stupid screwed-up situation

The trouble with House-

(Wilson figures that that has to be as good a thread to follow as any, as solid and sound a frame as he can conjure to reckon and reconcile House's lifelong string of bizarre actions and bizarrer consequences)

-is that the way he expresses himself is strange, and always has been strange. Which is to say, when judging people and their everyday demonstrations of self-reflection, House is so, so close to following a pattern another human being could understand...and then he deviates.

Sharply. Strongly. Stiffly.

And yet, cool. Fluid. Unbothered. Always with another thing coming. Always with another line prepared.

(He's an amoeba, shapeshifter, and yet he isn't. He's a flagellate, self-recriminant, and yet he isn't. He's a paramecium, limp and slipper, and yet he isn't.)

Like he predicts his every systematic action three hours, three days, three weeks in advance, and it's actually less important what the others say than it is how he responds (to what he knows they will say), because he has to leave them with exactly the right amount of information and inflections, while he hauls off and advances the visualization forward a frame, the better to set his feet for the impending interpersonal Evel Knievel of it all.

(He is performing himself because he doesn't know how to be anyone or anything else, and more than that because he doesn't know how not to perform anything at all.)

They call him an ass much more frequently than they call him a jerk - Wilson principal among them. He is ancillary to House's circles, yet also the one thing in the system that House's gravity actually respects, acknowledges, obeys. So he weighs in, as appropriate. He takes his habitual orbit.

Generally, you call someone a jerk when the human discourse they have to present to you is far outweighed by the arrogance and lack of courtesy with which they present it.

House self-justifies, his knowledge and logic and principles all marshaled neatly alike to his quick-tongued pop culture references that smoothly evade the topical and metaphorical rabbit-holes that are never, ever about tularemia. Yes, yes, and this is the only reason he hasn't been fired by now.

But more than that, House is strange. He leaves a quiet, staticky impression. He is impossible to replace not just because he is irreplaceable but because he is unlike anyone else on earth. When they made him, he took it upon himself to break the mold. Et cetera.

Wilson is convinced of this.

Wilson has, by this token, long since abandoned the prospect of imagining - rather, reimagining - House as someone without the peculiarities, the abstract and yet perfectly stereotypical hard childhood, the off-kilter notions of romance, the lechery that pushed boundaries and excused itself with humility all at once.

He had begun to wonder, instead, how this all would look if he was a man, and House were a woman. Not in some slinky, savant-garde turn-of-the-century future-fantasy involving lingerie and violence and private identities unknown even to the havers and doers, but in plain terms. Subjunctive, indeed.

If a woman had watched him launch that decanter through the mirror mounted over the jukebox and examined his distorted, fragmented portrait; had observed the cartoonish strung-out sentiment palpable upon his drunken dog-jowled face and bet on whether or not he'd actually bothered to absorb the contents of the manila envelope.

(So she knew that he delayed the inevitable.)

If a woman had bailed him out of jail and watched him process dopily out of the cell to collect his personal effects - had watched his face contort through several hungover progressions of recognition and disbelief until his hands had to take over and gesture limply with his coat and summons both.

(So she knew that he was easily stymied.)

If a woman had contacted him with a grapevine job offer, or opening, or invitation for obloquy, and then seized upon him, borrowed outsize amounts of money incessantly, monopolized his spare nights with eventually monotonous activities, artlessly made him pay for everything, flicked her shockingly intense irises over him as she carelessly chewed on his french fries, and all other such manner of low-hanging fruit.

(So she knew that he was hopelessly credulous.)

Wilson couldn't decide if he'd be more confused, or less.

A woman who acted like that, who had that bold a resume of manipulating and accessorizing him, of enabling him as much as he surely must have enabled her for this to have gone on so long, like torture that he had agreed to, somehow, no matter how vociferously with every day and every inciting inch and every subsequent flailing mile he rejected House's...advances

(or thought he did, or thought they were, or thought that he was speaking but really with his impotent floppy-fingered gestures he was saying nothing and nothing and less than nothing at all)

it all just kept advancing, in its strange way, amorphous and perpetually in motion or else pausing, high-brow and smug, to stand stock still.

This asinine friendship, it liked itself. Wilson's company preferred House's company, and vice versa, even as House and Wilson themselves stood merely adjutant and stripped of the right to do anything so straightforward as deny it.

House, the impossible jerk who spoke several languages and played several instruments and hated all displays of emotion, even that raising intelligence, who used his supposedly useless leg to deny that the way he carried himself was strikingly athletic.

Wilson, the very possible doormat who was actually, in his own way, quite vicious and, solely to House, vindictive; who said he'd never take advantage of his fine and moderate reputation but who by House was mercilessly aided and abetted into being a tremendous piece of work in his own right.

The trouble with House. The trouble with Wilson. The trouble with all of it, and an addictively bad taste in his mouth.

Wilson, who couldn't tell if he was strange by association or as the cause of it, or something else horrid altogether.

House, who couldn't tell where he ended and Wilson began, because he had a way of bleeding into people and them bleeding into him which he rather resented, as people tended to notice.

(Wilson had a firmer idea of the separation between himself and House, because when he went to sleep at night he actually bothered to make himself think of other things, which House didn't and couldn't and never would. Because Wilson was used to the rumble of indigestion that said House had disagreed with him, genuinely, that day. House, hyperfixed to the next several moves and desperate to slap the clock, was none so self-patient.)

Bleeding. Diseased. Marked, a leper.

House's friend.

Wilson's bulldog.

Homoerotic nutjobs.

Some rancid combination of tall dark and handsome with bright-eyed and fine-mouthed and just an untouchable, glorious freak of nature who dared anyone to define him, to understand him, to see through him and out the other side of the mirror and find him, oh, I don't know, nice but boring.

Wilson, some say, refuses to accept himself. House, in turn, refuses to accept this, but has no interest in changing the Wilson that everyone else sees.

(Unless it becomes, momentarily, a matter of defiance and ill pride. Unless it writhes about and self-remonstrates and coolly connects itself back down to the core.)

No woman of all the many that Wilson lets be interested in him, traditionally, would ever discover such a sacred route to treat him in this way. Of course, no men, either.

Because of the habits House has amassed, as he ambulates himself through the world by staying cryptic and hidden rather than unassuming (an ass or a pain in the ass, which is worse, tell me now, which is worse), he has made himself a target for anyone who hasn't already been driven away - good, bad, and otherwise.

And Wilson, well...he doesn't drive anybody away. He's the one who runs. But the way he runs is not all that interesting, from the outset. That is to say, when House found him in just such an interesting situation, reacting in just such a predictable and yet such a volatile way, House seized upon what it was that could sustain him.

Coexistence, more than friendship. An inhuman steadiness. A girder made out of a spine as sturdy as a lab coat wearing a healthy constitution of flesh, a silk tie, and a placid personal war. House saw three months, three years, three decades forward. He saw Wilson's unimaginable importance in his life, if only he believed that Wilson was fascinating (he was) and would never be boring (not never, not ever).

He knew what he had to do - and this was not to say that he never fumbled it with an incorrect prediction. He knew, as surely as the penetration of glass through glass, how he would keep his friend, henceforth. How Wilson might react to this was for iteration, later.

Wilson, House's living lifeline. Not a secret. Something everybody knows. House, Wilson's gift that only he can understand. Also, in broad strokes, taken for granted. And Wilson, too, deigns to face-value it. Could be proud and noble, if not sneering, that House is his charge and his alone. Could defend his honor in more casual circumstances than those concerning impending heartbreak. Could say, to any other, you don't get him. He's my friend.

But doesn't. Doesn't want to. Perhaps, is afraid to, or worse.

(Resentment? For what? For a job, companionship, intellectual pleasure? For the divorces, when House has remained, and Wilson yet retains the spirit to try again?)

But won't run. Can't run. Doesn't.

House? Not more or less than human, certainly not. But essentially odd, with or without the piece of quadriceps muscle. Wilson, also perfectly human, and in this way his perfect complement. In the way that humans can be horrible to and for and from and of each other. In the way that humans have contrived such complex social contracts and codes that they circle back around to stereotyping each other, and then climbing outside of those boxes and screaming like a loon to get back in, get out, let me in.

In the way that it is impossible for Gregory House's fabulous and fabulously grim manipulation of vicissitude to ever collapse flat without James Wilson's stern and sighing sense-making always within his grasp, no, these screaming skew lines, it's not that screwed-up, it's not that stupid, that won't happen, so much as that the coordinates of the cube will list, perhaps, and yawn sideways and just

just

not implode, or abandon all hope, or exit light and enter night, but fall apart and into pieces and into a place so utterly boring that neither of them will ever really feel like clawing their way out of it, anymore.

Which is the trouble with strange, special, surreally idiosyncratic people who don't know how to make nice and meet a friend and look comprehensible to absolutely anyone else in the place. The opposite of codependency is not insanity, but normality.

And if House made any more sense, man to man, in the throes of routine, Wilson just wouldn't be able to like him anymore.