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It was four am and he needed more than anything to sleep, but the conversation, and its implications, would not give him peace. Wilson’s memory is an excellent storage device, and it served him well in med school. He can memorize statistics, quotes, images, movements, and conversations. His memory has been called photographic. But for all its usefulness in his career, it causes difficulties for his emotional well-being because he remembers every vocal pitch, every facial spasm, every word of his fights.
But this hadn’t been a fight. House had slinked into his office with a slouch, his head not so high and up mighty as it usually was. Wilson had thought he was behaving oddly these past few weeks, always distant and alternating between morose and giddy, but this-- this was defeat. He was walking into Wilson’s office like he’d already lost and if that had been unusual at the time, the knowledge of why tore at him now.
“I have something to tell you,” he had said, and that if nothing else was a sign of how bad this was going to be. When House had something to say, he said it, and he said it clearly and without shame. If he had to set up the fact that he needed to get something off his chest—
He was facing the window, his profile standing before Wilson. He seemed intent on something outside. Perhaps he’d just noticed something remarkable about the familiar trees and buildings. Perhaps he couldn’t bear to look Wilson.
Wilson didn’t prompt him. He never prompted him. He just waited for what was given.
“I’m fucking Tritter. Well, he’s fucking me, to be more accurate.”
Now, as Wilson shuts his eyes and tries to fall asleep in his hotel room, he feels cold all over as he remembers that. When he’d first heard that, he’d been numb, almost deaf, to the news. He didn’t believe it because he didn’t want to. If he believed hard enough that it was a joke, then it would be one. House could be self-destructive, but even he had to have his limits.
If House had had difficulty in starting, he continued without effort. “It’s not bad—not at all, and that’s why, I guess, if it was bad I wouldn’t be—“
“You hate him,” Wilson felt the need to point out, but his delivery came out weak and as distant as he felt House was. “You hate his guts.” He had been holding onto the hope that this was no more than House using his twisted imagination to torture him, but as the realization that this was no joke seeped into him, he felt sick. Don’t throw up in your own office, Wilson had thought to himself, don’t.
House bit his lip, and Wilson, well versed in Housian Expression, saw that he was fatalistic over this. That he’d accepted the fact that he was fucking or seeing or screwing himself over with someone he couldn’t stand. “It’s not about liking, is it now.”
Of course it wasn’t. If it was about liking, he wouldn’t be here in this hotel room by himself, he wouldn’t have to hear that it was Michael freaking Tritter who was sleeping with House, he wouldn’t have to feel alone and sick and angry and jealous and bitter.
The denial had given away to anger at that point, and Wilson had snapped—snarled, perhaps-- at him, “Why are you telling me this?”
Again House bowed his head, and through his anger it occurred to Wilson that he had to be feeling a great pressure of self-loathing and confusion if he had actually came forth and told him something this humiliating. Good, he’d thought, good, let him feel bad; he deserves it.
“Call it a confession,” House said, and only House could have made that sound both flippant and self-humbling.
And that’s when Wilson remembered that this was his friend and that this was his friend’s round-about way of asking for help. Wilson reminded himself that his own emotions should be set aside, like they always were, because House’s came first. Like always.
But the help he offered was refused automatically. He tried to ask what he wanted to do, what he thought he should do—he tried to get House to talk about this—but House had rolled his eyes and mimicked him blah-blah-ing.
Whatever help House wanted or needed, Wilson couldn’t give it to him. Like always.
House hadn’t given, nor had Wilson asked for, the details of his arrangement with Tritter. Frankly, Wilson hadn’t wanted to know. But perhaps it would have been better. Because if Wilson had a good memory, then his imagination was nothing short of amazing. As he runs over the conversation over and over again in his mind, he simultaneously wonders—imagines-- what degrading, base things House might be doing with Tritter. And again he feels ill.
Wilson had long since realized that there was no saving House, but he still wants to, and it still kills him that he can’t.