Wilson Fest fic: To Lean On

[triedunture]

Title: To Lean On
Pairing: H/W friendship
Rating: G
Word count: under 3000
Spoilers: None, reference to an episode, but none really.
Warnings: None
Summary: wilson_fest prompt 50: Wilson and House duel on Guitar Hero

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House had been the one to choose the bar, not Wilson. Wilson would have never picked this place, but not because it was trashy or cheap or home to a younger crowd; Wilson wasn't bothered much by any of those things. He was, however, bothered by the steep staircase he now faced.

Not for his sake, of course.

"House." He turned and looked at his companion, who was locking up the beater station wagon on the curb. "Are you sure this is the place you wanted to try?"

House blinked brightly, his eyebrows high and daring. "Yeah, why?"

Wilson glanced carefully at House's leg as he approached in a stiff and awkward limp. The mental tally of pills he'd seen House take that day ran through Wilson's mind. Today was not one of House's best. So why would he want to come to some bar tonight? And one on the second floor above a pool hall, to boot.

Wilson opened his mouth to ask these questions in the most passive-aggressive, veiled way he could, but House beat him to the punch.

"Lean on me," House crooned, slinging an arm around Wilson's neck and forging ahead to the stairs. "When you're not stroooo~ng..."

"How kind of you," Wilson deadpanned. But he wrapped his arm around House's waist to steady him and took the stairs slowly to keep time with House's gait.

"We. All. Need. Somebo~dy. To. Lean. On," House continued to sing one syllable per step until they reached the top of the wooden steps and pushed through the door.

"What's next? Hitler sings Imagine?" Wilson detached himself from House's side and peered around the dimly lit room. It was a student bar, small and cozy, meant for long hours at the clustered tables instead of a quick round on the handful of empty barstools. Kids were sharing pitchers over cracked textbooks; Wilson could hear two undergrads arguing over the semantics of the semicolon.

"Okay," he said slowly. "I assume you didn't come here for the world-renowned collection of," he peered at the taps sticking up from the far side of the diminutive bar, "three ales, one stout, and an IPA."

"Nope." House licked his lips and pointed to the far corner. "I came here to rock."

Wilson turned and looked. What he had thought was just music coming from a juke box was actually coming from the sizable television mounted on the wall. Two guys in Princeton sweatshirts were playing some sort of video game with little toy guitars, matching up colored lights on the screen to the beat of an unfamiliar song.

"You've got to be joking."

House hobbled to the nearest open table, shucking his coat as he went.

"You're not joking," Wilson sighed.

"Monday nights are Guitar Hero nights," House stated firmly. "Last man standing gets a free basket of onion rings."

"House, we're the oldest people here." Wilson dumped himself into a chair opposite House and unwound his scarf from his neck, a gesture of defeat before the battle was even over.

"Yeah, and most of these songs were written before these brats were born. That means I've got an advantage." House waved to the barmaid and mimed pouring a pitcher.

Wilson scrunched his nose. "I don't know this song," he said.

"Dude. Muse. What are you, like, sixty?" House flicked a balled-up straw wrapper that had been left by the table's previous occupants. It bounced off Wilson's cheek.

"So you're here for a video game. Now explain to me." Wilson rubbed at his face. (The wrapper had been damp.) "Why am I here?"

"We all need somebody to--"

"All right, all right," Wilson said, interrupting House's chorus. "I'm here to cart you up and down steps; I see now."

"I might let you have an onion ring, too."

The barmaid arrived with the beer and two mismatched glasses, and Wilson poured. Over by the television, the song ended with a screech of misplayed notes. Wilson winced; one of the boys relinquished the toy instrument with a sigh while the other flexed his thin biceps in a King of the World pose.

"Oh, this is gonna be great," House said, slamming back a mouthful of beer before rising to his feet. "Let's go, kid!" He pointed in the classic challenger's stance, like Van Damme stepping into the ring with a Russian.

The undergrad eyed him in a shocked sort of way, but recovered quickly. Wilson watched as House limped sans-cane over to the play area, grabbed the discarded miniature guitar, and slung the strap around his neck and shoulder. The student moved forward as if to help him out (Wilson could see his lips moving, but couldn't hear over the catcalling laughter of the other kids, dizzy with joy that a man over forty was about to take on their leader), but House waved him off. He probably said something unnecessarily caustic in reply too, because the undergrad chuckled and shook his head.

The screen announced that they would be playing an old Pat Benatar song. Fantastic, Wilson thought. It's like I'm right back in high school.

He drank from his glass in slow sips while watching House play. It didn't take a genius to figure out the game: Five colored buttons on the guitar neck matched the possible colored orbs flying across the screen. House had to hit the right button at the right moment in the song to hit the note in a pantomime of playing the real instrument; missing the note resulted in a loud screech of simulated strings and a lower score. There were also flashing lights and little stars and people dancing on the screen, but Wilson tried not to think about it too hard.

At least House was having fun.

"Oh, FACED," House crowed at his opponent while the score calculator on his side of the split screen went wild, tallying upwards and upwards while the undergrad groaned in defeat. The song ended, and the boy stepped down to be replaced with an even cockier kid.

While House whipped him soundly, Wilson found his attention wandering. He looked over at two kids in a dark corner, juniors by the look of their three empty pitchers and a fourth well on its way. Going to undergrad in Canada meant Wilson had never had the experience of the Twenty-One Rush, that mad dash to the liquor store and the neighborhood bar to guzzle everything and anything in sight. Instead, he'd been steadily drinking since eighteen, but never really overdoing it, not really. Maybe a few crazy nights at McGill, Wilson mused, but it seemed like these Princeton kids just didn't know when to stop. Maybe it had something to do with being Ivy League and proving to themselves that it didn't make them first-rate sellouts, suits before they were even grown. Still grasping to their last excuses for acting stupid.

Wilson shook his head, amused. They didn't yet realize that their entire lives would be an excuse to act stupid if they just allowed themselves to. House proved that to him daily. Sometimes hourly.

But that wasn't the thing about this pair that caught Wilson's eye. It was the heavy tomes of biology textbooks that lay in haphazard stacks among their glasses and plastic pitchers. Their graphing calculators and carbon-paper stained fingers. The way the one kid, the taller, gawkier one, kept saying, "I will bet you five dollars, Jones. Do not turn the page! Five dollars, and then we'll see who's right."

"Give me a break, Healy." The kid with the longer hair was trying to wrestle his book out from under the other's palms. "We need to study, not gamble."

"They're essentially the same thing," Healy huffed with a laugh.

Wilson propped his chin in his hand and indulged in a small smile. He often wondered what he and House would have been like if they had met in school, and once in awhile he saw a pair like this that gave him a of clue. House would have been a terrible influence; Wilson probably wouldn't have finished his degree; maybe they would have formed a band and moved to California. If Wilson could play an instrument, of course. (Two terms of last-chair clarinet in seventh grade didn't count.)

He sighed contentedly and drained his glass. House, musical genius and video game junkie that he was, had already slaughtered his opponent to the strains of mid-'90s Weezer. The poor boy was slinking away, replaced by a spunky girl with a close-cropped head of purple hair. The small crowd clapped in approval. House turned towards Wilson to make a skeptical jerking-off motion with his fist.

Wilson shaded his eyes with his hand and pretended he wasn't with him.

The night wore on, and House remained undefeated. Every patron in the bar tried their luck against him, to the point where House was allowing challengers to pick the song instead of doing it randomly. Because House wasn't coming back to the table anytime soon, Wilson polished off the pitcher himself. Three or four glasses wasn't too much, he thought. And besides, House was driving. But Wilson hadn't eaten dinner. Now that he thought about it, he was feeling a little woozy. Pleasant. Drifty.

He glanced over to the pair of boys still studying in the corner. The rail-thin one that he had pegged as a nascent House was finished arguing with the other boy. Their hands were still clasped over the textbooks, though, and his not-quite-House thumb was drawing lazy ellipses on the back of the Jones boy's palm. Jones was frowning, but didn't retract his hand.

"Don't worry; you'll do well. You always do," the one called Healy said to his companion.

Fine. All right. Not everything and everybody fit in neat little compartments, Wilson knew. Just because two pre-med guys were drinking and gambling and laughing with each other did not make the tall one House and the anal-retentive one Wilson. He should have given up long ago on holding his and House's relationship up to other people's and seeing if they fit. He knew, somehow, that it never would. And the moment it might start to shrink into something approaching normal, House would do something to stretch it again, like the thin skin-colored webbing of Silly Putty.

If he and House were made of putty, what did the red egg symbolize? Wilson mused on this for a few seconds, then decided he was pretty drunk. Recalling childhood toys ranked somewhere in the Three Sheets to the Wind category.

"House," he called to his friend, "you almost finished here?"

With a flourish of fingers on the fake frets, House ended the Santana song and sent yet another student back to her seat. "Yep, I think that was the last hope for the kids. Onion rings, here I come," he answered over his shoulder, already lifting the guitar strap over his head. He was leaning back against a barstool, bum leg hooked on the footrest, good leg straight and stable on the ground.

"Wait." Wilson stood with a small wobble of his knees; one leg had fallen asleep. "I'll play you."

"I'm sure you'll try." House waggled his eyebrows and then pursed his lips in mock-realization. "Oh! You mean on Guitar Hero."

Wilson picked up the abandoned second player guitar with an unimpressed raised eyebrow. "I don't see how you got so good at this game; you don't even own it. Have you been ducking into the Wal-mart to practice on the display copy or something?"

"One of your patients. 12D." House shrugged and fiddled with his guitar's controls; he was switching his on-screen persona from a husky metal-type to a redhead. "His parents brought it in for him to play in bed."

"And you played with him?"

"Hey, that kid beat me for six straight days. He was a champion; if he were here tonight, he'd be the one getting the onion rings." House flapped his palm open and closed around the neck of the plastic guitar. "Smaller hands. Those kids can play these things much easier."

Wilson thought for a moment. 12D, that had been Ricky Alanson. He had left the hospital last week; his treatments were over, and it looked like he would be fine. Good. If House had been playing this game with a dying boy, Wilson wasn't sure how he'd feel. He'd have to realign that picture of House in his mind yet again. As it was, it took some imagination to see House sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, playing this game with a quiet, bored, and scared nine-year-old.

He shrugged into the guitar strap. "Can we play Barracuda?" he asked, pointing to the song list on the TV.

House snorted. "Predictable."

"What?"

"It's a girly song!" House clicked his guitar button down the list. "We're playing Rock You Like a Hurricane. Now suck it up and try not to cry too hard when you lose."

Wilson watched the screen as the song began. The bar had quieted down. Many of the patrons had trickled out; closing time was fast approaching. The normal self-consciousness that would come with playing a childish game in public didn't manifest. Wilson fingered the little whammy bar, realizing it got him extra points on the extended notes.

"This is kind of fun," he laughed, dipping and swaying with the toy guitar like it was a real instrument, like he was really in The Scorpions, a real rock star. A few missed notes here and there, but his fingers flew to the beat well enough. He had always maintained steady surgeon hands.

"Blue blue green, red red yellow blue!" he sang as he played.

"Quit it." House bumped his elbow at Wilson's side. "You're messing me up."

"You quit it." He jostled House back in the midst of a particularly awesome solo. Things spiraled out of control then, and Wilson won the song by a small margin. He owed this victory to the stomp he'd applied to House's left sneaker in the final bridge, but he celebrated like it was his talent that had done it.

"In. Your. Face." Both index fingers pointed now. "You want an onion ring? I might give you one."

"It's gonna haveta be a rain check, guys," the barmaid told them. She was busy flipping the chairs upside-down onto the small tables. Healy and Jones, the last of the students, were wrapping themselves in their coats and shoving textbooks in their backpacks. "Closing time. Come back next Wednesday."

"Sorry about that," Wilson said sheepishly and left a generous tip beside their empty pitcher.

House pulled on his winter coat with a moody glare. "You cheated."

"You tried to steal a basket of fried sustenance from the mouths of hungry children," Wilson countered, tugging on his trench. "Better hurry." He headed toward the exit. "Your crutch is leaving."

"Hold on," House grumbled, fiddling with his scarf.

Wilson turned around, walking backwards to face House while singing, "So just call on me, brother, when you need a hand!"

"Oh, Christ."

"We all need somebody to lean-- Ack!"

Wilson had leaned back against the swinging door and fallen backwards out of the bar. Into the stairwell, and down the flight of steps. Head over heels, he tumbled, his limbs too slack with fuzzy drunkenness to be of any use. He hit all fifteen stairs. Mostly head-on.

At the bottom of the stairs, he lay in a crumpled heap, his coat flapped over his shoulders, and thought about what House would look like standing at the top of the steps with his cane. If only Wilson could find the will to pick up his head and check.

At least nothing was broken. That he could feel.

Step-thump. Step-thump. Fifteen cane-driven steps down the stairs. Wilson peeked through his tousled bangs to stare up at House as he reached the bottom. House looked down at him and shrugged.

"Going down is easier than up, I guess. You've proved that." He stepped over Wilson's prone body with a jaunty cane waggle. "Better hurry. Your ride is leaving."

Wilson groaned as he lifted himself off the ground, glaring at House as he pushed out into the frosty night, singing a swirl of breath into the air.

"I just might have a problem that you'd understand. We all need somebody to lean on..."




fin.



You can download the podfic here.

Comments

[mitchpell.livejournal.com]

I absolutely love this! I can't remember in which episode Wilson comments on him falling down the stairs drunk, but you worked it in beautifully! I was laughing so hard I drew attention. :D