Keeper (Agnates in Elysium), 2/10 (R)
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house_wilson and betteronvicodin
Title: Keeper (Agnates in Elysium), Part 2/10
Author: Dee Laundry
Rating: R
Summary: House and Wilson’s son Jack passes one of life’s crossroads and makes an unexpected connection.
Note: Part One began in June 2033. Sequel to My Fathers’ Son, set in an AU that crosses over with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
simple__man’s Churchverse, which began with Brilliant. Grateful appreciation to daisylily for beta and to simple__man for creating something wonderful and letting me play with it.
Part One
The next Thursday night, after two more partially shared dinner breaks and three bouts of verbal jousting, Jack strolled up to Church after his shift.
“You’re off at nine, right? Want to go grab a beer?”
Church looked up from where he was re-stocking vitamins on the bottom shelf, and then straightened his back, rocked back on his haunches, and clutched his chest. “Why, Mister Johnny, are you asking little ole me out on a date?” he asked in a broad but passable imitation of an antebellum Southern belle.
Jack smiled. “I think my girlfriend might have a problem with me dating someone else.” Church turned back to the vitamins, grabbing the last few bottles out of the crate.
“So how about we just go out for a beer?” Jack continued.
His focus on arranging the bottles on the shelf, Church replied, “Or maybe we could get together and eat a bunch of caramels.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Church stood up, hiked the empty crate onto his hip, and started toward the stock room. “Sure, beer sounds good. You want to meet somewhere?”
Shaking his head, Jack walked alongside Church. “No, I’ll just hang out here in the break room and wait. I’ve got a book.”
“Suit yourself. Get it? ‘Suit’? Because you way over-dress for this store?”
Jack stepped out of the way of Church’s poking elbow and rolled his eyes. “See you at nine.”
“Lose the tie or I’m not going anywhere with you!” Church called as he disappeared.
Eighty minutes later, they were sitting at the bar in a dive pub two blocks from the store, pints of beer in front of them. Jack was counting the bottles of alcohol displayed and calculating the total volume by alcohol type in lieu of actually saying anything. What had flowed so easily in the store was awkwardly stunted now, and all Jack’s bravado had gone into making the invitation. He hadn’t saved any for small talk to ease them into a better conversation.
“Want to get something to eat?” Church asked offhandedly, and the earlier comment about candy flashed through Jack’s mind. He waited, sipping his beer, until Church had ordered fries and onion rings, and the bartender had moved away.
When silence threatened to loom again, Jack turned toward Church and gestured with his glass. “You said something earlier about eating candy together… caramels, that’s it. Why did that sound so familiar?”
Church’s lips quirked without actually forming a smile. “It’s a line from an old movie, from before we were born. Well, you were probably born in 1950, with the way you act, but it was before I was born, anyway.”
Concentrating, Jack frowned and stared at a brown bottle that was just darker than caramel candy. His mind skipped, tripped, stumbled, and finally pounced. “Hunting, something. About a young guy from South somewhere who solves the world’s toughest math problems. And his friend was played by Ben Affleck, way before his Oscar days.”
Church’s lips quirked further up; that expression was in real danger of becoming a smile. “It was called Good Will Hunting. The therapy scenes were all right – and those two professors were clearly the gay parents the guy never had – but the whole super-genius thing bugged me.”
“Why do they do that in the movies?” Jack asked, warming up to the subject. It had bothered him as well, for quite a while. “Why can’t characters just be smart? Why do they have to be super-genius, like you said, in the top one tenth of one percent?”
“And the geniuses are always totally crazy, too. Don’t forget that.”
“The movies aren’t great at portraying people with mental retardation, but they at least try to be sensitive there. Genius just gets stereotyped and gawked at.”
“Yeah,” Church said definitively, pounding his glass back down on the bar. He peeked at Jack out of the corner of his eye, and Jack peeked back.
Clearly they were both taking the subject personally. This could definitely be interesting.
They eyed each other for another minute until Church said, “So. IQ or SAT scores?”
“If we do IQ, which test? Stanford-Binet? WISC-R? Plomin’s Aptitudes? And at what age?”
“All right, all right. SAT scores, it is. Drop the Writing score, so it’s out of 1600?”
“Of course. Subjective piece of crap.” He looked over at Church, who was staring right at him. As they locked eyes, he felt like a gunslinger, for just a moment. “You first.”
“You picked SAT; you go first.”
He took a gulp of his beer for courage, and then let it fly. “1510.” Kapow, middle of the forehead.
“Oh,” Church said quietly, and looked down into his glass. “That’s a good score.”
Now that he’d flaunted his achievement, Jack felt a little bad. “It’s not that big a deal, anyway,” he said, knocking Church on the shoulder. “I mean, what relevance does it really have at this point?”
Church shrugged, still refusing to look at Jack. “It’s a good score,” he repeated. “But it’s not as good as, say, 1550.”
Jack closed his eyes against Church’s smirk. “Fuck!” He’d been had. “Fuck! What’d you get on the components? I got 800 Critical Reading, 710 Math.”
“770 Math, 780 Reading.” By the smile on Church’s face as he drained his glass, the beer was very sweet. Or the victory, one or the other.
“Fuck,” Jack commented again. It was his turn to look down and find wisdom at the bottom of a glass.
“Oh, come on, you baby.” Church gestured, and a second round of beers materialized in front of them. “You’re going to sulk because I beat you? Fine,” he sighed, in a voice of sarcastic surrender. “I’ll let you top me once – one time only – and then we’ll be even.”
“Top you?” Jack asked incredulously. “As in sex? How does me giving in to your desire to have sex make me even?”
“An uber-straight guy like you? Putting your dick in your foe’s ass is the ultimate symbol of power.” Church took the basket of fried nirvana from the bartender with a friendly nod and immediately grabbed a huge handful.
“You’re not my foe.” Jack sampled two fries, and then added salt across the whole basket. The ketchup went in as a pool off to the side. “And what makes you think I’m straight, anyway?”
Church rolled his eyes and swallowed his mouthful of food. “So many indicators to choose from. Here’s one: Have sex with me.”
Onion ring halfway to his mouth, Jack stopped. “No.”
“See?”
“Because I don’t want to have sex with you, that means I have to be straight.” The fries were good, but the onion rings were outstanding.
“Well, duh.” Church sucked the salt and grease off his thumb. “I’m gorgeous.”
“You’re not bad. But, A, I have a girlfriend, and B... yeah, OK, I’m straight. For now, anyway.”
“For now?” Church scoffed and took another sip of beer. “You’re a bit past puberty – it should be pretty clear.”
“Just because I’ve only been interested in women so far, doesn’t mean I might not be interested in a man in the future. My Pop didn’t fall in love with a guy for the first time until he was in his late thirties.”
“He was dicking them before then, though, I guarantee you.”
“I wouldn’t know; I’ve never asked him. Parents having sex, ugh.” Jack shuddered, and the onion ring between his fingers wobbled, crunchy coating and flecks of ketchup falling to the bar. “But I agree with Stephen Fry – it’s not about who you have sex with, it’s about who you want to spend your life with.”
“Gay Studies course in college?”
“Yep.”
“Class have a stupid title?”
“Eh, torturously long rather than stupid.”
“At least you got an A.”
“B minus,” Jack mumbled around another mouthful of French fries.
Church’s eyebrows raised as his glass lowered. “Seriously? I had you pegged as a straight-A straight guy. Your dads must have killed you.”
“Kind of. They were… preoccupied with something else at the time. I got As in everything else that semester; it didn’t hurt my GPA too badly.”
“Of course not. Johnny Upright would never let that happen. Even if he is a little defective in the brains department.”
“Hey! I thought we were going to let that slide.”
“We were, if you topped me. And a very generous offer on my part. I don’t hand that out to just anyone.” Church sighed dramatically. “But you turned me down and broke my heart, so you’ll have to settle for being the stupid one in our relationship.”
“Couldn’t I just be the straight one?”
Church fixed him with an intense gaze. If he hadn’t seen it a million times before on his own father, Jack might have felt nervous. “How do you know I’m not straight?” Church asked.
“So many indicators to choose from,” Jack mocked. “Here’s one: The near-constant declarations of wanting to have sex with me.” He thrust a French fry forward in demonstration.
“Well, the mood’s totally killed now, so you can wipe that off your agenda.” Church drank the last of his beer and nodded toward Jack’s fry before turning the other way. “Closet case,” he accused, as his eyes followed the sway of a very pretty petite woman’s hips on her way to the restrooms.
Jack watched as well. The rhythm of her hips was almost hypnotic, and he felt something primal rise in him. He quickly squelched it, however. Time enough for that later, at home, with Mary.
Church finally dragged his eyes away when the woman stepped out of sight. His hair bobbed as he turned back toward Jack, and his smile, while completely mischievous, was the most honest Jack had seen on him yet.
Jack was suddenly struck with the notion that Church was gorgeous. He glowed, when he let himself be open, and radiated energy even when he was completely closed off. Magnetism. A corny, over-used word but Church had it for sure.
Tipping his glass in salute, Jack smiled back. He clinked his glass against Church’s before letting himself look away. He’d been told by friends, teachers, classmates that he had a kind of pull on people, too. He’d found it hard to imagine but, with the repetition, had come to accept that maybe it was true.
He thought of that, as he nodded and grunted through Church’s next anecdote (a multi-person showering scene that Jack could’ve sworn was taken from a movie from three years back). Magnetism, pull, power. Who would lead? Who would follow? Would he be sucked into Church’s orbit? Or could there be some way for their orbits to overlap, twin planets with perfectly matched gravity?
Jack grimaced at his thoughts (coincidentally confirming Church’s assertion that a fifty-year-old gym teacher was not an appropriate addition to the shower room). He just met this guy – what the hell was he doing thinking all these things?
Damn, he thought, what does this place put in the beer?
(Continued)
house_wilson and betteronvicodinTitle: Keeper (Agnates in Elysium), Part 2/10
Author: Dee Laundry
Rating: R
Summary: House and Wilson’s son Jack passes one of life’s crossroads and makes an unexpected connection.
Note: Part One began in June 2033. Sequel to My Fathers’ Son, set in an AU that crosses over with
simple__man’s Churchverse, which began with Brilliant. Grateful appreciation to daisylily for beta and to simple__man for creating something wonderful and letting me play with it.Part One
The next Thursday night, after two more partially shared dinner breaks and three bouts of verbal jousting, Jack strolled up to Church after his shift.
“You’re off at nine, right? Want to go grab a beer?”
Church looked up from where he was re-stocking vitamins on the bottom shelf, and then straightened his back, rocked back on his haunches, and clutched his chest. “Why, Mister Johnny, are you asking little ole me out on a date?” he asked in a broad but passable imitation of an antebellum Southern belle.
Jack smiled. “I think my girlfriend might have a problem with me dating someone else.” Church turned back to the vitamins, grabbing the last few bottles out of the crate.
“So how about we just go out for a beer?” Jack continued.
His focus on arranging the bottles on the shelf, Church replied, “Or maybe we could get together and eat a bunch of caramels.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” Church stood up, hiked the empty crate onto his hip, and started toward the stock room. “Sure, beer sounds good. You want to meet somewhere?”
Shaking his head, Jack walked alongside Church. “No, I’ll just hang out here in the break room and wait. I’ve got a book.”
“Suit yourself. Get it? ‘Suit’? Because you way over-dress for this store?”
Jack stepped out of the way of Church’s poking elbow and rolled his eyes. “See you at nine.”
“Lose the tie or I’m not going anywhere with you!” Church called as he disappeared.
Eighty minutes later, they were sitting at the bar in a dive pub two blocks from the store, pints of beer in front of them. Jack was counting the bottles of alcohol displayed and calculating the total volume by alcohol type in lieu of actually saying anything. What had flowed so easily in the store was awkwardly stunted now, and all Jack’s bravado had gone into making the invitation. He hadn’t saved any for small talk to ease them into a better conversation.
“Want to get something to eat?” Church asked offhandedly, and the earlier comment about candy flashed through Jack’s mind. He waited, sipping his beer, until Church had ordered fries and onion rings, and the bartender had moved away.
When silence threatened to loom again, Jack turned toward Church and gestured with his glass. “You said something earlier about eating candy together… caramels, that’s it. Why did that sound so familiar?”
Church’s lips quirked without actually forming a smile. “It’s a line from an old movie, from before we were born. Well, you were probably born in 1950, with the way you act, but it was before I was born, anyway.”
Concentrating, Jack frowned and stared at a brown bottle that was just darker than caramel candy. His mind skipped, tripped, stumbled, and finally pounced. “Hunting, something. About a young guy from South somewhere who solves the world’s toughest math problems. And his friend was played by Ben Affleck, way before his Oscar days.”
Church’s lips quirked further up; that expression was in real danger of becoming a smile. “It was called Good Will Hunting. The therapy scenes were all right – and those two professors were clearly the gay parents the guy never had – but the whole super-genius thing bugged me.”
“Why do they do that in the movies?” Jack asked, warming up to the subject. It had bothered him as well, for quite a while. “Why can’t characters just be smart? Why do they have to be super-genius, like you said, in the top one tenth of one percent?”
“And the geniuses are always totally crazy, too. Don’t forget that.”
“The movies aren’t great at portraying people with mental retardation, but they at least try to be sensitive there. Genius just gets stereotyped and gawked at.”
“Yeah,” Church said definitively, pounding his glass back down on the bar. He peeked at Jack out of the corner of his eye, and Jack peeked back.
Clearly they were both taking the subject personally. This could definitely be interesting.
They eyed each other for another minute until Church said, “So. IQ or SAT scores?”
“If we do IQ, which test? Stanford-Binet? WISC-R? Plomin’s Aptitudes? And at what age?”
“All right, all right. SAT scores, it is. Drop the Writing score, so it’s out of 1600?”
“Of course. Subjective piece of crap.” He looked over at Church, who was staring right at him. As they locked eyes, he felt like a gunslinger, for just a moment. “You first.”
“You picked SAT; you go first.”
He took a gulp of his beer for courage, and then let it fly. “1510.” Kapow, middle of the forehead.
“Oh,” Church said quietly, and looked down into his glass. “That’s a good score.”
Now that he’d flaunted his achievement, Jack felt a little bad. “It’s not that big a deal, anyway,” he said, knocking Church on the shoulder. “I mean, what relevance does it really have at this point?”
Church shrugged, still refusing to look at Jack. “It’s a good score,” he repeated. “But it’s not as good as, say, 1550.”
Jack closed his eyes against Church’s smirk. “Fuck!” He’d been had. “Fuck! What’d you get on the components? I got 800 Critical Reading, 710 Math.”
“770 Math, 780 Reading.” By the smile on Church’s face as he drained his glass, the beer was very sweet. Or the victory, one or the other.
“Fuck,” Jack commented again. It was his turn to look down and find wisdom at the bottom of a glass.
“Oh, come on, you baby.” Church gestured, and a second round of beers materialized in front of them. “You’re going to sulk because I beat you? Fine,” he sighed, in a voice of sarcastic surrender. “I’ll let you top me once – one time only – and then we’ll be even.”
“Top you?” Jack asked incredulously. “As in sex? How does me giving in to your desire to have sex make me even?”
“An uber-straight guy like you? Putting your dick in your foe’s ass is the ultimate symbol of power.” Church took the basket of fried nirvana from the bartender with a friendly nod and immediately grabbed a huge handful.
“You’re not my foe.” Jack sampled two fries, and then added salt across the whole basket. The ketchup went in as a pool off to the side. “And what makes you think I’m straight, anyway?”
Church rolled his eyes and swallowed his mouthful of food. “So many indicators to choose from. Here’s one: Have sex with me.”
Onion ring halfway to his mouth, Jack stopped. “No.”
“See?”
“Because I don’t want to have sex with you, that means I have to be straight.” The fries were good, but the onion rings were outstanding.
“Well, duh.” Church sucked the salt and grease off his thumb. “I’m gorgeous.”
“You’re not bad. But, A, I have a girlfriend, and B... yeah, OK, I’m straight. For now, anyway.”
“For now?” Church scoffed and took another sip of beer. “You’re a bit past puberty – it should be pretty clear.”
“Just because I’ve only been interested in women so far, doesn’t mean I might not be interested in a man in the future. My Pop didn’t fall in love with a guy for the first time until he was in his late thirties.”
“He was dicking them before then, though, I guarantee you.”
“I wouldn’t know; I’ve never asked him. Parents having sex, ugh.” Jack shuddered, and the onion ring between his fingers wobbled, crunchy coating and flecks of ketchup falling to the bar. “But I agree with Stephen Fry – it’s not about who you have sex with, it’s about who you want to spend your life with.”
“Gay Studies course in college?”
“Yep.”
“Class have a stupid title?”
“Eh, torturously long rather than stupid.”
“At least you got an A.”
“B minus,” Jack mumbled around another mouthful of French fries.
Church’s eyebrows raised as his glass lowered. “Seriously? I had you pegged as a straight-A straight guy. Your dads must have killed you.”
“Kind of. They were… preoccupied with something else at the time. I got As in everything else that semester; it didn’t hurt my GPA too badly.”
“Of course not. Johnny Upright would never let that happen. Even if he is a little defective in the brains department.”
“Hey! I thought we were going to let that slide.”
“We were, if you topped me. And a very generous offer on my part. I don’t hand that out to just anyone.” Church sighed dramatically. “But you turned me down and broke my heart, so you’ll have to settle for being the stupid one in our relationship.”
“Couldn’t I just be the straight one?”
Church fixed him with an intense gaze. If he hadn’t seen it a million times before on his own father, Jack might have felt nervous. “How do you know I’m not straight?” Church asked.
“So many indicators to choose from,” Jack mocked. “Here’s one: The near-constant declarations of wanting to have sex with me.” He thrust a French fry forward in demonstration.
“Well, the mood’s totally killed now, so you can wipe that off your agenda.” Church drank the last of his beer and nodded toward Jack’s fry before turning the other way. “Closet case,” he accused, as his eyes followed the sway of a very pretty petite woman’s hips on her way to the restrooms.
Jack watched as well. The rhythm of her hips was almost hypnotic, and he felt something primal rise in him. He quickly squelched it, however. Time enough for that later, at home, with Mary.
Church finally dragged his eyes away when the woman stepped out of sight. His hair bobbed as he turned back toward Jack, and his smile, while completely mischievous, was the most honest Jack had seen on him yet.
Jack was suddenly struck with the notion that Church was gorgeous. He glowed, when he let himself be open, and radiated energy even when he was completely closed off. Magnetism. A corny, over-used word but Church had it for sure.
Tipping his glass in salute, Jack smiled back. He clinked his glass against Church’s before letting himself look away. He’d been told by friends, teachers, classmates that he had a kind of pull on people, too. He’d found it hard to imagine but, with the repetition, had come to accept that maybe it was true.
He thought of that, as he nodded and grunted through Church’s next anecdote (a multi-person showering scene that Jack could’ve sworn was taken from a movie from three years back). Magnetism, pull, power. Who would lead? Who would follow? Would he be sucked into Church’s orbit? Or could there be some way for their orbits to overlap, twin planets with perfectly matched gravity?
Jack grimaced at his thoughts (coincidentally confirming Church’s assertion that a fifty-year-old gym teacher was not an appropriate addition to the shower room). He just met this guy – what the hell was he doing thinking all these things?
Damn, he thought, what does this place put in the beer?
(Continued)