Penumbris

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Think positive, they say. A positive attitude can effect all sorts of changes. Laughter is the best medicine. Prayer can lead to miraculous recoveries - James has seen it for himself.

Not even the Mother Superior, he thinks, would be able to think positive in this situation. She might well turn to prayer, though. He almost wishes he wasn’t quite so world-weary and cynical, with just the right amount of god-fearing respect combined with a lack of faith to pray in vain. But Greg is testing his devotion to living without a higher power.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. In the metallic confines of their elevator prison, the sound of the other doctor’s walking stick repeatedly colliding with the floor, he knew, was designed specifically to send him completely and irrevocably insane. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Greg might deny it, mock-innocence on a face that probably learned sarcasm before the smile, or alternatively he might shrug the charge off, as though it was the most normal things for one friend to do to another when trapped between the fifth and sixth floors of the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital late one Thursday evening.

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

“I’m missing the O.C. Now I’ll never know if the cute one sleeps with the other cute one, or the cute but unpopular and morally superior one.”

“The cute one.”

House looked scandalised, the overblown expression animating his face in a way that managed to tug Wilson’s lips in a slight smile each time, despite his better judgement.

“What? No!” Greg said, his best offended-camp voice. “Now I’ll never watch it again. That bastard.”

Not really being an expert in the specialist subject ‘American popular television programming’ - knowing only what Greg spouted and which may or may not have been true, along with the snatches of it he caught when sitting in the other man’s office, lacking anything better to do and waiting for his friend to be released from the little cathode spells – James decided to change the topic in the hope that the subject matter would change to something less… well, one-sided. If any of his conversations with Greg were.

“Such a tragedy. My, whatever will you do to fill the long, lonely hours now? Take up knitting, perhaps…”

“Knitting? Knitting is for the likes of Foreman. Not me.”

“Foreman.”

“Yes. Although he wants, in his heart of hearts, to be as cool and unconventional as me, Foreman is doomed forever in his wishy-washy sentimentality to go home to a big ball of yarn and make hundreds of off-green tiny little sweaters for deprived – and possibly depraved – little children out in the big yonder.”

“Unconventional, he says, pining for his O.C.”

“Ah, but do you watch it? Does Cuddy? Cameron? Foreman? Chase?”

James shook his head, bemused. Whether any of them did or not was beside the point. No one would admit to it in front of House.

“See?” House concluded. “Unconventional.”

House in this mood he could handle. House in this mood he liked. It was the snatches of intense irritability and distress Wilson didn’t care for.

Silence fell again, and he could hear Greg shuffling restlessly, obviously in pain. The elevator was big enough that two people weren’t exactly crowded, this being a hospital after all, but James knew sitting in here would be uncomfortable for House, and that his pride wouldn’t let him. His weight shifted from one foot to another, and James didn’t want to look sorry for him, knowing it would only make the other man worse.

House hit the intercom button again.

“Hello? Sick man in here. Well. Sick men out there too. And I can’t make them all better and earn my keep if I’m stuck in here. Tell Cuddy I want this taking out of my clinic hours.”

“We’re right on it, Doctor House.”

“Oh, suddenly I feel so much better. Whatever would I do without you.”

The poor mechanic on the other end didn’t reply to that. He’d been very conciliatory the first few times House had harassed him, but his temper had started to fray, it was clear. Wilson didn’t blame him.

“You know, if you annoy him too much, he’ll cut the intercom and leave us in here longer just to spite you.”

“But that would be unprofessional!”

Wilson shrugged, then decided damn decorum and slid to the floor, knees mostly in his chest. House looked at him, the scandalised look of one whose best friend done dirty on them. Wilson refused to rise to the bait and merely sat still as House walked over his feet.

“Do you think Cuddy did this on purpose because I got taken to court again and refused to seduce her to apologise?”

Wilson considered his options carefully. “No.” He paused for effect. “I think Foreman was either trying to impress you or else replace you, or Cameron decided to descend to your level of courtship.”

“My level of courtship?”

“Please. You never progressed from hair-pulling and name-calling.”

There was a snort from above, then a grunt, and House came down in a confusingly brief tangle of legs and stick, until he was sitting opposite Wilson with his legs stretched out and almost touching. His head fell back against the wall, eyes closed, his throat bared momentarily while he breathed. Adjusting. “Much as I would like to impress upon you my studly manliness, with your habits of seducing anything in sight, I might not be safe.”

James half choked. “Oh, really? Are you that easy to pull? I thought Cameron had trouble.”

House rocked his head forward to look Wilson in the eye. “Ah yes, but she is a younger woman and only has one dying husband in the past who probably only married her because he wouldn’t get any from anyone else. And you, how many wives?”

“They don’t last very long,” James replied, looking up at the camera in the corner.

“No. They don’t.”

The mood turned sombre again, punctuated by the sound of Greg’s nails on the elevator floor, tapping out some toneless rhythm. James sighed.

Greg looked at him with puppy-dog eyes. “You know, we could always play I Spy…”

James hit Greg’s good leg. “No.”

“Charades?”

“No.”

“Pin the tail on the doctor?”

“What, exactly, is in your medicine bottle today?”

“Oh, just the usual. I’m just so happy to be here, stuck in an elevator with you.”

“Oh, pull the other one, House. I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“So manly… so commanding…”

“I said stop it!” Wilson said, louder. Sometimes House could take jokes too far, and even he would be uncomfortable. And one of these days, someone was going to take him at his word.

“Dreamy,” House sighed, leaning his head back again. As if on cue, he rummaged in his pocket for the offending painkillers and swallowed it dry. Wilson dragged his eyes back to the camera, arms folding across his chest.

“I’d only make you miserable with my constant womanising anyway.”

“Only if you didn’t invite me to join in.”

James half-coughed, half-laughed. “That isn’t generally what happens in affairs.”

“Maybe that’s where you’ve been going wrong.”

“…maybe. But—”

Clunk. A deeper clunk. Then a whirr, followed by the very definite sense of sinking.

“But what?”

“But we’re there,” Wilson said, getting up more or less easily to his feet, before grabbing hold of House’s arm, so he had to accept the offered help. Which he did. And then, behind his back, grabbed his ass, making him jump and yelp.

“Cuddy! Just the woman I wanted to see,” House started, hobbling towards her. “Now before you start, it wasn’t a ploy to get out of clinic hours – I would so love to help all the dying little kiddies with their asthma – I think your culprit is there. Look, see those red cheeks? Guilt. All over him. The shame…”

Cuddy did not look convinced. James straightened his coat.

“Noted. What wasn’t Wilson’s fault, however, were the constant harassments the engineer trying to get you out had to put up with.”

“The children! Dying of constricted airways! How could I sit by?”

“Fifteen minutes. Both of you. Walk it off, then do whatever it is we’re paying you to do. And try not to get stuck in any more lifts.”

Wilson nodded, rubbing between his shoulders. House was already behind Cuddy’s.

“My office. Bring the cuffs. Oh wait, did you leave them with me? I can’t remember. I’ll go check.”

“Don’t even ask,” he told Cuddy. Insane. Really. Truly insane. But somehow he thought the hospital’s insurance for ‘acts of House’ had been used up twice over this year already. He’d have to ask at the end of the financial year. Maybe he qualified for a holiday, by now. Somehow, he doubted it.

“Come on. I’m a cripple, can’t you catch up?”

“Coming,” he replied, rolling his eyes. Never getting in an elevator with the man again. Ever.

Well. Until they both went home, of course.