologist “ preached all of this new age Buddhist-y shit,” the food “sucked worse than [Wilson]’s cooking,” the walls were the wrong color, he missed his PSP, they scheduled art therapy during his soaps... Wilson said yes for the one reason House didn’t mention, the one reason they both knew he never would. House would never be better, so why stay here?

 

Wilson had talked to House’s chief psychiatrist, explaining that he was a doctor, that he could monitor House’s treatment compliance and be on guard for any worsening symptoms or side effects, that House would live with him, and that most of all he knew, in a way that no one else does, Gregory House. Within a week, the doctor was calling Wilson to discuss an outpatient treatment plan which included weekly therapy—which Wilson knew House would never go to and which he never has—and monthly med checks, which House complies to, Wilson suspects, because even someone as risk-prone as House doesn’t really want to die.

 

…

 

Over the past three months, Wilson has seen the ins and outs of psychosis in a way that he missed seeing with his brother. He has seen the good days, when House seems almost normal, his old sarcastic, sexist, misanthropic, brilliant self. He has also seen the bad days, the after days, when he comes home to a House in the middle of a conversation with his dead girlfriend. He has found House wandering the streets at three in the morning, caught up in a full-blown episodic hallucination—one of major reason House now lives with Wilson and not alone—and lead him home, given him a PRN sedative that he now keeps on hand, and stayed up the rest of night with him. He has seen House caught in a “mental fog,” his normally brilliant mind dulled in a way that Wilson can see is almost physically painful for his friend.

 

He now reads the psychiatry journals almost as much as the oncology ones. He has dealt with his friend screaming at him that he’s “not a fucking baby, and if you want to get a helping fix, just get another fucking wife.” He never makes House say he sorry, because he knows at won’t—and never did—mean anything. There are days when he hates this, but he will do it, he knows, until House gets better or until one of them dies. Not only because House will not be another Danny but because Wilson knows there will never be another House.

 

…

 

A week ago, a job “mysteriously” opened up at PPTH, teaching two diagnostics classes, each for two hours a day, two days a week. The job, in what Wilson is almost sure is a violation of fair hiring rules, was announced only to Wilson who knows, of course, that was manufactured specifically for House. Because House won’t do the requisite preps and probably won’t grade any tests, the job will only require eight hours a week of sanity. It’s highly flexible and starts in two weeks, Cuddy had said, leaving unsaid what they both were thinking: Please make House take it.

 

House, of course, had resisted at first. “It’s a pity job,” he said. “Teaching those med students will make me blow my brains out more than Mayfield did. They’re fucking useless.”

 

“It’s a job,” Wilson had pointed out, “in diagnostics. You’d be good at it.”

 

“I was a good doctor. Teaching is a job for the useless and senile.”

 

“It’s amazing you got through med school with that attitude.”

 

“Yes, because those med students are fucking imbeciles.”

 

“So, make them better. Build a better med student.”

 

“If I wanted to bash my head against the wall, I could find a much less painful way to do it.”

 

“House, take it. You need a job.”

 

“Why? Because being a psychotic cripple isn’t enough?”

 

“Because I know you won’t file for disability. Because someone has to pay for the BoobyHot channels you ordered…”

 

“Hey, I’ve seen you watching those at night!”

”Because you need to use your mind. You’re bored, and it’s killing you. Yes, you can’t be a doctor anymore, but this is as close as you’re going to get.”

 

House shuts up. The next day, Wilson saw a sticky note on the counter, “Tell Cuddy I said yes.”

 

…

 

As Wilson scoops the lasagna out of the tray, House turns off the TV and stumbles over to the table.

 

“So,” he says as he sits down, “how was the Cuddy boobage today? So low cut that you could see the good stuff?”

 

Wilson smiles, thinking that maybe these good days, these before days, make it all worth it, and knowing they probably don’t. He wishes sometimes that he could keep them in a bottle, saving them forever. That way, when the after days come, he wouldn’t have to rely just on memory to remind him that he hasn’t yet lost his best friend.

 

.

Comments

[lostwiginity.livejournal.com]

This is so sad! I wanna read on so badly.

[cagedwriter61.livejournal.com]

Even though I'm pretty sure Shore isn't going to keep House clincally insane and out of medicine this way, I'm liking this story. You have House and Wilson down as far as their voices and characterization, and I'm always a fan of House-Wilson friendship cohabitation. There were definitely a few lines that made me laugh, and it's well-written overall. Please keep writing!
:)

[tobiahawk.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Yeah, I'm totally expecting this to be AU as soon as S6 premieres, but it's a fun angle to write.

[llumik.livejournal.com]

Interesting, liked it very much. Didn't notice straight away that there's going to be more, it would have worked well even just like this. But more is definitely better, looking forward to that :)

[chickloveslotr.livejournal.com]

Awwwww!
So sad!
Can't wait for more!

So far - marvelous!....

[geelady.livejournal.com]

Off to read the rest. Anticipating more marvelous. 8^)

Genie

Re: So far - marvelous!....

[tobiahawk.livejournal.com]

Aww, thanks!