fic: The Cuckoo -- Chapter 26

[readingrat]

 

Part V
Chapter 26: Foetal Histories

Pete had been trying to reach Lucas Douglas ever since Wilson had turned up with the ankle biter the evening before, but to no avail. The man was either ignoring him or on a stake-out. When Douglas finally called back, it was at an inopportune moment: he was in the car with Lisa on their way to that shindig of hers.

"Yeah?" he said after checking the caller ID.

"You called," Douglas said.

He gave Lisa a quick glance but she was concentrating on the evening rush hour traffic. "Are you still working on the, uh, patient I referred to you?" he asked.

"Not alone?" Douglas surmised.

"No. What about her?"

"You told me I could let up a bit once the baby was born."

Pete wanted to strangle the man. "Yeah, but I didn't say that you should stop treatment altogether."

"I didn't stop observing Amy. I just ... shifted priorities," Douglas said. "Besides, that has kinda sorted itself out. They're moving to California, so I can't observe them for you any longer."

Pete chewed on that for a few seconds. "When?"

"Sometime next month. Amy's fiancé - probably husband by then - is aiming for a career in Hollywood. He got cast in a commercial; he believes that'll be his big break. But if you want, I can organise someone for you there to continue the observation. I have contacts to private dicks on the West Coast."

Pete wasn't interested in having Amy observed now that the hostage was in Wilson's hands. "No, don't bother." More to the point was the question of whether Amy really intended to leave the munchkin with Wilson or whether she had some other agenda. "What about the tumour?"

"The ... ? Oh, you mean the kid. Interesting that you should ask."

Interesting? That wasn't the word he'd have used for the biggest intel fuck-up within his admittedly short memory. Wilson had been saddled with Amy's kid and he, Pete, hadn't gotten any sort of forewarning despite investing heavily in a private sleuth.

Douglas continued casually, "You might want to suggest to Wilson that he should do a paternity test."

Pete forced himself to breathe calmly. "Might I?"

"Yeah," Douglas said. "See, I tailed Amy when I heard that she was quitting her job to move to LA. She went to a lab that specialises in paternity tests."

"Fascinating," Pete said, his eyes darting to and fro as he sorted this piece of information into the jigsaw of the past two days. "And what conclusion do you draw from that?"

Douglas, oblivious to his unease, continued with unimpaired cheer, "That Wilson isn't the kid's dad."

Pete's throat tightened. If Douglas of all people had figured out the truth, then the shit was about to hit the fan. "Explain," he rasped.

"See, Baby Mommy runs a paternity test on the kid. That wouldn't be surprising if Wilson doubted his paternity, but we both know that he doesn't. He wants to believe the kid is his. Which means that Amy doubts his paternity, and that's interesting. So I dug around, and guess what? This guy, the one Amy is engaged to now, he's been dating her on and off since high school. Childhood sweetheart and all that. Cute, isn't it?

"But you know how it is with these on-and-off thingies: there's angry sex, there's break-up sex, there's make-up sex, there's in-between sex, there's you-name-it sex - I figure the fitness trainer is the real dad, but Amy has no intention of telling Wilson that. She wants the best of both worlds: Wilson's child support and high school sweetheart as baby daddy. Sweetheart, for his part, wants to be sure he's the dad rather than raise Wilson's kid, especially now that they're moving out of Wilson's babysitting radius, so he wants a paternity test to make sure."

And the test result had been negative, which explained why Amy had opted to give Joel to Wilson: the guy she was screwing didn't want to raise another man's child. Fair enough; there was no reason why a child shouldn't be raised by his birth father.

There was another explanation: Amy had taken a look at her son's eyes, had thought long and hard about her insemination, and had come to the same conclusion as Lisa, namely that Wilson wasn't the father. So, she'd gotten hold of Wilson's DNA (say, by spiriting away his coffee cup after one of their meet-ups) and had run a paternity test with that. When she'd gotten the result (negative), she'd set to thinking, and the net result of her rumination was that she was in deep shit. She'd been conned by someone professing to be Wilson's friend, a creepy oddball whom she hardly knew, whose paternity she'd have to prove via a court order, and who'd probably only pay child support after subjecting her to a protracted legal battle. If he was the father. For all Amy knew, the sperm sample could have come from someone else altogether. Caught between a boyfriend who didn't want to raise someone else's child and the fear that Wilson would stop paying child support once he discovered the truth, she'd decided to hand her son over to Wilson. And now she was running as far away as she could, to make sure that Wilson couldn't file a customer complaint and return the product when he realised that it was defective.

Which explanation was the correct one? He'd opt for the first one if Amy had previously given any indication that she wanted Wilson to raise the child. After all, it wasn't exactly news that her boyfriend wasn't the progenitor. He'd opt for the second one if saddling Wilson with a child that wasn't his made any sort of sense. Then again, nothing Amy had done so far made sense: she'd slept with Wilson, allowed Pete to get her pregnant with a cup of semen, and had kept the foetus. Placing another man's child in Wilson's custody could be seen as an item worthy to be added to the list of crappy choices she'd made so far.

"Are you still there?" Douglas asked.

"Yeah," Pete said absently, going through the combinations and permutations of both possibilities. Did it make a difference which of the two it was? Not as long as Amy kept her mouth shut, and why shouldn't she? She stood to lose if Wilson figured out that the sprog wasn't his.

"I guess Wilson can discontinue child support payments," Douglas mused at the other end of the line. "It's not like Amy will sue him, given the circumstances."

No, of course not. She couldn't, now that she didn't have physical custody.

"You owe me two grand," Douglas said.

Two grand? He was supposed to pay the gumshoe two thousand dollars for missing the fact that Amy was playing Hansel and Gretel with her baby? Yet what choice did he have? The last thing he needed was Douglas dropping by and unfolding his theory about Joel's parentage to Wilson. If Wilson did a paternity test, ... . The mind boggled.

"Fuck!" Pete said.

"Payable in cash. I don't take credit cards."

"Fuckity fucking fuck." He felt marginally better after getting that off his mind. Lisa glanced at him before returning her attention to navigating the car across two congested lanes. "Yeah, okay, I'll pay."

"When?"

Pete disconnected the call and pocketed his phone.

"What was that about?" Lisa asked, drawing up in the parking lot of the hotel that hosted the fundraiser.

There was no sense in lying to her; it was possible that he'd need her help to keep Douglas away from Wilson once the PI cottoned onto what had really happened and scented the blackmail potential behind it. "It was Douglas."

"Who, Lucas?"

"Yeah. I've been paying him to observe Amy. She's moving to California."

Lisa slowed to a crawl. "I don't get it. Why would she do that? Why would she put a whole continent between herself and her child? Or do you think she'll come and get Joel before she leaves?"

"No," Pete said heavily. "It seems that moving away and dumping the crotchfruit are connected somehow in the space-time continuum."

The car behind them honked. Lisa raised an apologetic hand and drew into the nearest parking space. "What mother does that?" she asked. "What mother abandons her child? It's against nature."

He plucked his lower lip. "No, it isn't."

"You always say that we're hard-wired to nurture our offspring."

"Nope, we're hard-wired to ensure their survival. There's a difference."

"And abandoning an infant helps - how?" she asked sarcastically.

"You're in Family Healthcare; you must have heard of the Cinderella effect." What a stupid term! Children being abused by their step-parents weren't a fairy tale about to happen; they faced years of suffering, potentially ending in death.

Lisa turned to him with horror printed all over her features. "You think that Amy's fiancé was abusing the baby?"

"After he's been screaming continuously for six hours even Wilson wants to chuck him out of the window, and Wilson believes he's the father. Amy's fuck-buddy doesn't. The kid is colicky, Amy has the baby blues, she's living with a guy who isn't the kid's biological father," he said, listing the facts. "No matter whether the guy has been abusive so far or not, the kid is safer with Wilson than with Amy. And subconsciously Amy is probably aware of that."

"And you have nothing whatsoever to do with this?" Lisa asked skeptically. "You didn't pay Lucas to threaten her or anything?"

"No," he said, rubbing his forehead tiredly. "No, but I should have. I should have realised that the situation was a disaster waiting to happen. The kid could have died."

Lisa clasped his wrist. "But nothing happened. Everything is fine; your child is safe."

He stared out into the darkness for a long moment. "Yes," he finally said. "But no thanks to me."

---

Plan A was to hit the bar; if he got the rats that were running around in the labyrinth of his mind plastered, maybe they'd slow down. Unfortunately, the people who had organised the gala dinner were no fools: the bar wasn't scheduled to open till after dinner. Plan B, behaving in such a manner that Lisa would be happy if he left early, was nipped in the bud straight after he told the cloakroom attendant that her dress displayed her silicon pads to great advantage.

"There's only one thing standing between Wilson and the truth about Joel, and that's me," Lisa told him curtly. She paused to let the threat sink in. "Do not insult anyone, do not get wasted, do not sneak out the door, back or front. Behave, and if you can't control your tongue, then keep your teeth clamped on it!"

His only comfort was that Lisa was as miserable as he was and a lot tenser. Her smile was fixed as she greeted the guy who had superseded her, a smooth, poised thirty-something-year-old who was clearly going places, and although most of her colleagues were friendly enough, a few made no secret of their schadenfreude. One of them, a cardiologist whose name he couldn't remember although he'd seen him around the hospital, even came over to them grinning smugly and said, "How the mighty have fallen, Lisa!"

"Nice to see you too, Ed," Lisa said, never letting her smile slip. "Did you know that Ryan is thinking of moving cardiac rehab from Cardiology to General Medicine? No? You should talk to him about it."

Ed's grin faded. "You can't stop scheming, can you?"

"I'll be generous and give you some good advice: instead of making erroneous assumptions about what I'm up to, you should try to figure out why your new dean isn't interested in keeping you happy. I'll give you a hint: it's because you've pissed off so many of your colleagues that no one will take your side should you decide to challenge him. Have a pleasant evening, Ed."

"Need any help keeping him in check?" Pete asked when Ed had stalked off in a huff. "Like, keying his car or taking compromising pictures of him with the pharma technician or ..."

"What, Ed is doing Caroline?"

"Who's talking about Caroline? I mean the other one, the nerdy looking one who is always sucking on his pencil. And by 'pencil' I mean ..."

"Thanks, but no. I've got him under control. Let's sit down; my feet are killing me already."

The seating arrangement wasn't designed to improve his mood. Although Chase and his Flavour of the Day (a long-legged blonde with too much make-up) were seated at their table, they were on Lisa's other side, so that he could neither gossip with Chase nor leer down the babe's cleavage as comfortably as he desired. To add misery to discomfort, the head of oncology, Pearson, and his wife were seated next to him. Undoubtedly Lisa had engineered the seating order with Wilson in mind; Wilson, who was due to ease back into work life over the next weeks, would have been keen to exchange notes with Pearson. Pete, however, could have done very well without Pearson's company, and if Pearson's dour expression was anything to go by, the feeling was mutual.

Throughout the dinner, Lisa and Chase carried on an animated discussion in subdued tones, while Chase's floozie, bored and increasingly miffed, looked around for other distractions. She looked over at Pete from under her eyelashes as she licked chocolate mousse off her spoon, giving her tongue a seductive twist.

Oh, okay! He wouldn't mind hitting that. There was little chance of more than a grope in a dark corner, not when he was here as Lisa's protective shield, but getting Chase's date away from the others, overcoming her token resistance and testing how far she'd be prepared to go might provide some entertainment value. It would certainly be more amusing than Chase and Lisa's haggling over details of payment, budget and staffing matters.

"I'm not sure whether it's worth while giving up my present post in order to become a 'team leader'. It doesn't sound half as attractive as 'department head'," Chase was saying.

"Maybe," Lisa countered. "But you'll have budgetary independence: you can use the funds that I'll allocate to Diagnostics in any way you please. You won't get that anywhere else."

"Foreman ... ," Chase began.

"The last thing Foreman will do," Lisa interrupted him, "is allow you to challenge his leadership. No matter what he offers you financially, he won't give you as long a leash as I will, and you know it. Besides," she added shrewdly, "you're in no position to bargain. You've been away from diagnostics for five years."

"The bar has opened. I'm getting a drink," the blonde said, pushing her chair back abruptly. "You want anything, Rob?"

"Get me a bourbon," Chase said, adding a 'please' as an afterthought.

His date left, swaying her hips and casting a glance over her shoulder at Pete. He waited a token thirty seconds before saying, "I'll go get something too." He didn't ask Lisa what she wanted.

Lisa looked up when his chair scraped back, narrowed her eyes at the blonde's sashaying ass and nodded slowly. She turned to Chase, "I'll introduce you to a few people from General Medicine." She rose, and under cover of straightening Pete's collar and tie she hissed, "Don't poach on Chase's territory!"

"He has so much real estate that he can't keep an eye on every piece of property," he said. When she raised her eyebrows warningly he added, "Don't worry, I won't ruin your little deal."

He drifted over to the bar where Chase's date was seated already, one long leg crossed over the other. She smiled invitingly at him, so he moved to her side.

"Hey," she said, patting the stool next to hers. "Greg, isn't it?"

"Yeah," he said. He couldn't remember her name; Chase probably couldn't remember it either. And in a day or two neither of them would remember her.

"I had no idea this gala thing would be so boring. Rob should have warned me that he was only coming to talk shop with your girlfriend."

"She isn't my girlfriend," he said.

"No?" She didn't hide her disbelief.

"No, otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here with you." Hell, he sounded like a preacher.

His companion wasn't put out in the least. "I like a man with morals," she said, placing a hand on his arm. He stared at the hand.

"Why? Because the contrast emphasises your personality?"

She laughed as though he'd made a joke. Either she didn't get that she was being insulted or she didn't care. "You're funny! I like you. I was beginning to think this evening would be a complete waste of time." She tossed her head. "Your not-girlfriend's a bitch, isn't she, to lead Rob on like that! He said she promised to make him head of a department, but she's backing out now."

He didn't like that any better than the assumption that he was the kind of person to cheat on his girlfriend; Lisa was manipulative and a royal pain in the ass at times, but that didn't give a total stranger the right to call her a bitch. He already regretted following Chase's bored bimbo to the bar.

The bartender put two drinks in front of the blonde before turning to Pete with an enquiring look. "A beer," he said, feeling a lot more charitable towards Lisa than when he'd arrived at the gala dinner. His present frustration wasn't on her; he could blame Amy, Douglas, Wilson, or even himself for the mess they were in, but none of this was even remotely Lisa's fault.

"He's an idiot if he was banking on cashing in on a promise that she could only have kept if she had become dean at this hospital," he said.

"I don't know about that," the blonde said with a toss of her head, "but he told me that he handed in his resignation last week, so if he doesn't get this job, he's sunk. That's why we're here; we were invited to this really cool party in Princeton, but Rob insisted he had to come here tonight." She pouted. "But there's no reason why you and I shouldn't have some fun since we're both stuck here."

"You'd better take Chase his drink before he comes looking for it," he said, pointing at the whisky tumbler with its melting ice cubes.

"Only if you'll wait for me," she purred, getting up and bending over to pick up the drinks, affording him a good view of her cleavage.

"Sure," he lied. He watched her make her way towards Chase, who was standing next to Lisa talking to a group of doctors at the other end of the room.

Something was off in what she'd just told him: Lisa wasn't above making promises that she had no intention of keeping, but what idiot handed in his resignation without having a new job well within grasp? Although Chase hadn't known initially that Lisa was only interim dean at Philadelphia Central, he must have realised his mistake once he'd arrived at the hospital to conduct the transplant. He should have figured out that farming out her organs wasn't improving Lisa's chances of changing her deanship status from 'temporary' to 'permanent'. If he was so keen on the job, then he should also know that a West Coast upstart had supplanted Lisa a month ago. So why the hell had he handed in his resignation?

"Your beer," the bartender said. He picked it up wordlessly and got up, moving around the edge of the room in order to escape being noticed by Chase's girl when she returned.

Maybe Chase had an offer from somewhere else, a good one. But then, why still court Lisa when she obviously couldn't deliver the goods? He had Chase down as a gambler, but this wasn't a good gamble. A good gamble was one where you knew the odds but saw a possibility of beating them, not one where you believed they were better than they actually were. This was a reckless gamble, one that he couldn't win. Unless, of course, he had nothing to lose ...

His progress along the back wall was stopped by an obstacle: a photographer with a state-of-the-art camera on a tripod was busy taking pictures of various groups in the room. He had little compunction about ruining the pictures she was taking by walking in front of her lens, but her camera attracted his attention. It was a Hasselblad H5D; he'd heard of them, but he'd never seen one in action. He edged closer to the wall behind her in order to observe the camera in action, but when you were well over six feet tall unobtrusiveness was an elusive quality.

The photographer must have spotted him out of the corner of her eye, for without taking her eyes off her subject she said, "Just a moment, and then you can pass."

A few seconds later she straightened and said, "Thanks for waiting."

"Can I ... take a look?" he asked, pointing at the camera.

She stared at him, her smile fading. When she said nothing at all, he said, "I take it that's a no." Possessive and paranoid about her camera, he supposed. Not surprising: this Hasselblad cost more than a car.

She snapped out of her daze. "No, no!" she protested. "You can look. It was just that ... I was surprised to see you, Dr House. You're the last person I expected to see here."

She stepped back and gestured for him to come closer to the camera, but by now he had frozen instead. The camera was too expensive for the woman to be a doctor at Philadelphia Central indulging in her hobby for the evening. (Besides, people at the hospital mostly knew him simply as Wilson's friend 'Pete'.) She was surprised at seeing him here because she believed he had no business to be where Lisa was, which meant that she came from his pre-amnesia past.

So far, he had never been recognised by anyone, either at Philadelphia Central or anywhere else (other than PPTH), and when Lisa or Wilson introduced him as Greg House, no one seemed to associate anything with his name, positive or negative. He supposed that the scandal surrounding the car accident had been a regional affair while his fame as a diagnostician was restricted to a small circle of experts. Last year in Baltimore another speaker had claimed to know him, but even that person had admitted that he wouldn't have recognised him if he hadn't seen his name on the conference programme. This was the first time since the anniversary gala at PPTH that someone from his past had recognised his face, and he had no idea who this person was.

"I haven't a clue who you are," he stated baldly. There was no point in pretending otherwise.

She didn't take umbrage. "That's okay; you must have a lot of patients. Emma Sloan," she said, introducing herself. "You saved my son's life ten years ago."

"That's nice," he said, hoping he'd be able to escape before she got sentimental and started gushing out her gratitude.

"Maternal mirror syndrome," she added.

Now that was interesting. "And both of you survived?"

Her eyes narrowed. "You really don't remember, do you?"

"Nope." He examined the camera, not because he was interested any longer, but to pre-empt further conversation about his person and his past. "May I?" he asked and started taking pictures before she could object.

The camera was definitely a great toy. He took a few pictures of Lisa talking to her new boss before pausing to examine the result. Not bad, he decided, but his pictures weren't anywhere near as good as the ones the photographer had taken earlier. He scrolled through her pictures, trying to figure out what it was - lighting, camera angle or sheer luck - that gave her pictures both depth and immediacy, making his appear flat in comparison. He caught the visual reality of his subjects; she caught the driving force behind the people she photographed. There was Ed the cardiologist among a crowd of doctors, separated from the people around him as though surrounded by an invisible wall; Pearson and his wife, sitting next to each other, together and yet apart, the silence between them tangible; the new dean, Ryan Andrews, talking to a benefactor, brashly confident and cocky.

Emma Sloan was definitely too good to waste her talent on the Philadelphia Central Hospital Annual Gala Dinner. "What's someone like you doing at a low-brow event like this?" he asked.

She didn't deny that she was too good for the do. "Doing Lisa a favour. She wanted the pictures for the hospital's new website and for their annual report."

"More like doing her new boss a favour, I'd say."

"She asked before she knew that she wouldn't be getting the job, and I'm always happy to oblige her."

"She could have un-asked you when she got usurped," he pointed out.

"That would have been petty, wouldn't it? It was all fixed up already, the board was informed that they'd have a star photographer, etc., etc." She peered past his arm at the picture he was examining. "Ah, Dr Chase. Lisa said she'd invited him. I must go and say hello to him." She paused, then added, "Too bad about him."

He looked up from the camera in surprise. She smiled diffidently. "He doesn't look happy," she said. "He was such a ... a hopeful youngster. And so in love with that other young doctor. Dr Cameron, her name was. What happened?"

He shrugged as he tried to remember what he'd heard about Chase and Cameron. "They got married, they got divorced - the usual. No big deal. He's fine."

"You think so?"

She glanced over to the table where Chase was now sitting by himself, toying idly with a half-full tumbler. As they watched, Chase picked up his tumbler and emptied it in one gulp. He looked around, and then he got up with the glass in his hand and moved towards the bar.

"So he likes his liquor," Pete said dismissively. "So what?"

She smiled sadly. "I've seen this too many times not to know the signs: the edginess before the bar opens, that feeling of relief once the alcohol hits the blood stream, the craving for the next drink, the loss of control somewhere along the way."

She turned to rummage in her bag, ostensibly to get another lens, but he could see she was biting her lip. She straightened and said, "Let's hope he doesn't pass out tonight. That would be awkward for Lisa."

Indeed it would: Lisa had already introduced Chase as a potential diagnostician to a number of people. She'd look like a complete idiot if Chase ended up under the table. Chase's alcoholism was obvious to him and had been so for as long as he could remember (meaning, since last year), but to the best of his knowledge Lisa spent little or no time with Chase. It was anyone's guess whether she knew, but even if she did, what was she supposed to do? Tell the bartender not to serve him?

"I'll take care of it," he told her, returning the Hasselblad.

"May I take a few pictures of you?" she asked. "I'd like to show them to my son."

He nodded, standing awkwardly while the shutter clicked.

She grimaced. "These are no good: you're too aware of being photographed." Lowering the camera she said, "I'll try later when you're not feeling observed."

"Good luck with that," he said, moving away; he didn't intend to stay much longer. A few steps on he paused. "That photo series of Lisa's kid in her hall, did you take it?" He'd noticed the pictures straightaway the first time he'd entered Lisa's place: there was a black-and-white picture of Rachel for every year of her life, an on-going documentary of her development, each picture unique and of amazing vitality, the whole series pervaded by a sense of unity.

She looked up from her camera, surprised. "Yes, I did. I do a session with Rachel every year. It's my 'thank you' to Lisa for saving my son."

His mouth twitched upwards in a half-grin. "Didn't you say I saved him?"

"Both of you saved him. If you have anyone whose picture you want taken, just say the word. Do you have children?"

"No," he said automatically. And then his brain froze. "No," he said once more, forcefully. "I don't need any pictures taken."

"That's what you said ten years ago," the photographer said. "If you change your mind about that, just let me know." She dug in her pocket and pulled out a card. He glared at it without taking it. She smiled and pocketed it again. "Lisa has my contact details."

"I won't need them," he muttered as he strode towards the bar where Chase was sitting, downing his next drink.

	Chapter Index

Comments

[menolly-au.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that hospital will one day regret that they didn't give Lisa Cuddy the Deanship - she can certainly match it with the best of them.

I enjoyed Pete's encounter with Emma Sloan - it's nice to meet a patient whose life was improved by House's (and Cuddys) efforts. That's sweet that she's kept in touch with Cuddy and done the photo series of Rachel. And of course it's a chance to show us more of Pete's eclectic knowledge of all things - he knows his way around high end cameras and is also perceptive enough to realise that Emma is slumming it taking photos of a hospital fundraiser. Nice bit of by-play with Pete and Chase's date, and of course Pete stands up for Cuddy :)

Pete has another moment in the car when all the actual consequences of his grand plan land on his shoulders - like they did when Cuddy was being operated on. Cheekily giving Amy a cup of his sperm is a bit different to facing up to the consequences of having fathered an actual child. And of course Emma inadvertently reminds him of that by asking if he has any children :)

[readingrat.livejournal.com]

it's nice to meet a patient whose life was improved by House's (and Cuddys) efforts.
Emma Sloan was the only patient I could think of who had as much a reason to be grateful to Cuddy (and therefore to stay in contact with her) as to House, and she was very aware of the undercurrents within the team.

of course Pete stands up for Cuddy
He's slowly morphing from 'guilty' to 'very guilty' -- and it's about time, too.

Cheekily giving Amy a cup of his sperm is a bit different to facing up to the consequences of having fathered an actual child
Yes, that's definitely a point he should have considered before embarking on his 'save Wilson' crusade. Nasty of Emma, to rub salt into that wound.

Thanks -- for everything.

[barefootpuddles.livejournal.com]

I loved that episode with Emma Sloan (though I never really got the anti-vacation thing being how well traveled House was) so it was a wonderful surprise to see her here.

I get the feeling that House may have a chance to help Cuddy out here with some timely information. A bit of help that he owes her for including her so heavily in his machinations with so little information.

"You're in Family Healthcare; you must have heard of the Cinderella effect." What a stupid term! Children being abused by their step-parents weren't a fairy tale about to happen; they faced years of suffering, potentially ending in death.

I wonder if it would bother Wilson to realize he is about to begin to raise House's child? No way do I believe Wilson would abuse a child, but his track record for most relationships is spotty at best, and could this become a case of alcohol driven neglect if he realizes what has happened?

[readingrat.livejournal.com]

A bit of help that he owes her for including her so heavily in his machinations with so little information.
He's aware of being in her debt, though he'd never admit it, and that's what leads to his protective streak in this chapter, offering to 'take care' of Ed and refusing to join in Chase's date's grumbling. And yes, he could help out with some information, but why choose a simple solution when there are complicated ones to pick from?

No way do I believe Wilson would abuse a child, but his track record for most relationships is spotty at best
Wilson is good at relationships that are a 'moral obligation' (I think that was his term for his friendship with House). He said once regarding House that you don't get to choose your friends, which many people take as a negative comment, I interpret it more positively: he has commitments that he feels obliged to honour, no matter how he feels about the person in question (House, Danny), and he won't violate those commitments unless he has reached his personal limit. I think that a child would be a similar commitment, no matter whose it was. After all, is isn't as though Joel has all that many better options.

could this become a case of alcohol driven neglect if he realizes what has happened?
That's a question I asked myself too. That's definitely a danger, but that's a danger that any child whose parent is a (former) addict faces. Even bio children can get neglected by addicted parents.

Would finding out make Wilson a bad parent? No.
Is he more likely to neglect a child than any other addict? No.
Is finding out about Joel's true parentage a possible cause for a relapse? Yes.

But ... addicts relapse; that's what they do. Life will always throw Wilson curved balls; if the knowledge of Joel's parentage is likely to make him relapse, then the stress of getting back into work life, some other relationship going bad, the death of a parent -- all these things have the same potential to make him relapse. But there's also a chance that none of those things will make him relapse.

We could argue that Wilson shouldn't be a parent at all because of the danger of a relapse (though IMO that would be a little harsh), but I doubt that a non-bio child is in greater danger at Wilson's hands than a bio child.

Thanks for commenting.

[leesarenae.livejournal.com]

ReadingRat.. You are writing a WONDERFUL story.

Pete, Lisa and Wilson.

Lisa clasped his wrist. "But nothing happened. Everything is fine; your child is safe.

[readingrat.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm pleased that you're enjoying it.