Convergence

Chapter One

House didn't want to admit it, but he deeply missed living with Wilson. He missed being awoken by Wilson's early-bird habits; he missed the jibes he could get in and the pranks he could pull against the oncologist. But most of all he simply missed Wilson being there; he was the one distraction, other than Cuddy, that could get him to forget about the ever-present, ever-killing throbbing of his leg. And now the Cuddy distraction had passed.

He wanted Wilson to offer. He wanted to turn Wilson down, to make it appear that he was doing his best friend a favor by moving in as opposed to the other way around. But he was a few steps away from actually, actively begging. It was utterly humiliating.

House was thinking this over as he stared at his ceiling, willing him to go back to sleep for the half-hour he had before he needed to leave and come into work.

Before he needed to leave and face Cuddy again, which was getting harder and harder each day.

He had been happy, or at least as close to it as he figured he was actually genetically wired to be. Happier than he could ever remember being, even before the infarction.

Sleep failed him. He stood up instead, took a slow and hot shower, and then returned, dressing and making his way out the door and to his car. He climbed inside and drove in silence, wishing he could have figured out anywhere else to be other than the hospital today.

It didn't help that the first thing he encountered upon walking in was a memo from Cuddy telling him he needed to go directly to the clinic.

"Exam Room Two," was the specific request. "Stay there."

Upon reluctantly entering Exam Room Two, House discovered that his first patient of the day was a blue-eyed young man in his early twenties with a shaved head.

"And what seems to be your problem today?" House inquired.

"Yo, I got a pain in my neck," the young man replied, leaning it to the left and wincing, as if to demonstrate.

"Okay," House replied. "What were you doing when you hurt your neck?" The man's bright blue eyes seemed to glaze over at the question. "It's not that difficult a question, you know," House continued. "What… were you…" The man cut him off angrily.

"I was getting beat up, okay? By a fucked up old guy with a messed-up ear." House raised an eyebrow, as if expecting the young man to add "yo" to that sentence as well. Regardless of anything else, House was how intrigued. Admittedly, a "pain in the neck" was not particularly interesting diagnostically, but this did sound like the beginning of an interesting or amusing story.

"By an old guy with a messed up ear?" House prompted as he reached out to take a look at the offending neck muscle. "Tell me more." He pressed gently on a large red bump that had formed on one side of the neck, and the man let out a grunt of pain.

"He's just a big asshole," he replied, "Made me leave town."

"An old asshole, apparently," House pointed out, and the patient rolled his eyes.

"Scary old asshole."

"I see," House said evenly, picking up a chart. "Have you had any other symptoms recently that may be important for me to know about?" The man looked as if he was thinking, considering, and then ruling out telling House something. The diagnostician sighed and reached down, rubbing at his thigh in frustration. "Come on." He sighed, and then tried a different approach; he lowered his voice slightly and spoke conspiratorially. "You know that under the law, anything you tell me is doctor-patient privilege. I can't reveal anything you tell me to anyone else." The man's eyes widened slightly, and he took a deep breath.

"You're serious?" he asked. House nodded.

"As a heart attack. Which you could have… if there's something more you're not telling me about." There was a pause, and House suspected that the truth wasn't going to come from those lips after all. But a second turned to another, and House simply let the silence rest. The longer he spent on this clinic patient, who might actually be interesting, the less time he had to waste on the others, who were much more likely to be completely uninteresting.

"I was a meth manufacturer." House blinked. When he considered it, he wasn't all that surprising. It was obvious that the young man used meth – a simple look at his fingertips and his lips confirmed that hypothesis. But a manufacturer? It had been quite some time since House had encountered one of them.

It was interested. And where did this old man with a messed up ear factor in?

House walked over and locked the door.

"I see." He narrowed his eyes.

"Me and this older guy – not the one who beat me up – we… cooked together. Real nice partnership. But then… shit just got crazy. We…were on top of it for a while, man. Then… I got greedy, met a girl, fell in love, got into really heavy shit…" He stared down at the floor, swinging his legs against the examination table.

"She died." He still didn't look at House, and House still didn't interrupt. "We started working for this guy… a big manufacturer, like crazy. Huge production." The man swallowed and looked back up at House, locking eyes. "You promise this is all confidential?"

"I promise."

"He made me kill a guy."

The words were barely audible, and House leaned closer to make sure he had truly heard them.

It was like something out of a movie; a horror show that House had stepped into on the worst of days and with the most lackluster of intentions. But now he was in. He'd treat this man, he'd… help him, but was there a cure for this? The illness that ailed this man was unlikely to be found in House's physical diagnoses.

Suddenly, House needed a name. He didn't know why, just desperately needed to put a name to a face.

He didn't hear himself ask, nor did he know what made the man answer, House knew, honestly.

"Jesse Pinkman."