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House had been right, Wilson considered as he sat in his office. Dying did change everything.
It changed friendships – he had just told off House and cut their friendship off down the middle, feeling as if he had severed a limb but still felt its phantom twinges traveling up his spine.
It changed love – he had had Amber, and maybe he had taken her for granted. Maybe it had seemed like another round of the same old thing he had felt when he had met each of his ex-wives, the calm before the storm. Or maybe it had been the storm he had lived for.
And House had been central through it all. If Wilson was honest with himself, House had been a rock to him.
But he needed somebody to blame, and it seemed as if that somebody needed to be House. If it weren’t for him, well… Then nothing would have happened. Selfish, nasty House messing everything up again, and he had always been jealous of Amber anyway.
It was an easy place to channel all the guilt, an easy place to put all the pain and hatred that he would be injecting into himself otherwise.
“But not healthy.”
Wilson turned his head, trying to figure out where the voice had come from.
“Over here, James.”
His eyes settled on the chair in this office where House would generally sit – the one on the other side of the desk. And she was sitting there, impossible as it was, all long blonde hair and a look on her face that indicated that even though this meeting was a little bit beneath her, she was going to do it anyway. Because it was important, maybe.
“Amber. You can’t be here.”
“I can’t?” she echoed, kicking one leg over the other. The chair seemed to move under her weight, which Wilson figured couldn’t be good for his mental state. He started to wonder how he could tell if he was oriented x3 in a way that he could be sure of. “Well, I can do anything now, can’t I? I’m no longer constrained by the physical… Isn’t that what they say?”
“You’re in my head, Amber. This is just some kind of a… grief reaction.”
“Maybe,” she agreed, “Or maybe not. Maybe I’m here because you’re packing your things up to leave the hospital you love.”
“This hospital isn’t what I love,” he fired back. “It’s a building. A workplace. I can find another.”
“And another? And another? How long will you run from me, James?”
“I’m not running,” Wilson said, shoving a few prescription pads into a box absentmindedly. “I just need a change. I can’t keep looking at House every day, and I don’t even know why I’m talking to you about this. You’re not real and even if you were real, you don’t like House anyway. You would encourage me to get away from him. Ergo, you are not real.”
“I never told you to get away from House. I told you there was room enough to let me in.”
“And see how well that worked out.”
“Ouch. Touchy.”
Wilson rolled his eyes.
“Even my grief-fueled hallucinations are giving me a hard time,” he complained, picking up a stack of medical journals and trying to decide whether to pack them or just trash them.
“Well, the only time you ever had fun at a medical conference is when House came along,” Amber mused. She swiveled in the chair a moment and then stood up from it, crossing her arms and clicking her tongue. “Are you really going to read those on your own?”
“I don’t remember asking your opinion, Ghost Amber.”
“Who you gonna call?” she replied with a smirk.
Wilson dumped the journals into the trash can and kept moving.
Everything on his desk seemed more and more irrelevant. It seemed to all fall into two categories – medical textbooks and stuff he had gotten as inside jokes with House. Neither of them seemed right to him right now. He hadn’t been able to save Amber…
“The most brilliant minds together couldn’t save me,” she told him. “Don’t hold it against yourself. It was just… one of those things. Isn’t that what you tell patients when it’s hopeless? You did all that you could have done.”
“But you know that we don’t ever really believe that.”
“We have to. Or no doctor would ever sleep,” Wilson retorted. “We have to convince ourselves that we did.”
“And we can. When it’s somebody else who we never have to see again,” Amber replied. “That’s one reason I got into radiology instead. It’s all scans. I remember you saying once that I didn’t have a great bedside manner.”
“You didn’t,” Wilson replied, “But neither does House. And look how many people he saves.”
“Then why are you leaving?”
Amber glided across the room, and it was then that Wilson realized she was dressed in her lab coat like she was at work, rather than what she had been wearing the last time he had seen her, the last time before the bus crash, and Wilson wanted to kick himself as he realized he couldn’t even remember what that outfit had been. Shouldn’t something like that always stay in someone’s memory? Shouldn’t it always be immediate, ever-present, not an image printed out on the past?
“Because I can’t look at his face knowing what he did.”
“So you’re forgetting the whole DBS deal, then?” Amber inquired, “And I thought I was the cutthroat one.” She smirked and leaned against the wall, hands supporting her back.
“It’s not about the DBS. It’s not even about you. It’s not about me. It’s about House. He’s toxic, and this was just the culmination of… well, just years and years of shit.”
“Then why don’t you feel any better?” Amber inquired.
“How do you know how I feel? You’re not real, or even if you are, it’s not… it’s not the same.”
“Nothing is the same,” Amber said, “And I know how you feel because you’re crying.”
Wilson looked down at his hand, which had traveled to his cheek without him realizing it, and it did come away wet. He waved his hand and shrugged it all off.
“I’m leaving,” he said, feeling more like a child gathering his things and slipping off in the night than he wanted to.
Amber smiled, and maybe he was imagining the sad look; maybe he was managing her entirely, but…
“I’ll be right along,” she said, and Wilson stared at his boxes until the sun went down.