Title: The Doctor Went Down To Georgia
Author: amazonqueenkate
Fandom: House/CSI: Vegas crossover
Pairing: Past Greg House/Bobby Dawson, present Bobby Dawson/Nick Stokes
Rating: PG-13, for allusions to past sexual acts
Warnings: lacrosse practice; telephone messages; hard wood; Nick getting ogled; Gregs not resembling Mr. Sanders
Summary: Bobby's surprised to see an old friend, but even more surprised at how the years have changed him.
Disclaimer: CSI belongs to Bruckheimer. House to Shore. I got nothin'.
Author's Notes: Oh, the things subluxate inspires me to write, and then betas for me. Just an odd little crossover idea that crawled into my head and would not die. And then, became a fic. All on its own. Without permission. Darn it all.

Bobby probably would have never glanced up from the in-house memo had a voice not greeted him the moment he set foot into his lab.

"You know, for a crime lab, security around this place is pretty lax. Any cripple off the street can just waltz right into the ballistics lab, unnoticed."

Blinking, he did look up from the memo, and straight into the weathered face of a stranger. The man was reclined in one of the lab's two wheeled chairs, his feet propped up on the other one. He, in fact, would have looked rather comfortable were it not for the fact he was also idly twirling a cane. Twirling a cane dangerously close to the nearest microscope, Bobby noted with a pang of nervousness deep in his stomach. Whatever the cane was for, though, didn't seem to effect the man lounging in his lab; his uninvited visitor wore a self-satisfied smirk that reminded him a bit too much of Hodges.

"Uh, can I help you?" he asked, once all other reactions had failed him.

The visitor rolled his eyes, still twirling his cane. "The amazing thing about Christmas cards, Robbie, are these ‘return address' thingies. Anyone can track you down and end up at your front door."

Christmas card. That narrowed the possibility to less than a hundred people, but still too narrow a demographic. Too bad there wasn't a database for this sort of thing. "This isn't my front door," he noted.

"No, it isn't. Because your neighbor. Mrs. Lighton -"

"Lambrecht."

He dismissed Bobby's correction with a little wave of his hand. "- told me you worked here. Gave me the address and everything. Offered me a cookie, too, and introduced me to the kid." His grin widened. "She has your eyes, if not your gay."

In that moment, something clicked, and Bobby very nearly dropped the memo onto the floor. "Greg?" he gaped, and as annoyed as he had been, he burst into a smile. "It's been years! I didn't even know you were gettin' my cards! How you been?"

Said Greg - Greg House, to be specific, a man who resembled Greg Sanders about as much as Bobby's socks resembled a Glock semi-automatic - shrugged slightly. "I'm not dead," he admitted, rising. Or rather, attempting to rise; the motion required considerable effort, and once he was standing, he relied on his cane to stand. "I'm thinking dinner. Tangiers. A nice steak, my treat."

"Oh." Bobby's frown faded slightly, and he eyed Greg suspiciously. "Mrs. Lambrecht didn't tell you, did she?"

"You haven't gone vegetarian on me, have you?" Greg grimaced. "Some nice rabbit food, then."

"No, not that," he replied. "I work nights, Greg. I just got here."

Greg frowned, the expression of a man who'd obviously had a plan - how many times in high school had Bobby seen that exact frown? - and tapped his cane on the ground. "Do you eat breakfast?"

"You're persistent."

"Robbie, how many times did I try to feed your dog my half-written term papers so I could bring in proof that it really did eat my homework?"

"How many times did it work?"

"Touché." Greg smirked knowingly. "Your wit has improved since high school. Sadly, your ability to avoid a question has not."

Bobby rolled his eyes and moved to respond when there was a rap on the door and Nick poked his head in, looking rather like a boy who had just lost his puppy. "Hey, Bobby, you got a - " The words died on his tongue as his eyes moved past Bobby and towards Greg. "Did I miss somethin'?"

"How many Southerners does it take to run a crime lab?" Greg asked no one in particular. Bobby watched with a slight sense of dread as Greg took in the full sight of Nick, from boots to head and back again. The "back again" was significantly slower, too, and by the time he'd reevaluated Nick's torso, Greg was out-and-out leering. "Do you eat dinner?"

"Greg."

Greg sent him a meaningful glance. "Just because you don't doesn't mean your co-workers have the same bias."

Nick arched an eyebrow and glanced at Bobby, obviously uncomfortable, and Bobby just shook his head. "Nick, meet my old friend Greg."

"House," Greg amended, not budging.

"Stokes," Nick added to his own name, and - paragon of politeness as he was - stepped fully into the lab to shake Greg's hand. He kept glancing back at Bobby, though. "Here for a visit?"

"Ran out of hookers to hire in Jersey. Needed a change."

The visible discomfort on Nick's face increased, and Bobby smiled slightly as he looked back to his memo. "How long are you staying?"

"How many hookers are there in Vegas? Count, divide by three, and you'll have the length of my stay in days."

"Oh. Well, good luck with that." Nick pulled his hand away as quickly as he could without appearing rude, and turned his full attention to Bobby. "Griss needs that bullet from last night," he informed him quickly.

"It's on the top of the pile. I'll have it done in a - " He glanced briefly at the clock, and caught House out-and-out ogling Nick. He frowned slightly. " - half an hour?"

Nick nodded. "Thanks, man." He sent one last, slightly-apprehensive glance over at Greg. "Nice to have met you."

"Likewise." When Greg's eyes budged from Nick's back, it was only because Nick had made it all the way down the hallway and around a corner. (Bobby only knew this because he'd been watching, too.) "If you won't have breakfast with me," he decided, "I'm inviting Mr. Stokes." He smirked. "And then, I'll stro -"

"I'll meet you at the Tangiers at eight," Bobby informed him tensely, setting down the memo. Greg grinned triumphantly. "Can I show you out?"

"Depends. Do any of your other co-workers look like that?"

"Yes."

"Then no."

Bobby rolled his eyes as Greg wandered out of the office, making some gesture that could have either been friendly or obscene over his shoulder as he went. The heavy limp and reliance on the cane was new, and he watched it carefully as his old friend meandered down the hallway, stopping briefly to grin at a very confused Catherine Willows.

"Same old Greg," he muttered, and started in on the pile of firearm evidence waiting for him.

==

Greg House, it turned out, was not actually the same old Greg he'd spent two years with during high school. That Greg House had been a recalcitrant Marine brat, brilliant and powerfully self-assured, purposely beating out every other student at the base school just to prove a ridiculous point; that he, who had lived in D.C. and California and Pennsylvania, was just that much better than the rest of the kids present. Bobby discovered quickly, though, that part of the blatant arrogance was deserved; Greg was as brilliant as he was surly and innovative as he was underhanded. Greg - a junior to his freshman - had started out good friends with his older brother Randy but soon ended up spending his afternoons with Bobby instead, dragging him around the base or out into the city of Albany on a variety of "adventures" that often ended in a long, stern lecture from his father.

And that wasn't counting the other things they'd done, behind the bleachers or in the locker room after lacrosse practice. Compared to drinking in the alleys behind the one liquor store in Albany that didn't care about proper ID, those things qualified as unforgivable.

"It's still not as bad as the look on Mr. Matthews' face when we got caught right after," Greg stressed as Bobby scooped up the last of his hashed browns. Greg leered at him - the same kind of leer he'd shown Nick in the lab several hours earlier, only with a strange familiarity behind it. "And your excuse, Robbie… ‘I dropped my watch.' I've met three-year-olds that lie better."

Bobby sent him a tense look. Most of the Tangiers' built-in restaurant was empty, and the few other diners didn't seem to be listening in on or caring about the two nearly-middle-aged men in the corner booth, eating eggs with beer. Still, the dramatic retelling of his high school exploits were a bit disconcerting on principle. "I'm just glad you knew Matthews was sleepin' with Miss Prescott in science," he admitted. Greg grinned as he finished the last of his beer. "He would've called home if you hadn't blackmailed him."

"My powers of observation have only grown, Robbie." He set down his beer bottle and glanced idly out at the rest of the patrons, watching them with the keen eye of a man who only acted disinterested.

"Those were the good old days."

He snorted. "More like the good old occasional moments under the bleachers." His leer grew as he tipped his bottle back and forth idly, worrying it between two long fingers.

This Greg House, it seemed, was a brilliant but deeply embittered man who had been through something - something more significant than being caught in the locker room or reamed out by his father - and it was only as Bobby set down his fork for the final time that he remembered how they'd gotten onto the topic of the so-called "good old days," anyway.

"I thought I asked you how you were."

Greg rolled his eyes, still surveying the sparse crowd. "And I asked you to breakfast."

"I'm here, ain't I?" Another eye roll, this one clownishly exaggerated. "C'mon, Greg. How you been? You never sent me any Christmas cards."

"What in our history, exactly, makes you think I send out any Christmas cards?" Greg turned his attention back to Bobby, his bright gaze somewhat distant. He continued toying with the beer bottle. "Went to med school, got a degree, work in Jersey. Pretty boring, really."

Bobby couldn't help but glance at the cane propped up against the back of the booth, almost like a third member of their party. Greg obviously caught this gesture and, before Bobby could form any sort of reaction, he'd jerked his head towards it. "Got a big stick, too."

"What happened?" he asked after a moment's pause.

"I think they carved it out of wood. Not sure, though. Didn't ask."

"Not that, Greg."

Greg shrugged, and there was a flicker of insecurity as he released his beer bottle. "Leg thing. Big doctor words. Not worth explaining." He smirked slightly. "I knew you'd appreciate it, though. Great weapon, little noise."

Smirking, Bobby quirked an eyebrow. "Seems a little unwieldy to me."

"That's what they all say until they handle it."

For the first time, Bobby noticed it, the sparkling behind the leers he'd been receiving as they recounted locker room exploits a few moments earlier. He frowned slightly. "Just the cane?"

"Any of my wood, really." Their eyes locked across the table as the comment floated across the air, Greg watching him carefully and gauging his reaction. How many times, years ago, had Greg used that very same expression to con him into drinking just one more beer or staying just fifteen minutes after practice? "If you're interested, of course," he added after a beat's pause, never looking away.

They kept up the makeshift staring contest for another half-second before Bobby dropped his glance to the tabletop and his empty plate. "I'm seein' someone," he said after a moment.

"Seriously?"

"Pretty serious, yeah." An inadvertent smile came to the corners of his mouth as he glanced back up at Greg and his always-intense stare. "You harassed him, actually."

The always-intense stare immediately snapped into a surprised expression. "Strokes?"

"Stokes," he corrected with a smile. "And yeah."

The surprise melted into another Greg-House-patented leer. "You know, I still do threesomes."

"I don't think I could forget if I wanted to."

"You also don't know how often I hear that."

The waitress arrived at that moment to take their plates and offer the check. Greg admired the view as she wandered off, leaning further back against the booth. "Could have been fun," he decided after a moment, not looking back across the table.

Bobby smiled slightly. "Greg, he knows where the keys to the ballistics lockers are kept."

"So?"

"So not even you can outsmart a bullet, Superman."

Greg smiled - didn't leer, or smirk, or sneer, but actually curved his lips into a sliver of an actual smile. "That's what you think, Robbie," he replied, and reached for the check.

==

Greg goaded him into playing a couple hands of blackjack before he returned home, and he stepped into a house darkened by closed curtains and blinds another hour and a half later. He puttered through the normal routine of locking up, flipping through the mail, and setting the coffee pot to brew, noticing last that the light on the machine was blinking.

"Robbie Dawson! It's your ol' pal Greg," greeted the voice, already re-familiarized in the back of Bobby's mind. "I'm in town for a couple days - booze and women, you know how it goes - so I'm going to buy you dinner. Don't thank me."

He smiled slightly at the machine before he wandered into the bedroom.

"You used to go by Robbie?" Nick asked somewhat blearily as soon as he entered, and Bobby blinked into the thick darkness provided by the blackout shades. "Saved the message for you."

Smirking into the darkness, Bobby shed his jeans and shirt and climbed into bed, the mattress sagging comfortably under his weight. Nick rolled over to study him, and for the first time, Bobby realized exactly how much like a CSI's gaze Greg's sharp eyes really were. "Doesn't seem like the kind of person you'd be friends with," Nick noted after a moment of silence.

"He isn't," Bobby admitted with a slight shrug, and reached up to smooth his knuckles along Nick's jawbone. "I just knew him, you know?"

"In Georgia?"

"In high school, yeah." Nick smiled slightly as Bobby allowed his hand to drift a lazy path down his arm and side, settling eventually on his hipbone. "Jealous?"

The smile shifted slightly, almost suspicious. "Dunno. Should I be?"

"Hard wood aside?"

Nick snorted. "Yeah."

The room fell into a simple silence and Bobby sighed. He remembered, however briefly, lacrosse fields and cigarette-littered alleyways where they sat on cracked milk crates and drank the cheapest beer money could buy. Somehow, he had a feeling that more than "big doctor terms" had come between the Greg of those days and the Greg of these, similar in brilliance but also somehow different in spirit.

"It was a long time ago," he decided after a moment, his eyes slowly drifting shut. "Kind of a different world, ya know?"

Vaguely, he was aware of Nick's fingers finding his arm and tracing a few lopsided patterns across his skin. "Still can't believe you know him," Nick murmured.

"I knew him," Bobby corrected, and thankfully, Nick said nothing more.