Posted to house_wilson and betteronvicodin

Title: Keeper (Agnates in Elysium), Part 1/10
Author: Dee Laundry
Rating: R
Summary: House and; Wilson's son Jack passes one of life's crossroads and makes an unexpected connection.
Note: Begins in June 2033. Sequel to My Fathers' Son, set in an AU that crosses over with another Housefic writer's universe (to be revealed at the beginning of Part Two). Grateful appreciation to daisylily and the writer to be named later.

The drugstore was considerably shabbier than Jack Wilson remembered it from his interview. But it was walking distance to the apartment, and they'd agreed to give him the hours he preferred – noon to eight, giving him the whole morning to write and most of the evening to spend with Mary – so it would definitely do.

"You a detective?"

Startled, he looked around until he noticed the man leaning up against the building several feet from the front door, smoking a cigarette. It suddenly struck Jack that he'd never seen a person his own age smoke in public.

"No, I'm not a cop. Why do you ask?"

The man shook his head, his dark brown curls flopping lazily. "Only people who wear ties in this neighborhood are detectives. And I don't need the hassle." He took a short drag off the cigarette and blew smoke rings into the air.

"I'm starting here today as a pharmacist," Jack explained. "You're a nicotine addict? There are these new time-release pills that –"

The guy flicked the cigarette into the street without bothering to put it out. "Not an addict. Those things can kill you. But smoking 'em looks damn cool."

As he pushed away from the wall and turned toward the door, Jack noticed he was wearing a nametag from the drugstore.

"You work here, too, Chris? My name's Jack. It's a pleasure to meet you."

The guy looked at Jack's outstretched hand for a moment, and then ignored it in favor of glaring at him. "My name's not Chris."

"You stole Chris's nametag?" Jack asked.

Not-Chris snorted a quick laugh. "Never thought of that possibility. Good one." He shook his head, and then pushed his curls back from his face. "Chris is one form of my name, but it's not what I go by."

Minutes were ticking by, and Jack didn't want to be late his first day. But somehow it felt important to finish this conversation. "Then why is it on your nametag?"

"Because I had to put something and the dipshit manager wouldn't let me put 'Death' like I wanted."

Jack found that his hands had made their way to his hips. "Why didn't you just put the name you go by?"

"Because that's reserved for people who aren't idiots. And none of the customers or employees in this store qualify." Not-Chris pulled open the door to the store and smiled extremely insincerely at a woman who was leaving with her three squalling kids in tow. After her departure, he waved Jack in.

"So what should I call you?" Jack asked as he straightened his tie.

"Depends," replied not-Chris, stepping off toward the front registers. "Are you an idiot?"

***

Jack took special care over his first week at work to meet all of the employees at the drugstore: pharmacists, assistants, clerks, management. Believing as he did that people lived to the expectations placed on them, whether high or low, he tried hard not to concur with not-Chris's assessment of all-encompassing idiocy.

It was difficult.

By the work schedule posted in the break room, Jack and "Chris" had overlapping shifts every Monday and Thursday, but he didn't actually lay eyes on the man again until three weeks later.

Jack had been enjoying a quiet, pleasant dinner in the empty break room when the door banged open with enough force to shake the hinges. He could hear the night manager Louis hiss, "Chris!"

"Dinner!" not-Chris hissed back, but he closed the door quietly behind him.

"The damned door's made of industrial steel; there's no way it's going to break. I don't know what he's worried about," he commented on his way to the refrigerator.

Jack continued to eat his dinner. "Maybe he thinks it might look bad to a customer."

"Which one?" not-Chris called from behind the refrigerator door, over the clank and bang of whatever he was messing with in there. "The bored old lady who's been talking Ramone's ear off for the last ten minutes? The cranky, sleep-deprived new mom who's wandering the store so she doesn't have to go home and deal with her colicky baby? Or the moron trying to buy cigarettes with food stamps? Because that's all the customers we got as of this moment."

He walked away from the refrigerator empty handed and peered at Jack's meal. "What's wrong with your food?"

Surprised, Jack took a quick scan of everything to reassure himself it still looked good. Looking up, he said, "Nothing's wrong with it."

"Where's the meat?"

"Nowhere. It's just Portobello and roasted eggplant in here," – he raised the larger container – "and three-bean salad in there." He pointed to the smaller container with his fork and then went back to eating.

"You can't have dinner without meat." Not-Chris was leaning over the table, sniffing at the food. "Didn't your mama raise you right?"

Jack pulled the containers closer to him, and countered, "My mama didn't raise me at all."

Not-Chris opened his eyes wide in an expression many people would have interpreted as sincerely interested. Jack had seen it many times on his own father and figured it to be instead sarcastic in the extreme. He goggled back briefly and then returned his attention to his food.

"Are you insulting your mother," not-Chris asked, "or hinting around for sympathy because you're an orphan? Bet it's the orphan one. It'd explain your level of screwed-up-ness to have taken a job here." He grabbed Jack's lunch bag and shoved a hand in it. The bulging of the sides as his fingers prodded and probed reminded Jack of the very old Bullwinkle cartoons, in which Bullwinkle could never quite pull a rabbit out of his hat.

After a few futile seconds, not-Chris threw the bag back on the table. "Why don't you have chips or something to balance out all those vitamins?"

"There's a vending machine right there; buy your own damn chips. And I'm not screwed up, and I'm not an orphan. I was raised by two parents who loved me very much. Just neither of them was a mother."

"Ha," not-Chris replied. Even from the other side of the room, waiting for his Funyuns to drop, he was still trying to eye Jack's food. Jack drew the plastic containers even closer.

"So little Jackie had two daddies?" not-Chris scoffed as he dropped into the chair opposite Jack. Munching away, he swung his feet up onto the table, the soles of his shoes dangerously near Jack's food. Jack covered one of the containers and brought the other up close to his chest.

He concentrated on controlling his expression and voice, eliminating any and all defensiveness. His fathers had loved each other and loved him; he was proud of his family. People who wanted to criticize or scorn could do it on their own time.

"Yes," he said simply, and continued eating.

"Wouldn't have thought a rainbow-flag family could produce such a Johnny Upright kind of guy. Whereas I," not-Chris mumbled around the Funyuns, and then coughed, choking a little. Jack passed him a soda, from which he took a long swig. "Whereas I," he began again, "like every normal kid, was raised by a Dad and a Mom."

Jack snatched back his soda before it disappeared completely, planted it on the table, and picked up the eggplant. Water off a duck's back, he told himself, and wasn't that a hoary old chestnut of a cliché?

A tap of plastic against plastic brought Jack's attention back on not-Chris, who had at some point found a second fork and grabbed Jack's three-bean salad and was currently scraping the last few beans into one corner of the container. He looked at Jack and smirked.

"Of course, Mom's got a penis, but we can't hold that against him. Actually, Dad probably holds it against him, but that's a horrible pun, and I try not to think about it anyway."

In one swift, graceful move, he swept the beans into his mouth, threw the container on the table, and rose from his chair. At the door of the break room, he turned back. "You can call me Church. Mind if I call you Johnny?"

Jack smiled and speared the last bit of Portobello. "If I say yes, that's what you'll call me, right?"

"Until the end of time," Church replied and walked out the door.

Jack chewed contemplatively and wondered if Church had to have the last word in every conversation.

(Continued)