Gregory House had built an identity on certainty. Pain was constant. People were temporary. Desire was a distraction best anesthetized with sarcasm and pharmaceuticals. James Wilson was the exception that proved every rule-loyal to a fault, terminally empathetic, the oncologist who believed in saving things that were already dying, including House.

Which was why the door opening that Saturday night should have meant nothing.

House didn't look up at first, sprawled across the couch, cane hooked over the armrest, a medical journal ignored in favor of reruns. "If you're here to make me socialize, I'm prescribing you distance," he called.

Silence answered him. Then the soft, uncertain click of heels that did not belong in his apartment.

He looked up.

Wilson stood in the doorway-no, not stood. Hovered. Self-aware down to his fingertips, shoulders pulled in as if he could apologize for occupying space. A dress that caught the low light, hair styled, makeup careful in the way of someone who had watched three tutorials and still expected to be laughed at.

House's brain, normally a cathedral of diagnosis and deflection, went completely, medically blank.

**A pity she does not exist. ***

Wilson cleared his throat. "It was a dare," he said quickly, already cringing at himself, hands fidgeting with the edge of the fabric. "Conference thing. I lost. This was- statistically inevitable."

House didn't answer.

He was staring. Not clinically. Not analytically. His pulse had done something deeply irresponsible.

The only girl I ever loved-

He pushed himself upright, cane clattering to the floor, because balance had become theoretical. "You—" he began, and stopped, because the sentence you look- had too many endings and none of them were survivable.

Wilson shifted, flushing beneath the makeup. "You can say it. I look ridiculous. That's the point. Humiliation builds character."

House had known Wilson through divorces, through chemo wards, through nights where neither of them said the word lonely but it sat between them anyway. He knew every expression, every defense mechanism.

He did not know this feeling.

My tail began to wag.

"Turn around," House said hoarsely.

Wilson blinked. "What?"

"Medical evaluation," House lied. "I need to confirm this isn't a hallucination caused by long-term Vicodin use."

Wilson huffed a nervous laugh and did, the movement careful, awkward, devastatingly real.

House felt something fracture- some long-held theorem about himself collapsing under the weight of sequins and familiarity. He had always been a self-proclaimed expert in desire. Women were uncomplicated. Wilson's taste in them had been a running joke for years.

There is no hope of love for me.*

Except this wasn't a joke. This was Wilson, trying not to meet his eyes, and House wanting-absurdly, catastrophically-to cross the room and fix the way he was standing, the way he expected rejection before it arrived.

"I don't know why I came here," Wilson admitted, voice small. "I guess I thought... you'd find it funny."

House did. In the sense that gravity was funny when it stopped working.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring like the answer to a differential diagnosis had just rewritten his life.

"You're not funny," House said quietly. "You're-"

He stopped again, because the word was beautiful, and that was a symptom he had no treatment for.

The only girl I'll ever love-

Wilson's breath caught, and for once neither of them had a script.

"House?" he asked, barely above a whisper.

And the room-his apartment, his carefully constructed kingdom of isolation-felt suddenly too small for the thing unfolding inside his chest.