Title: The Art of Losing
Fandom: House
Pairing: Gen (it was intended to be House/Wilson, but they never got around to the sexing, so take it whichever way you prefer (dirty!))
Rating: D (alas!)
Notes: The title comes from the (overexposed but still good) poem by Elizabeth Bishop, which is the Wilsoniest poem that ever Wilsoned.  Oh, Jimmy.

The Art of Losing

James remembers the precise moment when they left. Each of them. All of them. There’s constancies about leaving, he’s discovered; things like the click of suitcase latches and the honk of the taxi; the eyes darting like wild things and the way the jaw sets against his begging. At this point he’s tried every trick in the book and some he scrawled in the blank pages at the end of the book; cajoling, yelling, litigation, counseling, grabbing his brother’s cold and clammy hand and hissing silly words about blood and family. Nothing ever works. Nothing stops the leaving.

Work is no better. In the part of his brain that used to store batting scores and the intricacies of Green Lantern’s adventures he now keeps an ever-expanding list of his failures and their kidnappers. Eileen Samson, ovarian. George Reingold, lung. Steven Peters, melanoma. He remembers who sat with them, what they wore, whether they screamed and raged and railed or simply folded like flowers broken at the stem. Chrissy Bartholemew, breast. Her husband wore a rumpled blue suit and wept quietly. Her sister wore a yellow blouse and jeans and kicked the vending machine until the orderlies stopped her. They had been very close.

Sometimes he thinks to put in for a transfer, but this is what he signed up for.

And at home they’re always transferring without asking. He signs up and signs up but they keep taking his name off the list.

And now Gregg is slipping away from him, bit by bit, biting insult by insouciant cane twirl. He can see it in every comment intended to cut just a little bit too close to home, in every avoidance tactic the man runs through, in the flick of his wrist and the twitch of his Adam’s apple as he swallows another Vicodin dry. The drugs are stealing his friend from him, and Wilson’s not quite sure what he’ll do when Gregg goes and he’s really alone.

So he lies, and he gets better at it, until he knows right away that Gregg believes him and isn’t just humoring him, and somehow the more convincing he gets the worse he feels. He conspires to put the person he cares for most in the world through agony, and he neglects his department to watch the fallout. He cajoles and he yells and he’s this close to litigating, and still House is sliding between his fingers.

When James was 13 he had his heart broken for the first time, by a pretty freckled thing with yellow hair and lips stained pink from Italian ices. Johnny laughed at his youthful affaire d’amour, but he took pity on his youngest brother and scooped up a handful of sand.

“When I hold it like this, I can keep most of it,” he said, and James can still remember the way he squinted against the sun at his big brother, his idol, his god. “But when I close my fist too tight…” and the sand spilled in rivulets back to the beach. “You understand?”

James rolled his eyes. “God, you’re cheesy,” he said with a grin, and Johnny pushed him, and then Charlie asked them if they wanted to play volleyball before they were too geriatric to spike, and the lessons in loving were forgotten for the day. Maybe they were forgotten forever, because although it was 22 years ago and James can still remember every detail of what they all said and did, he’s never really learned the simple Hallmark lesson his brother tried to teach him, and it’s nine years too late to ask for it again.

So he lounges in Gregg’s office and fires back one-liners, or lurks in exam rooms with him watching General Hospital, or skulks around the conference room during rapid-fire whiteboard sessions. And he wears new ties to work and delivers prudent advice and buys the occasional birthday cane, even as he imagines what it’ll be like when Gregg finally does leave him. He’s got being left down pat by now, so it makes sense that it’s this last that’ll be the worst.

Really, though, there’s no point in anticipating. He remembers them all, but he never sees them coming; not until the taxi honks and the suitcase clicks and they’re walking out the door. Gregg’ll be a little slower, with the cane and all, but he’ll make it eventually.

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