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Cuddy’s been holding his hand for so long that his fingers are numb. That, or it’s nerve damage from the DBS.
He knows what she’s doing. Trying to keep him in the land of the living, using physical contact to anchor him here. He knows, conceptually, that it’s a nice thing to do, that he should be comforted. But he feels nothing.
The thing is, the one person he needs to see is the one person who wants nothing to do with him. He wants Wilson so urgently that it’s a physical ache, deep in his chest, making it hard to breathe or think straight. Wilson is his north star, his safety, his center. Life without him is unfathomable.
So for now, he chooses not to fathom it. He works hard not to think about the last look he’d seen on Wilson’s face, when they made eye contact through the glass wall of this hospital room. A look so unreadable that he couldn’t tell if Wilson was relieved to see him alive, or disappointed. It should have been you, House imagines him saying, and honestly, he can’t argue the point.
He works equally hard not to think about Amber reaching for him as the bus overturned, the metal jutting through her thigh, the confused horror in her eyes. I’m cold.
He should have hired her last year, he thinks to himself, semi-sanely. Maybe none of this would have happened. If she’d won the game, she wouldn’t have needed the consolation prize.
“Consolation prize?” He hears Amber say this from somewhere behind his head. “You and I both know you don’t see Wilson’s love as a consolation prize. That’s the jackpot.”
“Shouldn’t you have ascended to a higher plane by now?” he snaps at her, but when he turns his head there’s nobody there, of course.
His voice wakes Cuddy, though. She uncoils herself in the chair beside him, wincing at a cramp in her neck, then looking at him with concern.
“How are you feeling?”
“Peachy.”
He avoids her gaze, but he can feel it on him nonetheless, boring into him as she checks his vitals.
“You should go home,” he tells her, and he means it. It’s dark outside and he’s long since lost track of time, but they’ve all been here for close to 48 hours straight, the chaos of the crash and the mystery and Amber all blurring into one endless, nightmarish day. “Folding yourself up into a Rubik’s Cube in that chair’s no way to sleep. Not at your age.”
The jab is so half-hearted that he wishes he hadn’t bothered, but she gives him a long-suffering glare anyway. Both of them feigning normalcy.
Cuddy rises to leave, but then pauses. Looks down at him with an expression that’s almost stern, like she’s afraid he’s missed something.
“I hope you know how significant that was. What you did for Wilson.”
“Killed his girlfriend?”
“You almost died trying to save her. You quite literally fried your brain. And because you did that, Wilson and Amber got to say goodbye to each other.”
“Yeahhh,” he says, with a mock-contemplative squint, “and I killed his girlfriend.” He’s not interested in litigating this with her. If he were a functional human being, if he were capable of taking care of himself, if he didn’t feel entitled to Wilson’s help every minute of every hour of every day, Amber would have had no reason to be on the bus at midnight on a Monday.
Cuddy keeps trying to argue, but he tunes her out. Lets himself sink into the overwhelming feeling that he shouldn't be here. It should have been me.
~
When he wakes up again, it’s light outside. And Wilson is standing at the foot of his bed.
He blinks, concerned he’s hallucinating. Wilson doesn’t disappear. In fact, he moves closer. He looks exhausted, even more ragged than he had a day ago.
“Hey,” House says, softly.
“You look awful,” Wilson replies, lowering himself into the chair at House’s bedside. His voice sounds small and hoarse, like he hasn’t used it in a long time.
“Seen a mirror lately? Pot, meet kettle.”
“Are you—“ Wilson waves a hand at the monitors. “Your vitals look fine, CT scan’s clean, but how do you feel?”
House has to take a second to process this question.
“Didn’t realize you cared,” he says, more bitterly than he intended. “I’m fine. No permanent damage, probably.”
Wilson nods, looking down at the ground. House can feel the weight of all the things he should be saying right now, the words pressing against his vocal cords but refusing to come out. Are you okay? What do you need? Will you ever forgive me?
“Did you get any sleep?” he finally asks, instead. Wilson shakes his head, and that’s worrying. He’s been awake for days.
“I tried to. But the apartment— it’s full of her.” Wilson’s voice cracks on the last word of this sentence. “So I just took a shower, came back here. There’s a lot of paperwork to do, anyway. She didn’t have any family.”
House had noticed this, the lack of any next of kin besides Wilson. Unusual, but something about it had also clarified Amber, thrilling the part of his brain that craved answers. Her steely self-reliance, her compulsive need to succeed, her ruthlessness. She’d never been more admirable to him.
“I swear to God, if I could switch places with her, I would,” he says then, words all tumbling out in a rush. “It should’ve been me.”
To say it out loud is liberating. He expects Wilson to agree, at least tacitly. He’s too gentle to admit it outright, but there’ll surely be a half-nod he can’t quite disguise, a curl of his lip that says yeah, it should. But instead, Wilson’s face crumples, and he starts to cry. Deep, wracking sobs.
House freezes. This was not the reaction he planned on, and that deep ache in his chest returns with a vengeance, like something in him is wrenching at the sight of Wilson in pain. He can’t stand it.
“Wilson,“ he says quietly, reaching for him, though he’s still too weak to move much. His hand hangs in mid-air, useless, inches from his friend’s shaking form. But then Wilson grabs his outstretched hand and clings onto it, rests his tear-streaked face against House’s knuckle.
“I thought you were dead too,” he says, his voice uneven and distorted by tears. “After Amber, after they took her away, I went to my office and I had… I don’t know. I guess I fell asleep for a few minutes, but I didn’t realize it. I thought I was still awake, walking around the fifth floor, and I got paged to come to your room, and I just knew. I knew you were gone.” He takes a shuddering, painful-sounding breath.
“Can’t get rid of me that easily. I already stuck a knife in a socket, my body’s pretty much immune to electricity. Also to bullets. And heart attacks. When the rest of you are all long gone, it’s just gonna be me and the cockroaches.”
He’s rambling a little, trying to make Wilson laugh, and he does.
“Amber said you were like a cat.”
“Obsessed with licking my own ass?”
“Nine lives.”
And this makes sense, of course, since Amber was the one he paged, the one who found him that day. Pumped his heart back to life after he shocked it into stillness. She saved his life, and he ended hers.
“She was good,” House says, not meaning to say it out loud, this half-formed thought. But it’s true. She was so good.
Wilson sobs again at this, bowing his head lower until his face is pressed against House’s shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he chokes out, and House scrunches a hand into Wilson’s hair, strokes his head, barely breathing. “It was insane, asking you to do this. Asking you to risk your life. I was just… I wasn’t thinking straight. I just wanted to save her. I wanted more of her. We only got six months, and I just wanted more of her—” His voice cracks, another sob obscuring the rest of his words.
“I know,” House murmurs, holding onto him as tight as he can. “I know.”
He’s reminded of a night, seven years ago this month. The worst night of his life until now. It was days after Stacy left, when the anger and denial had given way to raw abandonment, and the pain in his leg was so bad it made him physically sick.
He’d spewed bile at Wilson, both literally and metaphorically, cursing at him, ordering him to leave, and he'd calmly absorbed it all and stayed with him. And finally, when he’d burned through his reserves of impotent rage, he’d wept in Wilson’s arms, clinging to what felt like his only hope as Wilson said you’re okay, I’ve got you, over and over. No-one had ever seen him cry like that, before or since.
After so many years of holding House together, now Wilson’s the one who’s adrift, clinging to a lifeboat in choppy and treacherous waters. And as lifeboats go, he isn’t the most structurally sound, but he’s here. He’ll be here, always, for Wilson.
“Come here,” he murmurs after several minutes, after Wilson’s sobs have evened out into jagged breaths. “Up here. You need to sleep.”
House shifts to the right, creating space, and Wilson doesn’t hesitate, maybe too exhausted to argue. He climbs up onto the bed, pressed so close that House can feel him shaking. It’s only then that it occurs to House: this must be exactly how he’d lain with Amber at the end. He feels winded by that thought, his chest tightening with empathy.
Wilson’s tears are silent now, soaking into House’s neck and the flimsy cotton of his hospital gown, and he pulls him closer and shuts his eyes. Prays to a higher power he doesn’t believe in, to bring Wilson peace.