House MD Fanfiction

Counting Sheep

Hilson, smut, 8173 words
By: vampmissedith

Wilson was exhausted. Not tired, not sleepy--completely worn out. It was the type of exhaustion that came after a long, never-ending, tiresome day after very little sleep the night before. House had insisted on watching some sort of television show marathon with him and Wilson could have dragged his ass to bed at ten, when he’d started yawning, but instead he’d somehow got invested in the uninteresting characters and crappily-written plots, and hadn’t crawled his way to his comfortable bed and fluffy pillow until about one in the morning.

Wilson generally went to bed around eleven, sometimes earlier on the longer, rougher days, and he always regretted staying up later than that the next day and told himself he would never do it again. Wilson usually woke up early, got ready, woke up House, made some breakfast, woke up House again and fed him, then took House to work and woke him up the final time as he placed the handicap placard on his rear-view mirror and parked. Of course, on days when he was an idiot and didn’t get any sleep, he usually hit snooze a few times, skipped his daily morning shower, went through drive-thru (waking up House to find out what he wanted) and then spent the rest of the day drinking coffee.

Perhaps his day would’ve run a bit more smoothly had things turned out that way. Alas, no. One of his patients coded so his pager went off twenty full minutes before his normal wake up time. He woke House up, who insisted he would drive himself to work whenever he felt like it, and Wilson grumbled as he combed his hair and put his pants on backwards, thus meaning he had to take them back off and put them on the proper way, brush his teeth quickly, grab the first tie he saw--yellow, and he knew House would mock him for it--and rush out the door, chugging too-hot coffee, burning his tongue and throat, and blasting the radio to stop himself from falling asleep at the wheel.

The patient who coded had been a middle-aged woman with colon cancer who had shown every sign of recovering smoothly. She’d only lived four hours after she coded, so Wilson had spent a few hours with grieving, confused family members, accusations, and threats of being sued. Ah, the glorious life of being an oncologist. He managed to calm them down, remind them of the chances he’d given them before, and not long after he had his late patient’s single sister sobbing into his arms and House walking by at the wrong time, which meant more accusations, stalking, and awkward lunch conversations.

That, of course, might have been a mishap in an otherwise tiring and boring, normal day, except that the estranged father of an eight-year-old patient decided to drop on by and start an argument with his ex-wife, so Wilson had stepped in as peacemaker, ended the fight, and somehow managed to get yet another woman hugging him (although quite a bit more flirtatiously than the previous one) and House, still stalking him, had seen that, too.

Two meetings had been interrupted by House, and the rest of the day he had to suffer through eight obnoxious pages (all during Wilson’s rounds) and five missed calls (all during Wilson’s clinic duty.) He had taken two calls while he’d been doing paperwork and talked about absolutely nothing important, and realized House was just checking on him as his wives used to when they started getting suspicious, which was ridiculous because Wilson really wasn’t planning on seeing any of his patients’ relatives outside of work, but House was paranoid for some reason.

All of this would have been normal, albeit mind-numbingly exhausting, had it not been that twenty minutes before it was his time to leave, one of his patients seized, which was an unexpected result. Since his name was not Gregory House, his patient didn’t suddenly have a rare but curable disease that he pieced together at the last minute. Instead he found out that the tumour in the teenager’s brain had grown and caused the seizure; his chances of survival had gone to slim into terminal, which meant a meeting with the parents. Which meant more crying and comforting another family; which meant his staff knowing he was there and needing help on reading an x-ray when they should have gone to someone else, but Wilson obliged anyway because they needed help and he was jittery with too much crappy espresso, anyway.