A/N: I know, I know - it's not Amends or SA, which has a lot to do with the fact that I shouldn't even be writing fic at the moment. However, ages ago I was sent a prompt that I never fulfilled and now the muse won't shut up. So here's an entirely random piece of old school House/Wilson to tide everyone over until I can go back to the epics.

P.S: This one is in six parts, already written up and finished, so no messing around waiting for updates! ;)

PLEASE READ THE WARNINGS!

Rock Songs and Razorblades

Author: Storm

Rating/Warnings: Hard R; Possible self-harm trigger.

Summary: In which a trip is taken, stationery is stolen, House has a hunch and Wilson learns not to lie to a fellow addict.

Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Greg House. Including his creators. And theirs.

The views expressed by the characters do not necessarily reflect the view of the author.

Part One:

"That was three thousand dollars and three days of my life that I'll never get back."

House reclaimed his cane from the stewardess and heaved himself out of the rickety wheelchair that had transported him from the first class aeroplane cabin to the cattle-pen enclosure of the air-conditioned terminal. Wilson followed him out of the tunnel, rubbing the cricks from the back of his neck.

"Not to mention thirty-six Vicodin that should have lasted a full week," he pointed out reproachfully.

House snorted, his cane clumping vigorously on the streaked, well-worn linoleum as they plodded through the immigration queues. Separated by stony-faced attendants at passport control, he continued at baggage collection:

"In the universal hierarchy of pain and suffering, that conference ranked so high that thirty-six bottles wouldn't have been enough to make it bearable – hey, watch it! Cripple here. If you take my cane out with the baggage trolley, I get to ride in it."

"Sorry." Wilson dragged it back on course, peering awkwardly over the erratically heaped suitcases House had tossed onto it from the grey conveyor belt chuntering endlessly around behind them. "I think the front wheel started its life as a kid's bicycle stabiliser."

"If you didn't pack as though you were moving to L.A.—"

Wilson hauled the trolley to one side of the walkway and braked. He walked around to the side of it and began to reload the bags so that the strap from his carry-on wasn't dragging under the wheels.

"One of these is the one I put together for you, because spending seventy-two hours without a change of clothes or a toothbrush is a cheap way to get out of going to panels."

House shrugged, glancing down at the wrinkled t-shirt he'd slept in on the last night; revenge for Wilson having housekeeping iron all three of his shirts and press both pairs of jeans every morning of the conference.

"Gets me out of spending all night with you too."

"This again?" Wilson kicked the brake off and trudged on towards the exit doors. "You want a double room showing up on our expenses claims? Planning to write the next Noel Coward play out of Cuddy's reaction? Because you'll need someone else to play your co-star."

"Here we go again."

"House." Wilson shunted the cart over into the trolley collection point. He leaned heavily on the handles and scrubbed a hand over his face, holding up the queues of departing travellers. "That wasn't—I didn't mean—There's no one else—"

House scoffed, darkly. "This time."

"Grace is dead," Wilson said shortly. "Her file was requested in Rome two weeks ago. I got the notification yesterday."

House stopped staring aloofly into the distance and glanced down, fidgeting with his cane handle. Wilson's shoulders slumped with a sourceless ever-present sense of defeat.

"I didn't realise that you—we've never said that we were exclusive—I…" He broke off; the brittle set of House's jaw making him question whether it had ever needed to be said. Stuttering and, as always, shunted onto his back foot by House's unpredictable insecurities, he finished: "I'm not sleeping in a different room to have kinky phone sex on hotline, you know. I-I stayed up all night with you yesterday playing Scopa d'Assi when I've never been to Italy, you change the rules every time you think you're losing, and my Latin is rusty!"

House eyed him, level and appraising, then shunted the trolley back into the stack and stole the quarter out of its coin slot.

"Coming over tonight?" he said abruptly, hefting his bags.

"Any more Viagra and your skin will turn blue. Hoh!" Wilson stepped through the exit doors and sucked in a lungful of searing air. He stopped for a moment, shading his eyes from the dazzling glare and the sudden illusion that House's skin had turned not blue but yellow.

"Blue suits me better than red suits you," House countered, clomping past him toward the parking lot, its black tarmac sweating a mirage between the sprawling terminals. "All those hot stewardesses and you didn't have pre-existing membership to the mile-high club?"

Wilson swung the cases into the back of the Volvo and slammed the trunk closed. He dusted his hands off on his suit, leaving smoky prints on the thighs of his cream pants.

"My idea of good sex usually excludes the need for throat lozenges and air sickness bags afterwards."

House snickered. "You could've timed it better with the turbulence."

"If I'd timed it worse, you'd have the opening skit for your new comedy," Wilson retorted flatly. "It may be your fantasy to turn up at PPTH E.R. with your tackle on ice in a champagne cooler, but it's not mine to come in with you whilst having my dislocated jaw held in place with my tie."

House put his cane on the roof and stretched the kinks out of his long back, showing dark oval stains under the arms of his orange t-shirt.

"Wheeled in delirious with heatstroke is much classier."

Wilson wiped the sweat off his brow with his jacket sleeve and opened the passenger door. He turned the engine over and rolled all the windows down, leaving the door hanging open. Stifling air was walled in and around the vehicle. If not for the silver sunshade propped inside the windshield, it was hot enough that in place of leather seats he'd have expected warped metal and cinders.

"We should go."

"You could take off your tie. There're no donors to schmooze here."

"If I can gag you with it, I will." Wilson reached for his top button, slackening the noose at his neck.

"You do that, I can't try opening your zipper at seventy miles an hour on the freeway."

He left the tie in place. "You know, the main entrance at PPTH could do with redecorating, but I don't think it looks any better coming in via the morgue."

"Wuss," House yawned, opening the door and easing into his seat.

Wilson lingered, looking back toward the terminal. He was no longer sure if he were glad he was leaving behind the networking frenzy of false smiles and cheap wine in cheaper glasses or if he wished he were headed toward it, where catheters and central lines were only words and he could get drunk enough to tell House he loved him, safe to pretend he couldn't remember in the morning.

He sighed and got into the car.

Passing along the stretch from exits twelve to fourteen, House broke off from listing twenty symptoms that could have been anything from rhinovirus to Lupus in a half-hearted game of Guess the Diagnosis. He pulled a wrinkled, revolted face.

"I smell with my abused nose something beginning with F."

"IV antibiotics," Wilson said distractedly. "Levophed. Dopamine."

House looked at him strangely. "I said 'F' for Foley bags, but close enough. What's got pre-mortem embalmment on your mind?"

Wilson licked suddenly dry lips and shook his head, shrugging at the weight that had settled on his shoulders as soon as he picked up the Turnpike southbound. "Smells like the oncology wards sometimes. I've got three new patients starting chemo tomorrow."

"I thought you'd maxed out your case load?"

"Not after last week." Wilson shifted his grip on the steering wheel, as the rainbow array of cars in the flanking lanes on the highway became beds and gurneys, their white curtains pulled closed. He blinked hard, passing one hand across his face. "I sent ten families home to plan flower arrangements and choose hymns. I feel like my staff should be wearing black armbands and painting red crosses on the doors."

"The heat?" House asked quietly.

"Probably not. Probably the natural progression of the disease. But it always seems that way. A heat wave this intense has the same effect as a bad winter freeze. People up and die of exhaustion."

House nodded and proved himself a liar as he said: "Three of them were children."

"Four. Andie. Two hours before we left." Wilson steeled himself with a breath of artificially cooled air and raised the façade of a smile. "She beat my prognosis by six months."

"Tough kid," House murmured, in the tone Wilson would normally have said brave.

Long fingers wrapped around his thigh, smoothing up and down his inseam. The rest of the journey passed in silence.

"Come in tonight."

Wilson pulled over and killed the engine. In the ticking hush, he looked down at the crinkled place on his trousers where House's hand had rested and shook his head.

"Not tonight. Between the last few weeks at the hospital and then the conference, it's been so long since I saw my bed that I'm going to start carrying a picture of it in my wallet."

House's nostrils flared, a soundless scoff of resentment and resignation. "Once you've seen one hotel room, you've seen them all."

Wilson stared through the dust-streaked window at the shapes of guitars and piano visible in the twilight gathered inside 221B, the lamps waiting to be switched on and the red glimmer of the standby light on the waiting plasma screen. He closed his eyes and wrapped his left hand around his right wrist. He plucked lightly at the thin rubber bands he wore like bracelets, so tight they cut into the tender skin, and shook his head.

"I'll see you tomorrow, House."

Keeping company with a bottle of scotch and a bunch of idiots with power tools on the plasma screen, House flexed five fingers inside a single elastic band and stared at a copy of Plato's Republic on the bookcase. Halfway down the second glass, the band slipped and snapped down around his wrist. A scarlet circle burned into his pale skin. He snatched it off and catapulted it angrily across the room.

TBC…