DVD Commentary 2/3

[deelaundry]

Part Two of the DVD commentary for “Around the World and Back Again.”

“Where do the pimps hang out in this city?” House asks in Mandarin.

 

One of the mysteries of the original fic was what House and the Chinese cabdriver talked about. I assumed, of course, that it was sex.

 

In the rear-view mirror, he can see the cab driver’s eyes flick. “Are you buying or selling?”

 

House looks over to his left. Wilson’s eyes are closed again – Christ, the woman with sleeping sickness didn’t conk out this much – and with the light sheen of sweat and the gentle street lights flickering across his face, his features are unimaginably soft. Even the five o’clock shadow can’t keep him from looking like a schoolboy. It’s freaky.

 

I kid because I love. Sleep and waking was a big theme of the original fic, and it worked so well there, highlighting Wilson’s disorientation and, I think, explaining some of his slower reflexes. House is the more active player in the story, so for him, Wilson’s sleep is an annoying delay in game. (Even though Wilson’s probably just resting his eyes here.)

 

Also, glistening Wilson under soft yellowed streetlights I imagine would be quite the yum.

 

Still looking at Wilson, House says to the driver, “I’d never sell my little brother.”  He can hear the wheels in the man’s head turn, attempting to gauge family resemblance – Caucasians, or maybe just fares, all look alike – and wondering whether the foreigner knows that phrase means “penis.”

 

House is a clever man who likes to show off that he’s clever, so of course he’d know the proper slang. But, not knowing Mandarin, how was I to write it? Wikipedia rides to the rescue again. I typed in ‘Singapore slang,’ and boom, an entire page devoted to sexual slang in Singapore.

 

“But the eight inches of his little brother I can rent out for the right price.”

 

It took me a long time to figure out what the joke was going to be here. (thedeadparrot had established that the cab driver laughs, so there had to be something funny.) I toyed for a while with something around “duck” and “chicken” (slang for male and female prostitutes, respectively), but in the end, a dick joke always sells. Isn’t House nice for saying Wilson has a larger than average penis?

 

When the driver laughs, a deep, rumbling sound, Wilson’s eyes open and he glares a little. House smirks, thinking of the amusing faces Wilson would make if he understood this conversation.

 

House switches topics to the best food stalls near their hotel. Cuisine being Singapore’s national pastime, the driver expounds for the next twenty minutes, and walks them to the hotel check-in desk just to finish up a thought. House thanks him for the advice, and tips generously, although out of Wilson’s sight, because he doesn’t want the man to get any ideas.

 

The concept of cuisine being Singapore’s national pastime came straight from Wikipedia. I just ran with it.

 

House’s stomach doesn’t start to knot until his bag has banged into the cream-colored bedskirt, leaving a bluish-black smudge. He’s caught for a moment on the puzzle of what the hell the baggage handlers dipped his suitcase into, but his guts will not be distracted. They’re coiling and tightening, feeling an awful lot like his right thigh, and he wishes they would cut it the hell out.

 

For you UK folks, bedskirt=valance.

 

In fic, why doesn’t House compare pain/sensation in the rest of his body to what he feels in his thigh?

 

Jump right in, a voice in his head says. It’s what you came for, and this is time to do it, because after all that sleep Wilson’s bound to be awake. He’ll probably stay up all night just watching bad television. Go, go, go!

 

Well, Wilson may be awake, but House can barely keep his eyes open. It’s an excuse, but it’s true, so he tells the voice in his head and the knot in his stomach to shut the fuck up and let him get some sleep.

 

He dreams about Wilson in a prairie skirt. It’s not that sexy.

genagirl was the originator of the image of Wilson in a prairie skirt. (He was also de-balled in her fic, but not in House’s dream here.) Apologies to anyone who likes that kind of skirt, but they’re not very sexy to me.

 

The knock at the door startles him out of sleep, which is good because he really has to piss. He realizes on the way to the door that he slept in his clothes. He starts thinking excitedly that maybe he’s still dreaming and it’s mid-80s Grace Jones at the door.

 

It’s not.

 

See Section 1 of the commentary for a note on who Grace Jones is, and why Wilson is most definitely not her.

 

“Oh, it’s you,” he says to Wilson, sneering a little because the prairie skirt has just flashed through his brain again.

 

Wilson rolls his eyes. “You know, I’m sure you have a hot date with a hooker this early in the morning, but I recommend waiting until we’re done with breakfast. Sex on an empty stomach is never fun.”

 

“Well, you would know,” House says, and considers adding that to his woefully short list of excuses why he didn’t go for what he wanted last night. He’s got to make that list longer if it’s going to overflow into tonight as well.

 

Did this come through OK? House is trying to make up excuses not to hit on Wilson, because he's getting nervous about it, and it would require change.

 

After pissing, he splashes water on his face, refreshes his deodorant, and follows Wilson to breakfast like a good boy.

 

Don’t know why I felt compelled to detail what House’s grooming activities were.

 

When they get there, the spread is a multi-cultural buffet – dumplings, scrambled eggs, rice, croissants, soup. House is suddenly starving and grabs a lot of everything.

 

When Wilson raises an eyebrow, he shrugs and says, “I’m a growing boy.” His stomach is growling so loud that he almost misses out on hearing Wilson’s laughter. It goes on his other list, the list of grudges against his torso.

 

Greg House has never trusted his torso. His head, his arms, his legs: they all work right for him. (Well, the one leg doesn’t any more, but he’s not going to let it screw up his metaphor the way it tries to screw up his life.) They’re all reliably strong and sturdy and responsive.

 

His heart, his guts, and his dick, on the other hand, are traitorous bitches. Can never turn his back on them because they’ll sell him out on less than a moment’s notice.

 

He trusts what he thinks and what he does. What he feels… is going to kill him some day.

 

The torso metaphor came to me as I was thinking about House’s motivations for how he acted in the original fic. House is a man of action. He likes to do, and he likes to think, but he has a severe disconnect when it comes to feeling. I think he feels very deeply, more than most people give him credit for, but he doesn’t always understand those feelings, and doesn’t know what to do with them. It then occurred to me that the organs historically associated with one’s feelings are in the torso, and that led me to the metaphor. I like it, anyway.

 

The rest of the morning is boring, boring, boring, with only a couple of spots of dullness to break things up. House solves world hunger and cures cancer during this time, but he doesn’t tell anyone because the farm subsidy lobby would never let it happen and he doesn’t want Wilson to lose his job.

 

This section sat blank for a while, because thedeadparrot had established that House sits through the lectures but doesn’t listen. What is he doing? I didn’t want him to be angsting over Wilson and the booty call – and then I realized solve world hunger/cure cancer are what people say they’d do if they had a lot of time. House is kidding, of course; he didn’t really solve those two knotty problems of mankind. He did make some progress on world hunger, but the farm subsidy lobby definitely would not let it happen. They’re quite the powerful lobby, at least in the US.

 

A few people try to bother him during breakfast and coffee breaks – networking, he hates that word – but he blows them off. He’s not here to talk to them.

 

When he shoots down an invitation for lunch, too, Wilson calls him on it. “What? They seemed nice.”

 

House glares at his stupidity. When has House ever gone for nice? “They seemed boring.”

 

“You hang out with me,” Wilson argues. “I’m boring.”

 

We’re now going into an argument thedeadparrot wrote for them. I’m not convinced I got every nuance behind this, but I tried. 

 

House snorts at this ridiculousness. “You can pretend to be, maybe. That’s one of your stupid compulsions, to be normal, to be like everyone else. You’d love it if you were boring. But you’re not, and you hate it.” He’s said the same thing before, not that Wilson has ever taken the advice behind the words and truly let go.

 

It occurs suddenly to House that maybe the thin veneer of banal respectability is part of what makes Wilson interesting. But there’s no way in hell he’s telling him that.

 

This thought occurred suddenly to me, so I made it occur suddenly to House.

 

“You, on the other hand,” Wilson replies, “love being different. It makes you special. It makes you better than everyone else, because they’re all the same, and you’re different.”

 

It’s not like House hasn’t heard this from Wilson before. But it stings this time in a way it usually doesn’t. He snaps back before thinking. “Of course, you’re the one who has to examine everyone’s faults in order to make yourself feel better about your own. You can’t stand to see how screwed up you are, so you take it out on everyone else.”

 

Wilson looks defiant for a moment, but then gives up and changes the subject to lunch. It turns out Wilson’s got no money with him. House exchanged US dollars for Singapore dollars during one of Wilson’s airport naps, so he’ll have to pay.

 

A teeny question I had of the original fic was where House got the Singaporean money. I wrote it in here.

 

“Don’t make it a habit,” Wilson teases. “People might start taking advantage of you.”

 

House pictures vividly, in a series of flashes, the ways he’d like Wilson to take advantage of him, and has to glare to hide what that does to him. “What happens in Singapore stays in Singapore,” he intones, and that’s what he hopes, at least, because he can’t allow himself to hope for anything different.

 

Aw, House is starting to admit that he’d like this to be more than a booty call. But he doesn’t think that will happen. Silly House!

 

“My lips are sealed,” Wilson replies, and one of the earlier flashes pops back up. House tries not to smile.

 

After fending off a McDonald’s request from Wilson – seriously? for a man who can cook, Wilson doesn’t seem to have much taste – House leads them to the food stall the cabbie had suggested. It all looks good and smells great, but House has been craving mee siam (among other things) ever since he decided to come to Singapore.

 

In the original Wilson doesn’t know why House picked the stall he did – I decided it was the recommendation of the cab driver.

 

Wilson actually digs into his food with a minimum of fuss, for once, and they eat quickly. House steals Wilson’s noodle – not a euphemism – and they talk about this and that. House wonders how his team is doing back in Jersey. They have a tendency to turn into the Keystone Kops without him, and he can’t quite figure out how to break them of that while still keeping them under his thumb when he is there.

 

1) Reference back to the first paragraph! 
2) Is the Keystone Kops an old-fogey thing, or do you young people know about them? 
3) The issue of how independent House wants his fellows to be is a very interesting one. Wonder if anyone’s wrote a fic about that? (My lack of gen reading is showing here, sorry.)

 

The afternoon session brings the blissful release of sleep. He wakes to the sound of Wilson asking, “Dinner?”

 

House nods, distracted by the pain in his leg. “Yeah, sure. Whatever.” He pops a Vicodin, ignoring the stunned looks from some of the other attendees.

 

This is the first of two times House says the exact same line: “Yeah, sure. Whatever.” No idea if it was intentional or not on thedeadparrot’s part.

They go back to the same food court, for soon kway and char siew rice this time. House ends up paying again.

 

“Not going to be a habit?” Wilson asks, stuffing a dumpling into his mouth.

 

This kind of teasing is what House likes best. Wilson giving it right back to him – and House nearly derails himself right there, but pulls back from the brink. “Oh, shut up,” he says.

 

Revealing a lot of my key convictions about House and Wilson’s relationship in this fic! “This kind of teasing is what House likes best” is most definitely how I see it.

 

Wilson talks about how being away from home gives them the chance to be different, and House almost chokes on his food. Are his intentions that obvious, or is Wilson doing that weird empathic mind-reading thing he does from time to time, where he gets the message but not the meaning?

 

Has anyone else noticed this about Wilson? That he has these occasions where he reads House very well but then totally misses the point? It’s odd. I don’t know if thedeadparrotwas consciously having Wilson do that here, or if her intention was that Wilson talking about this was what spurred House to make his move. I chose the former.

 

House spins out some crap about finding oneself in the jungle, and Wilson laughs. Reading House’s mind, then, and subconsciously to boot. Wilson’s going to be the death of him.

Harkening back to the earlier line:  "What he feels… is going to kill him some day." Wilson is what House feels. Aww.

 

Wilson leads the conversation on the way back to the hotel, telling him the latest gossip from the oncology world: hook-ups, back-stabbings, and who sucked what to get where. What a nice date this is, his heart sighs, and while he’s busy shutting that shit down – booty call! booty call! – his guts and his dick get into a pissing contest over who can be the most tense. You’d think the dick would win (it’s a pissing contest), but the stomach’s got some weird mojo and as he and Wilson get to their rooms, his torso is taut and aching and his penis has rolled over and is playing dead.

 

Is it wrong to say I’m in love with my own writing here? The whole of the last two sentences, with House struggling against the different parts of his body (soul), and the phrasing. “What a nice date this is” – so girly, and of course House can’t believe he’s thinking it, but consider it: they went and got food, they’re talking and laughing, and House is very much hoping to have sex later. Sounds like a date to me. And then the tension in his guts vs. the tension in his dick, and how funny a phrase “pissing contest” is. (All the rebellious organs are once again the ones in his torso. The word ‘torso’ in the last sentence really should have been ‘abdomen.’ Ah well.)

 

Then Wilson smiles at him, and it all evens out. “Come on in,” House says, nodding toward his door. “It’s been days since I’ve seen a soap.”

 

“Well, I didn’t want to say anything, but…” Wilson wrinkles his nose and smirks.

 

Daisylily suggested having Wilson wrinkle his nose here, and isn’t that just a cute image?

 

Loser, House thinks affectionately. “Soap operas, ding-dong. There’s a ton of them on the Chinese channels. Something freaky bound to be going on.”

 

Wilson shakes his head and steps over to his own door. “I don’t know Mandarin, House, or Cantonese.”

 

That’s so not the point, of the soap operas or the invitation, and he’s not quite sure what Wilson is trying to pull. “You actually think that makes them any better?”

 

“Not really,” Wilson replies. “I’m just tired. Maybe later?”

 

“Fine,” House says, but inside he’s cursing. Tired, yes of course, it’s probably been all of two hours since Wilson slept last. Asshole, he thinks, but he doesn’t know if that’s aimed at the man standing in front of him or at himself.

 

He flees.

 

Single sentence paragraph again, just to give it some punch.

---

Continued in the next post

Comments

[inlaterdays.livejournal.com]

I LOVE the bit about Wilson getting the message but not the meaning. It's spot-on. He gets how House is manipulating a situation, but then overwrites the reasons with why he, Wilson, would do it, rather than why House would do it.

[deelaundry.livejournal.com]

Thanks! The concept came to me as I was writing the story and I thought, "Hey, yeah." : )