Chapter Text
People will think we’re gay.
The sentence had weight.
Wilson catalogued it as such—five words, immediate social consequence, predictable outcome. It had been the commonly regurgitated justification for detours, delays, and silence, always delivered with a voice already apologizing for existing. It explained the long path away from want and toward the acceptable, uttered with the precise tone that suggested awareness of An Important Rule, even while violating it by thinking too hard about it.
Wilson was good at rules.
He had avoided the obvious Abnormal Acts his whole life, for he had bound the impulses of his body with schedules, ethics committees, consent forms, and unspoken agreements. When his patients spoke, voices packed with grief and self-disgust, he understood immediately. He always did. Empathy came easily when it was someone else’s mess.
Wilson used to respond to their pleas: “We’ll get through this,” a guilty sort of kindness drenching his voice, and he would be called a saint, a martyr, the Boy Wonder Oncologist with sympathy for all.
What he did not tell them is that he had learned, young and thoroughly, how to punish a body for producing unauthorized thoughts. That he had broken himself into compliance often enough that the procedure felt routine.
The hotel bed was thin and unfamiliar, its sheets tucked too tightly for comfort. Lying on the lumpy mattress, Wilson lay awake, counting the seams in the ceiling, then the seconds between the hums of the ventilation system.
When that failed, he strums the self-made scars on his hands and thighs; thick portions of tissue made from healed cuts and burns that recount each of the foolish cravings of his idle brain—and how he would treat them.
Pencil sharpeners, shaving razors, weeks skipping lunch, boiling showers in his McGill dorm—he sought out every weapon of penance that would enable him to castigate weakness. Long fastings would deny his brain the energy to dream up morbid fantasies of gun cabinets and pills, and his arms, flayed open and still oozing plasma, would not have enough will or strength to reach for weakness. He observed the geography of his skin with the same detachment he used when reading scans. Evidence of past interventions. No need to review methodology. Outcomes were inconclusive.
Vivid memories from his university days remind him of how he would bask in the delectable taste of a blade tearing through his skin; whimper with the sight of wet blood draining from a freshly made wound, staining his sweatshirt with deep red; sigh with relief in a grotesque body that would not have enough strength to load its brain with distractions and stupidity, feeble yet feverish, full of the certainty that a permitted kind of pleasure was cleansing him.
He knows that tonight is supposed to be a sleepless one. The political strife suffocating Princeton Plainsboro; gossip leaking through the walls of the hotel—something about budget cuts—several ballots against his initiatives that are set to fail; the possibility of once again finding House missing—all weigh on Wilson’s shoulders to the point of crushing his bones. His insomniac thoughts do not surprise him; he thinks, almost desperately, of his best friend.
Wilson closes his eyes. The first memory of House’s existence comes back to his mind: unkempt hair, sharp eyes that saw too much, hands that moved with certainty even when they shouldn’t. The way House had looked at him during their first meeting—not through him, but into him, parsing Wilson’s careful construction of normalcy with the same diagnostic precision he’d use on a patient.
“Greg...” The whisper escapes unbidden, and Wilson’s chest tightens with something that feels like grief and longing combined. His thoughts spiral, images of House overlapping with the crushing weight of everything Wilson has denied himself. The careful distance he’s maintained. The jokes that cut too close. The way House’s presence makes his hands shake with something that isn’t fear.
In a loud, hitched gasp, Wilson sits up abruptly, gasping for air and wide-eyed, his damp polyester sleep shirt glued to his skin. He feels claustrophobic, desperate to leave that windowless, prison-cell-like bedroom, terror dripping from his nape in the form of sweat, and shoves the bunch of sheets off his body, crawling out of bed as if it were made of quicksand.
Covering his shoulders with his jacket, Wilson rubs his damp fingers on the doorknob; they slip once, twice, struggling to wrap around it. “Fuck,” he whispers, then shakes his head until the door finally opens.
He leaves his room like a man drowning.
A trio of digital numbers above the elevator panel flicks before Wilson’s eyes: 2:57 a.m. In contrast to his stifling room, the cold air of the tiny cubicle feels rather comfortable on his skin. Leaning on a wall of stainless steel, he takes a deep breath, then another, until his hands are less pale and quivery than the ones that almost smashed the door handle of his room.
“Ground Floor,” the voice in the elevator jolts Wilson out of his reverie. As he reaches the lobby, a cramping ache radiates through his bones, reminding him that he is stepping on the cold marble floor in his socks—he was so concerned about escape that he forgot his shoes entirely.
He does not mind. Pain might do him some good, as it always does. Distract him from unwanted thoughts whilst he navigates the restricted immensity and solitude of a pitch-black hall that is so used to being crowded during the day.
The lobby doors stand before him, glass reflecting his gaunt silhouette. Wilson pushes through into the night air.
The cold is immediate and vicious. It bites through his thin clothes, raises goosebumps on his arms, and numbs his feet through his socks. The parking lot stretches before him, empty except for scattered vehicles under orange sodium lights.
His battered Corvette sits three spaces away.
Wilson’s hand moves to his jacket pocket automatically for his keys. He hadn’t meant to grab them, but muscle memory had intervened. The metal feels heavy in his palm as he approaches the vehicle.
He should go back inside. He knows this with clinical certainty.
Instead, Wilson unlocks the door and slides into the driver’s seat.
The interior light illuminates the car’s cabin, and Wilson catches sight of his medical bag on the passenger seat. He’d forgotten it was there—leftover supplies from his last hospital visit. His hands are shaking as he reaches for it, unzipping the main compartment with trembling fingers.
Syringes. Alcohol wipes. Bandages.
A scalpel.
Wilson’s breath catches in his throat. The blade gleams under the dome light, small and sterile and perfectly familiar. He’s held thousands of them and used them to save lives, to excise tumours, to open bodies with precision and care.
Now he presses it against his forearm as if he’s in his twenties again, drunk with a dull pencil sharpener. He craves that euphoric pain, sharp and clean and honest in a way nothing else in his life has been.
Wilson watches with detached fascination as the skin separates, pale edges pulling back to reveal the fatty yellow subcutaneous tissue beneath. Blood wells up immediately, thick and dark, spilling over the sides of the wound and dripping onto his pyjama pants in heavy drops. The bitterness of copper fills the car’s interior.
"Just once,” he whispers, even as his hand moves the blade again.
The second cut crosses the first, forming an X. More blood flows, faster and maybe warmer than he remembers, soaking into the fabric of his sleeve. Had it always been this easy? Did he apply too much pressure?
Wilson’s breathing comes faster. The pain radiates up his arm in waves, but beneath it is that familiar relief, that sense of punishment delivered and received. He deserves this. For his thoughts. For his weakness. For being fundamentally Wrong, Bad, Abnormal, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong in ways he can’t fix.
The scalpel moves with practiced efficiency, creating a lattice of wounds across his forearm. Some are shallow, others deep enough that he can see the white gleam of fascia. Blood pools in his lap now, soaking through to his skin, sticky and cooling.
His hand is slippery with it when he finally sets the scalpel down on the passenger seat, leaving crimson smears on the leather. Wilson stares at his mutilated arm, at the geometric pattern of destruction he’s sloppily carved, and feels something like peace settle over him.
This pain belongs to him. This he chose.
The engine turns over with a quiet purr. Wilson doesn’t remember deciding to drive, but his foot is already on the brake, his sticky hand shifting into reverse. Blood continues to drip from his arm, pattering onto the floor mat in a steady rhythm.
He drives without a destination, taking turns at random. The streets are empty at this hour. His injured arm continues to dribble red streaks on the leather. Each movement sends fresh pain shooting up to his shoulder, accompanied by more bleeding. He should probably apply pressure and find something to use as a tourniquet. Should do any number of things his medical training screams at him to do.
Instead, Wilson drives faster.
The highway stretches before him, empty and inviting. The speedometer climbs—75, 80, 85. His vision blurs slightly at the edges, whether from blood loss or tears or exhaustion, he can’t tell anymore. Doesn’t matter.
The bridge appears ahead, a concrete span over a steep ravine. Wilson has driven across it dozens of times without thought. Now he studies it with new eyes—the low guardrails, the drop beyond, the rocks and water far below that would crush a body on impact.
It would be easy.
So easy.
Just turn the wheel. Let physics and gravity do their work. The fall would take—what, three seconds? Four? And then it would be over. No more pretending. No more rules. No more exhausting performance of being someone he fundamentally isn’t.
Wilson’s blood-stickied grip tightens on the steering wheel. The bridge is two hundred yards away. One hundred fifty. One hundred.
His foot presses harder on the accelerator. The speedometer hits 90.
Fifty yards.
Wilson closes his eyes, feels blood congealing on his arm, and hears his own ragged breathing in the confined space.
And sees House.
House getting the call. House identifying his body. House hacking feverishly into his leg. House with a needle in his arm. House staring at a bottle of Vicodin with dead blue eyes because Wilson was selfish enough to leave him alone.
“Wait—” The word tears from Wilson’s throat, raw and desperate.
His eyes snap open. The guardrail is fifteen feet away.
Wilson wrenches the wheel hard to the right.
The vehicle fishtails violently, rear end swinging out. Wilson can feel the moment he loses control completely—that sickening sensation of motion divorced from intention. He overcorrects, turning left, but the physics are already decided.
Wilson’s body is thrown against the door, his injured arm slamming into the window. Fresh pain explodes up his shoulder as the right tire hits the guardrail with a metallic scream that drowns out everything else.
The impact sends the car airborne, spinning. Wilson’s seatbelt cuts into his chest as he’s thrown sideways, then up, then sideways again.
He hears the driver’s side window explode inward in a spray of glass, fragments peppering Wilson’s face and neck—tiny cuts opening across his skin.
The car crashes down onto its roof on the far side of the guardrail with a groan of crumpling metal. Sparks fly where metal scrapes against stone, and Wilson’s left arm, pinned between his body and the door during the fall, snaps with an audible crack as the full weight of the vehicle compresses it.
Finally, mercifully, it stops.
Silence descends, broken only by the squeal of cooling metal, the hiss of a punctured tire, and Wilson’s ragged breathing.
The oncologist hangs upside down, held by his seatbelt. His arm dangles uselessly, bent at an obscene angle midway between elbow and wrist.
Blood drips from somewhere above—no, below, he’s upside down—pattering onto the inverted ceiling beneath him in a steady rhythm.
Wilson inhales sharply in horror, bringing a stabbing pain in his left side. Broken ribs, multiple. He can feel the grinding sensation of bone fragments moving against each other.
The cuts on his right, the ones he’d made himself, have been torn wider during the crash. Some have glass embedded in them. Some have split completely open, revealing muscle and tendon. Blood flows from Wilson’s forearm steadily, pooling on the ceiling below his head.
The doctor's working hand fumbles for the seatbelt release. His vision keeps growing at the edges, and his muscles won’t cooperate. It takes three tries before the mechanism clicks, and he drops pathetically into the wreckage.
It’s almost laughable, going from a Respectable, Normal Oncologist to a broken man lying on his side, surrounded by glass and blood and twisted metal, staring at the destroyed interior of the car through the one eye that isn’t swelling shut.
He’d swerved.
At the last possible second, he’d chosen to live. Not for himself—God, never for himself—but for House. A sound escapes Wilson’s throat, something between a laugh and a sob. It makes his broken ribs grind together agonizingly.
Even his suicide attempt had been about someone else.
Even now, lying limp in a wrecked car, he couldn’t make a choice that was entirely his own.
In the distance, he thinks he hears sirens, but they might just be the ringing in his ears.