Doing Time

A/N: Gen, post-finale House, M.D. fic. During some down time in their road trip, Wilson asks House about his prison experiences.

For those of you who don't know, here's some background:

Read my short oneshot, "Wreckage", first. It is basically canon from the series finale written from Wilson's POV. In the last episode, House gets stoned on heroin stolen from his patient to kill himself. Wilson has stage 2 cancer and he has five months to live. House was going to take time off and spend that time with Wilson, but a prank he pulled on his boss, Foreman, landed him in hot waters. He flushed season tickets down a toilet, which inevitably backed up and the excess water that seeped broke down the floor, causing major damage to important medical equipment, particularly an expensive MRI. Early in the season, he was serving time in prison, and he was let out on probation. This latest stunt alerted his parole officer and now House has to go back. The sentence for felony vandalism is 6 months (Foreman got it reduced). So...yeah. House is never one to give in, so he tried a bunch of schemes to get himself out of it. Finally, he feels so desperate as to well, commit suicide. In "Wreckage", the body Wilson saw coming out was not House's. In a Sherlockian route, House faked his death, though not intentionally. He just escaped through the back door...and kinda, sorta never told anyone. The only catch is that now he's a dead man, there is no way he can go back to practicing diagnostic medicine. Or be a part of society, really. But honestly, all House wanted was to be there for Wilson in his last months, so there you go.

"Down Time"

"You can go out, you know," Wilson said with a theatrical wave of his arm. He was lying on a dingy hotel bed, in a dingy hotel room. House was sitting up on the other bed, flipping through the hundreds of channels available to see if there was anything remotely worth watching, even if only for a momentary diversion from the elephant in the room - that Wilson was dying, slowly. Of cancer. "This hotel room isn't the most exciting place on earth."

Wilson had good days and bad days. It was a cliché, but it was also Wilson's life right now. There was a slow downwards progression - the motorcycles of the early days have given way to a sensible rental car - but there were still peaks of brightness. Some days they could hit the road and see the sights, or burn through Wilson's lamentably lame bucket list.

Today was not one of those days.

He gave up on the search to find anything worth watching and settled on a 'reality' show that had a fake looking group of people standing around arguing with each other. He bet himself that the blond with the boob job would be the first to start crying and then turned the sound down. He kept half an eye on the screen, the other on Wilson.

"I spent an entire day in solitary watching a spider crawl across my cell. Your cancer is the next Star Trek movie in comparison to that."

Wilson rolled his head to one side on his pillow to look at him. House couldn't help but draw a comparison between the Wilson he'd seen on his first day out of prison and this one. He'd lost weight, and the dark circles under his eyes made him look ill. The stubble added an air of danger to his usual 'boy next door' looks. The main difference though was that this Wilson looked at him with an air of fond tolerance that that other Wilson hadn't. This Wilson was his friend. Until he died.

"What was it like? Prison? Solitary? You never talked about it."

"You've never asked." No-one had. Ever. Even Adams had never mentioned it. He'd made a dumb ass joke about not being jumped five minutes after he came back to the hospital and that was it. Other than a few speculative looks in the cafeteria, and that guy from orthopedics making a crack about House's parole, the whole hospital had just ignored the subject. They behaved as if House had merely been on sabbatical for a year and the anklet was purely decorative.

"I didn't want to know," Wilson said after an uncomfortable minute of silence. He looked away from House. "I was afraid of what you might say."

"But you want to know now? Because you're dying?"

"Yes, House. I don't want to go to my grave without knowing how much crap you went through in prison." House could almost hear Wilson's eyes rolling.

On the television the people were going about their mindless pantomimes for the camera. The blond bimbo was crying as he had predicted. It's a fair bet that she wouldn't last a day in prison.

"Prison was... boring." He said finally. He saw in his mind's eye that first day, walking into the common area and then struggling up the stairs to his cell. All eyes had been on him. He'd been afraid. His disability had marked him out, it was a weakness in a place where he knew he had to be strong to survive. The fear was only a small part of the experience though. Most pervasive of all was the boredom, the monotony and the sheer hopelessness of the place. People locked away from a world that was going on without them. A world that had forgotten them.

"Dad once described military service to me as hours of boredom interspersed with minutes of terror. That was prison. I made my deals to keep myself safe and mostly that was enough. So the rest was just a lot of sitting around and doing nothing." He wasn't going to mention the janitorial work. He had a reputation to maintain.

"Deals?"

"Drugs in exchange for protection. I had six Vicodin a day, and gave half of them to the neo Nazis so they wouldn't kill me, or let anyone else kill me."

There was a lengthy silence.

"You must have been in pain." Wilson knew a bit about pain by this stage. About living from pill to pill. House had seen him counting the pills...and the minutes.

"Pain was better than getting my head bashed in." Except it hadn't always been enough to stop the bashings, but House wasn't going to tell Wilson that. As it had all through his life, his big mouth had gotten him into trouble more than once. "I met a you there, well two yous. One tried to talk me out of doing stupid things - "

"Which you did anyway."

"Of course." Frankie had been the only tolerable part of his prison experience. He'd been moved to a different section of the prison when he came out of solitary and never saw him again.

"And the other me?"

"Bashed a guy's head in so that I wouldn't get killed."

They both watched the silent television screen for a few minutes and then Wilson piped up again.

"Why did you get sent to solitary?"

House looked over at him, surprised. "You don't know? I thought Foreman would have told you."

Wilson shook his head. "No, we didn't really talk about it. It was his decision to try and get you out of prison. It just so happened that my patient was his first opportunity. Any patient with an obscure disease would have done."

Oh, he'd always figured that Wilson had been the one behind busting him out of prison.

"There was a patient - mystery illness, moron of a prison doctor. You can guess the rest. Let's say we had a disagreement on treatment plan. Turns out the prison authorities don't really care about results - and they don't give clinic hours as punishment. The guy lived, and I got eight more months on my sentence and one month in solitary."

The eight months had ended up costing him a great deal - more than he could ever have thought. Without them he would have been finished his parole long before PPTH's lousy plumbing put him in danger of going back to prison. Without them he'd still have his own name, and his own life. But Wilson would still be dying so it wouldn’t matter.

"What was solitary like?" Wilson's energy was fading, his voice was soft and strained. It hurt him just to talk, some days.

"Like a five star hotel room. If I could have called up a hooker it would have been my dreams come true."

"House. I want to know." There was a sincerity in Wilson's voice that House turned away from. He didn't want to talk about this. He didn't even want to think about this.

The hotel room they were in was about three times the size of his solitary cell - where he'd spent at least twenty three hours a day for thirty days. And the hotel room door wasn't locked from the outside, and there wasn't a steel toilet in the corner, cement walls, and a total absence of people. When he left it, he wouldn't be shackled. The hotel room was nothing like solitary.

He didn't like being in small spaces anymore. He didn't like locked doors. And he sure as hell wasn't telling Wilson about that, or the nightmares that had plagued him for months after his release. But Wilson was waiting for an answer.

"You know those circles of hell?"

"Yeah," Wilson breathed out softly and House realised that yes, he did know about those. He looked at Wilson again and saw the lines of pain on his face, the sickness written on his skin, and the sadness in his eyes. He saw the next few weeks stretched out before them. He saw the inevitable end.

"This is worse," he said.

Prison was easy.

Thanks for reading!