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Gregory House was an asshole.
This wasn't news to anyone who'd spent more than thirty seconds with him. He spewed insults more than he held normal conversation. He slipped needlessly cruel jokes about patients into his diagnoses. He stole food and trinkets off desks and from under his colleague's literal noses. He lied and manipulated and could probably get his cane classified as a weapon of mass destruction.
He wasn't a nice man.
Not like him. He thought as he walked down the street in the cold October afternoon. Not like Wilson.
James Wilson was an angel.
Everybody thought so. He was so sweet, so good. He brought children stuffed animals from the gift shop, discussed comic books and boy bands at length with teenage sarcoma wards, laughed and cried with his patients, held them as they passed. He offered up chunks of his own body to revive dying husbands and grandfathers. It was as though his heart had been built too small, and all it's love and compassion was constantly oozing out, through his bloodstream and into his life.
It took something huge, something truly evil, to staunch the flow of that bleeding heart.
Like his friend Lisa punching him hard in the hospital parking lot, her body trembling with the effort to keep it together and avoid a scene, a point made rather moot by the fact he was bleeding from his mouth.
Like his repeated apologies to the woman he betrayed falling on deaf ears, following her across the lobby until she turned sharply and told him in a shaking voice that maybe it was best for everyone if he took the week off.
Like stumbling home and finding his friend-turned-secret-lover still lounging around in his pajamas, tuning his guitar. Not phased by his girlfriend dumping him mere hours before. Not even reacting to Wilson's fat lip except to ask if he'd gotten into a turf war with the Girl Scouts again.
Something like that might do it.
Wilson threw down his bag and screamed with fiery eyes at House to get out, to leave and never come back. To go ruin somebody else's life.
And he did.
Anything big enough to break Wilson was enough to make House listen.
He let himself be shoved out of the building with nothing but his cane and the clothes on his back. He walked up and down the streets of Princeton under the gray and stormy skies, his cane whacking against the cracked sidewalk. A few passerby stared at his pajama bottoms, but he didn’t care or even notice.
He couldn’t think about anything that wasn’t James Wilson, the good man he had broken.
It had never felt this bad when it ended with Stacy, with Cuddy. House had always been able to pare the blow down to more manageable levels through reason, through cold hard facts. He could zero in on moments in their relationships where his girlfriends were to blame, where the screaming and lying and throwing shoes was their fault, their mistakes and flaws. His pushing them away was just a natural reaction to them doing the same.
But Wilson had never given him a reason to run. He was too good for that. For House.
The wind was picking up. College kids and young mothers ran for cover in coffee shops and grimy thrift stores, their eyes flicking up at the ominous sky. His leg ached and his muscles pulled tightly in between his joints, screaming for a rest, but he didn’t stop. He had never done what was good for him, why start now?
This hurt because everything that had happened - instigating the affair, lying to Cuddy, barreling ahead like a runaway train, never once giving any regard to how Wilson was faring on the parallel rail - was his fault. His twisted, callous, selfish fault.
The rain was falling now, in infrequent, chilly drops. They hit his forehead and cheeks and lips, small and spiky, like tiny knives. He finally took mercy on his leg and leaned against a storefront, his back to the glass.
He breathed hard for a minute, hunching over to rub his thigh. His mind was racing, a million words stringing themselves into a billion thoughts. One, however, stood out among the blur.
You know, Wilson doesn’t need good.
His thumb ran over his puckered skin and he analyzed his own words, trying to strain their meaning from his mind's stew. Wilson was good. He was the personification of light. Nobody he found could ever shine as brightly as he would.
The best case scenario would be loving someone dark, someone made of night and cold and blackened earth. Someone who could display to the world how wonderful he was, if only by contrast.
House had his fingers wrapped around his cell before he remembered Wilson wasn’t taking his calls. He had been trying to get him to pick up all morning, and kept getting sent straight to voicemail.
He had to find a pay phone.
“It’s like the freaking ‘90s.” He grumbled, limping back into the flow of the sidewalk, this time at double speed.
It took a good half hour to locate an actual working pay phone, and another fifteen minutes stealing enough petty change to make a call. His hands shook when he pressed the buttons, numb in the brisk fall air. The rain was a little steadier now, plastering his hair flat against his scalp as it came down.
It rang twice as he waited. Wilson would never ignore an unknown number - it might be a patient in need. He was sweet like that.
It rang again. An old woman came to stand behind House, tapping her foot impatiently as she twirled an umbrella over her head, droplets spinning off and hitting the back of House's thin tee shirt. He turned around and grinned.
“Gee, I’m so excited to be back out on the streets. They say Nercophiliacs Anonymous just flies by, but lemme tell ya, I thought I was going to be the corpse getting felt up by the time I got outta there!”
The woman’s eyes widened and she coughed loudly, backing away. He smirked.
“…Yeah, hello?”
It dropped from his face as quickly as it came. Wilson’s voice was slow to start, and a little stuffed up. He’d been crying, and was trying valiantly to hide it.
“I’m a jerk.” He said, before Wilson could even ask who was calling. “I’m not going to remember birthdays or go to parties and I’ll probably try and sabotage our relationship. I owe you over $14,000 in expenses and damages.”
“House, shockingly, this isn’t helping.” Wilson had dropped his Concerned Doctor voice and fallen back into the tones of misery and anger. He didn’t hang up though, so House spoke again.
“I'm screwed up. Really fucking screwed up."
"No arguments from me there."
"But you keep coming back. Because that’s what you like. It’s what you need.”
“You think I need to betray a good friend and be publicly humiliated?”
There was such a long silence it seemed for a moment as though the connection had been lost. Then House sucked in a breath through his teeth, a little rain coming in too, damping his tongue.
“I think you need m-someone to…fall back on.”
There was another silence. When Wilson spoke again, his voice was entirely different. Soft. Stunned.
“House…"
House coughed, loudly. His cheeks and ears suddenly felt warm, despite the chill. “Because I’m not anything great, but I could be the best of a bad situation. You’re not getting any younger. And you’re still making all the same screw ups and still got all the flaws you’ve always had-“
“House.”
“Yep.” His nonchalance was so forced it was almost laughable.
Wilson scoffed, and the line made a crinkling, shifting noise. He was holding the phone in between his ear and shoulder, rubbing his face with his hands. “Shut up.”
House stared at the receiver, now slick with rain, unsure of how to proceed.
Another rustle, and the phone returned to Wilson's hand. He sighed. “Come over. We can get dinner...talk.”
Click.
Doctors know loss of muscle, either through atrophy or surgical removal, causes motor skills and strength to suffer, never fully recovering to their peak abilities.
Most would argue there are some exceptions, however, if they had seen how fast House ran back to James Wilson’s apartment.