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Two weeks on the road, and they stumble across a faith healer in a gray hotel conference room out by some airport. At least, it seems like a stumble.
Boyd dresses more casually now, cooler, like any other college-age kid. Sweaters and jeans, instead of suits. Hair messier than it used to be. The whole performance a little more raw, more real.
He recognizes them. Smiles. Places his hand on Dr Wilson’s chest.
“How’d you know I was sick?” Wilson asks.
“He wouldn't have come here for himself,” Boyd says, nodding at House.
It's true. Still. Wilson is less concerned with the allegedly-healing hand on his chest, more worried about House.
In a diner down the road, waiting for onion rings to arrive: “What the hell was that?”
“What?”
“Boyd!” Wilson says, incredulously. “It's completely irrational!”
“Right!” House agrees.
Wilson blinks. “Okay. So you do know it's -”
“No, I suddenly forgot decades of medical experience. Of course it's irrational.”
“You hate irrational.”
He shrugs. “Everyone's irrational when it's someone they love.”
He says it so simply, openly, that it doesn't quite register at first. As though he’s noting the weather, pointing out the obvious.
Wilson opens his mouth and then closes it again. That is, he thinks, exactly what House is doing here.
“Where's the nearest bar?” he asks instead.
*
Wilson doesn't push it. Someone they love. House said it; he doesn't need to fish for compliments.
Trust House, he thinks, to somehow avoid saying it directly right when he needed to hear it, but to drop it in casually now.
*
Every ten days or so, after that, they somehow wind up in the presence of another faith healer. It doesn't disrupt their routine; it's more like House seeks out whoever the nearest flake is and tugs them towards them.
Wilson finds it endearing, the first few times, and then his patience wears out. “Not going to see another charlatan,” he says, coughing.
“It's twenty minutes,” House protests.
“I don't have twenty minutes to waste!” Wilson snaps.
“It could save your life!”
Wilson stares. “Right,” he mutters to himself, carrying out his own mental diagnosis. Smoke inhalation, he thinks. Extensive drug abuse. Anticipatory grief, maybe. At any rate, House has lost his mind. “We need to get you a CT scan.”
House squints. “What? No. No scans. I'm dead.”
“Yeah, yeah. Except we need to get your brain into a scanner. You're sick.” It makes sense now in a horrible sort of way. He imagines a whiteboard, imagines scrawling “selfless behavior” as a symptom. House gave up being a doctor for him - he should've seen this sooner.
“I'm not sick.”
“You're sending me to faith healers,” he says wearily. “You're sick.”
*
“I'm not sick,” House insists all the way to the hospital, where Wilson provides fake details and lists off just enough worrying symptoms to get him admitted and tested and scanned promptly.
MRI, clean. CT, clean. PET scan, clean.
“Can we go now?” House whines like a child.
The attending mutters something about scheduling another test in a month or so, monitoring symptoms, but confirms that yeah, he's free to leave.
On their way out they agree that neither of them would have let a patient walk out of there like that. Wilson watches House's face light up as he talks, and the wave of grief that hits him is enormous.
“You're never going to be a doctor again,” he says, haunted - reiterating a point he's made before, made at the very start of this insane quest of theirs, but somehow it feels fresh and raw and newly appalling.
“Are we doing the Great Lakes or what?” House is good at deflecting.
“You deserve one last surgery,” Wilson says, his heart pounding.
“I'm a physician, not a surgeon -”
“You're you.” Wilson shrugs. “You think you can't handle it?”
It's exactly the right tack to take. House knows he's being manipulated but he can't resist the challenge. “What'd you have in mind?”
*
It is no more insane than having a faith healer place hands on him. That is what Wilson reminds himself as they prepare for surgery in a hotel room - maybe not the most unhinged thing either of them has ever done but definitely in the top five.
Worst case scenario, he dies on the table. He's dying anyway.
Best case scenario, House gets enough of the tumor no one in their right mind would operate on, enough of it to slow things down. He might get another year or two.
“Hey,” Wilson says, grabbing House's hands before he goes under. “I just need you to know -”
“Yeah, yeah, you're totally gay for me,” House snarks.
Wilson rolls his eyes. “I love you. You jerk. Try not to kill me.”
House smiles. Genuinely.
Wilson closes his eyes. If that's the last thing he sees, he's grateful it's something beautiful.
*
Groggy. Sore. Alive.
“The tumor shrunk,” House says, hoarsely. “Delayed response to the chemo. Or -”
“Or Boyd,” Wilson rasps.
House doesn't sneer. He opens his mouth wide, silent, and then shakes his head. “Maybe,” he admits.
“Okay, I get it, I'm dead. No way the real Greg House would ever allow that as a possibility.”
House bites his lip. “We got it. The whole thing.”
Wilson freezes. He doesn't understand. Can't let himself take it in. “It's - gone?”
“Yeah.”
“But it - are you sure?”
“For now.” The caution in House's voice is strangely what convinces him this is real.
“Oh my god.”
“Yeah.” House stares at him. “You wanna go home?”
Home: Princeton. The hospital. Cancer patients. Regular life, with all its attendant heartbreak. Wilson would be lying if he said it held no appeal. He's a good doctor. He cares. His work matters to him.
But.
“You're my home,” is what he says.
House pretends to gag. “Gross. No. Take that back.”
Wilson laughs. He's grateful for this response, really; both of them earnest at the same time doesn't work. “So, the Great Lakes,” he says. “Which one do we do first?”