Chapter Text
As the car crept nearer to their new home, John shut off the radio and craned his neck, plunging the car into a ringing silence to hear the directions his wife, Blythe, was reading off a wingspan-wide map. Greg looked out the window to the suburbs he’d be wreaking havoc in for the next year and change, and breathed deeply. This was far from his first time moving– it wasn't even his first time moving across continents and oceans–but invariably, each time he moved houses, his hair stood on end, blood singing with anticipation and nerves. Their flight from Japan had touched down just yesterday, and the few belongings that moved from country to country with them were trundling down the road behind them in a small moving truck. He was tuning out the sound of his father, notably mapless, arguing about directions with his mother who notably held a three foot wide map of the county, route highlighted and destination circled with thick black marker, and squeezed his eyes shut until he heard the map like a thunder sheet meet his mother’s thighs. “Okay, here it is, here - Orleans Blvd.” She pointed out with a flutter of her hand.
The houses on this street were cramped, shoulder to shoulder, but admittedly kind of homey. They were about a thirty minute drive from his dad’s Navy base, and a 20 minute bike ride from his school. He wished he was going to the public school 10 minutes away instead–they got to wear their hair how they liked it, could wear jeans or sweats or flannels or stupid tee shirts, and they even got those jocky football jackets. It all looked so mundane and trite and low pressure , if the movies were anything to go by. It’d been years since Gregory House had lived and learned in the United States, and it seemed like a pitiful waste to come back here for his senior year of high school only to spend that year in a private school, wearing yet another uniform with yet more restrictions on his haircuts and hem lengths and belts. He was sick of it. He couldn’t wait for this summer to be over so the school year could start so that it could end and he could be off to college, where he could wear whatever he wanted to wear, and go wherever he wanted to go, and do whatever he wanted to do.
The car jolted to a stop by the curb in front of a green house so desaturated it was nearly gray, with an overgrown yard, and about two feet of front porch. Porch was probably too generous a turn of phrase for the stoop with an awning that yawned over their front door, but it had a certain charm to it, if he was honest.
“We’re here.” John grunted over his shoulder to his son. “Get the bags in the trunk first, then help the men in the truck with the boxes.”
“Yes sir.” Greg squinted into the sun as he ducked out of the car, rounding it slowly as he looked down the street.
“Now, Greg, let’s get this over with.”
“Yes sir.” He breathed with a roll of his eyes. God forbid he not trip over himself sprinting to the back of the car to pull fifty pound suitcases from the trunk. God for-fucking-bid.
The truck idled loudly behind them, bored men pulling the metal ramp down to clang loudly on the asphalt. Greg winced. If half the neighborhood wasn’t already watching them from their windows, the banging of the moving men was sure to reinforce the spectacle. And he hated to be a spectacle.
He hauled the three suitcases in the car to the entryway and was clamoring into the back of the truck to help the moving men (“We are not sitting with our thumbs up our asses while someone else carries all our shit into the house,” his father had told him, as if he’d argued in the first place), when he heard the neighbor’s door open and a flurry of movement spill out.
“Hi there!” A tall woman called, making a visor from the sun with one hand and waving with the other. Greg noticed that her lips, nails, and hair were all nearly matching tones of deep red, and each caught the sun. They stood out against the green tone of the house paint. Beside her was a man in a sweater vest and slacks, presumably her husband, who looked utterly out of place in such a casual setting, awkwardly pressing his lips into an almost endearing attempt at a smile and lifting one hand in restrained acknowledgement. In front of them were two boys, one just about the height of his mother and gangly, and another who was chubby and clearly hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, looking suspicious of the new neighbors from his vantage point half hidden behind his brother.
The Houses each paused where they were and waved back, Blythe leading the greeting committee. She placed the box she was holding on the ground at her feet and walked over to the kind neighbors, saying in a loud voice as she went, “Hello! We’re the Houses, we’re moving in next door!” Then in an undertone, “Or, well, obviously….”
The red lacquered lady clapped her hands together and threw back her head. “The Houses in their new house! Love it!”
Greg covered a snort with a cough and the taller of the sons scrubbed a hand across his eyes in apparent embarrassment. Their eyes connected and the boy gave him an apologetic look. Greg smiled.
“I’m Ruth Wilson, this is my husband, David, and two of our sons, James,” she gestured to the older one, “and Daniel.” She mussed the hair of the dweeby younger one who gave her a scathing, ‘hey!’ “We have one more, Joseph, but he’s off at school at the moment. College! Pre-Law!”
“Lovely to meet you all. I’m Blythe, that’s my husband, John, and that’s our–oh where is he? Oh there in the truck, that’s our son Gregory. We’ve just moved here from Japan!”
“Japan?” The husband chirped. “You’re a long way from home.”
“Ah, we were, but now we’re back!” John gave his forced-guffaw-of-amiable-conversation that always made Greg roll his eyes. It was dripping with fakeness, he couldn’t understand how his father didn’t realize it. It made him look ridiculous. His father turned to face Greg and tipped his head significantly.
“Hi, it’s nice to meet you.” Greg said.
“Nice to meet you,” the boy, James, said back. Greg tamped down a smile. There was something about this dork in his rumpled flannel over a t-shirt and his straight jeans clearly bulging with a book he was likely forced to shut mid-sentence to come stand on his stoop and wave to strangers.
The smaller boy said nothing, but nodded.
“Could you guys use some help?” The woman, Ruth, asked. “I’ve got three boys with big muscles just waiting to carry some boxes!” None of the boys around her looked like they were particularly rippling with muscles under their sleeves and they all looked acutely terrified of the prospect of the Houses taking her up on the offer of her surrogate strength.
John had mercy on them, “Oh, that’s kind of you, but we’ve got quite an army here.” The hired men hadn’t stopped circling from the house to the truck in a heavy footed, sweaty ballet.
“Well at least let me make you all some lemonade to cool down from all your hard work!” And before John could tell her thanks but no thanks, Ruth whirled back inside, leaving her husband and children to blink and look around like they’d been released from a spell and were only just realizing they had the freewill to go back to their newspapers and books and TV sets.
Moving the rest of the boxes from the truck to the front room didn’t take very long after that, and Ruth traipsed up to the open door with a knock on the door frame, a pitcher of lemonade and some quartered bologna and mayonnaise sandwiches on a platter.
“Here! A little pick me up for you guys. Movers included!” She said sternly at a uniformed man, as if daring him and his crew not to have a snack before dispersing the boxes further into the house.
“Thank you Ruth, this is very generous of you.” Greg’s mother took the platter and the pitcher, placing them on the round dining table to the left of the entryway. The house, blessedly, had come previously furnished, as all of their houses had. The military didn’t want to have to pay to relocate three people and all of their furniture, so the boxes of clothes, books, photo albums, music players, and their tiny portable black and white TV with about three channels were all they really needed. Greg had become accustomed to living without. He didn’t dwell on it.
“Would you and your boys like to join us for dinner sometime?” he heard his mother ask. He missed the response as he was directed up the stairs with a box labeled “Gregory.” He slid past movers on the stairs and peeked around first one doorway - a bathroom - then another - a spartan bedroom with boxes stacked against twin sized bed to the left. He dropped his box of sweaters on top of the others and gave the room a once over. Not bad, all in all. There was a side table with a lamp between the doorway and the bed, a closet across from that and a desk with drawers and a heavy looking chair beside that. There was a window with dark green curtains straight across from him and a dresser to its left. And thankfully, a bookshelf beside that, cramped in the corner. A deep green area rug laid in the middle of the room. All of the furniture in this room, and in the house, was a heavy dark wood. He stepped toward the window to open the pane for some air flow and stopped stock still as soon as the curtain was pushed aside.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Greg murmured to himself. “ Stellar. ”
Across from his window, no more than a yard away, was the boy James, laying on his stomach on a striped braided rug reading a book, presumably the one from his pocket, and bobbing his head to music Greg couldn’t hear. Greg stepped forward, nearly pressing against the glass to get a better look at this travesty of architecture between them, and laughed incredulously. This is what he got for obeying his father and not looking up from his moving feet for more than a quarter of a second. He’d entirely missed that the two windows had - awnings? A petit-four of a roof? - outstretched and meeting in the middle, with maybe 4 inches between them. Their windows were practically kissing. James’ window was God’s hand and Greg’s was Adam’s. Who the fuck built these things? What a cruel turn of fate for Greg to be tits to ass with his hot neighbor’s bedroom. Their bedrooms . Where they change and read to music on the floor and jerk off . Talk about a bummer.
“Oh my God ,” Greg groaned too loudly, letting his forehead thump against the glass. He jerked his head back up, hoping his thumping hadn’t startled his neighbor who was, lo and behold, now looking directly at him. Greg smiled and waved, feigning confidence, just seeing James wave back before hightailing it back down to the last of the boxes by the door.
He was drafted into helping his mother unload boxes of pots and pans and a box of dry goods from Japan. His father opted for pizza delivery for dinner rather than grocery shopping and waiting for a home cooked meal - one of the rare kindnesses that his father indulged in on the first nights of living in a new place. They sat at their round dining room table, with ceramic plates and glasses of water, pizza box in the center, and chewed in relative silence, the sounds of a new suburb buffeting against the windows.
“Well this is a nice little place, isn’t it, Greg? And a neighbor your age! That’ll be a nice change of pace for you, maybe you can make a new friend.”
“Yeah, that’ll be nice.” There was a moment of silence. “Um, there’s a bookshelf in my room already, so I don’t need to worry about finding one.”
“Good, that’s good. You have so many books.”
The conversation was painfully stilted, and it was a relief to everyone when John declared it was time to watch the evening news (in yet more stilted silence) and then scatter for the night.
Greg let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding when he made it back upstairs and was finally able to peel away his sweaty clothes and change into his pajamas, James blessedly absent from his room. Finally alone, Greg looked out at the stars and tipped his head, blinking until the constellations slid into the same place they were in yesterday, a world away. And then he closed the curtains.