House/Wilson Brainworm #92 ************************* That's What You Do Wilson's Freudian slip is showing. A House MD/Hilson ficlet, inspired by https://youtu.be/GA1fWZsfMR4 He looked like crap. Weak, sweaty and pale. I made a notation in his chart. "Just looking at you hurts. I was gonna order up some extra pain meds." "I love you." "I lov --" I almost said it back. I'd like to say it was a reflex -- a moment of linguistic autopilot. I'd like to say that. A near-miss. I tried to make a quick hairpin turn into humor instead. "Is that you talking, or the morphine?" I waited for the usual punchline -- "That's me talking to the morphine" -- because it's the kind of thing he always said. But he didn't. "Do you know what I think, Wilson?" The word came out with an edge on it, like profanity. Or mockery. I see you, all of you, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it. "I think you do. I think you feel the same way, and it scares you shitless. Because if you admit it -- even for a second -- it would upset your comfortable little life, the pretty little house of cards you've been trying to build, first with Sam and then with Bonnie and then Julie. And then you'd have to do something about it." He looked at me with those eyes -- the ones that were sharp as razors some times and soft as butter others. The ones that had punched into my skull like bullets years before, and lodged there, somewhere delicate and vital down near the brainstem. Inoperable. If I tried to cut them out I'd die. But even if I left them alone, untouched, I knew they'd still move and shift by themselves one day -- while I was asleep or having lunch or working and trying to mind my own business -- and tear something important open anyway. Maybe today was that day. "I think you're afraid. So you waited until now to slip up and admit it. You waited until I wasn't at full strength, torn up and half-dead with a useless leg and fucked up on morphine. You waited until i was toothless and safe and stuck in a hospital bed, and couldn't do anything about it." I didn't answer him -- because there really wasn't anything to say to that, was there? So instead I just stood there -- face flaming, guts twisting, silent. And eventually he turned over and closed his eyes. And I went home and fucked my girlfriend. Because that's what you do, isn't it? You go home and fuck your girlfriend, who is pretty and sweet and heartrendingly uninteresting, in your perfect little tidy apartment. To remind yourself of who you are. Or who you're supposed to be, anyway. That's what you do.
Isn't it?