A/N: This fic stems from my belief that, without Wilson, there is no House. Plus, I've been in a really angsty mood all week. I'm also apologizing right now for any OOCness there is. I'm a newcomer to this fandom (like two weeks, but I love it so much already) so cut me some slack. AU obviously.
Relative
"I don't want him to know" The Dean of Medicine for the PPTH stared incredulously at her head of Oncology, James Wilson, but that emotion was soon overtaken by the overwhelming grief she felt for him.
"How can you not tell him? He's going to find out anyway." Wilson ran his fingers - Cuddy wondered silently if the frailness she saw in them was real or generated by the knowledge of the sickness she knew was growing inside him - through his fluffy brown hair and smiled his usual sweet smile. Her heart twisted painfully. Soon that gorgeous smile would only be a ghost of a memory.
"Believe me, I know he will, but," he paused and sighed, the weariness in his brown orbs twisting her heart even more, "I just want him to be happy for as long as possible." She shook her head slowly.
"House is going to be furious when he does find out, you know. He's going to want to save you." She stopped, not daring to finish the sentence, not wanting to say what they both knew to be true. House couldn't save him.
If she didn't know better, if Wilson had not told her himself, and if he hadn't had the unaltered, devastating proof with him, she would never have believed him when he told her he was dying. It seemed impossible that Wilson could die, and that the cause could dare be so very ironic.
It was cancer, he'd told her. A tumor. A brain tumor. Inoperable. Terminal. Certain death, not only for Wilson, but for House as well. He only had a few more months, he'd said. It'd surprised her, how calm and detached he seemed. She would have thought he would be terrified, but he wasn't, but then she thought that he'd probably made peace with what was happening to him long before he'd decided to tell her. He would have to be calm, for she knew when House finally found out he would not be.
Time, she knew, was relative. As the saying went, time flies when you're having fun, and likewise it slows to nonexistence when you'd much rather it flew by. Who wants misery to prolong itself? That was what was happening now, in her office, as she stared at James Wilson. Time had completely stopped, giving her, ironically, time to drink in and memorize the sight of a man whose time on this earth was soon ending. Finally she sighed.
"Fine, I won't tell him, but you should." He smiled gently and rose from his chair. When the door clicked softly shut behind him, time kicked into overdrive.
She was right about House. He was furious, but underneath that potent anger, she saw an underlying fear and desperation. He tried everything, said everything, did everything, until she could no longer stand it and showed him the proof Wilson had brought her. No hope. There was no hope for Wilson. There was no hope for him.
It was strange how you never really get to see the softer sides of some people until the one they love is almost beyond their reach, but that was how it was for House. It was like, once he finally realized that he could not save Wilson, he just stopped caring what others thought of him. From that day - which she remembered as being particularly dreary - on he never left Wilson's side. He relegated all his cases to his team, only leaving his dying friend's side for food and bathroom breaks.
They were happy too, she supposed. As happy as a pair of people can be when they're trying to cram in as many memories as possible in such a rapidly dwindling amount of time. They were like two equal but separate quantities of an equation. Directly proportional in all ways. As Wilson's brain began to fail him, House was there, wittier than ever, to pick up the slack. When Wilson's body began to fail him, House ignored the demands of his own body, refusing to let the nurses handle such precious cargo, in order to tend to Wilson.
She didn't know what House would do when Wilson finally died.
The day Wilson died started out normally enough. She popped in for a quick visit with him, just barely holding back tears. He was so diminished, so frail and weak, but his eyes were alive and bright and sparkling with the kindness that had always been part of him. She had allowed herself a small moment of hope; maybe they were all wrong; maybe, just maybe, he would beat this. He had even sat up in his bed and beckoned her in.
"Good morning, Cuddy!" She brushed a kiss across his forehead and brushed stray locks of his soft hair out of his eyes.
"Good morning, James. How are we feeling today?" He bobbed his head enthusiastically, his cheeks flushed with the force of his excitement.
"I'm feeling great, or," he paused, much like he had the day he told her the devastating news, "I will be when House gets here. It's important that he gets here." His voice had an edge of certainty to it that disturbed her, though at the time she couldn't say why, but she just smiled and murmured, "I'm sure he'll get here as soon as possible."
He'd sighed in relief and lay back on his pillows, already exhausted by that small action.
"Good," he'd hummed while staring fixedly out the window, "I wouldn't want to leave without saying goodbye." She ran her fingers through his hair one last time before leaving the room without another word.
She was in her office filling out papers - she couldn't remember what they had been for even now - when Foreman came to tell her the news. Well, no, he didn't actually say anything. It was in his posture. His eyes and the remorse that filled them. Wilson was gone. Dead, and she knew it was only a matter of time before House followed him.
Without a word, she left her office. There was nothing to say.
House was sitting next to Wilson's body - still in his room - holding his pale, bony hand in his when she arrived. Everything about them was porportional. Where Wilson was little more than a skeleton, House was a frightening shell of himself. His skin hung off his frame slightly, and his brilliant, piercing blue eyes had been reduced to dullness, the never-ending fire in them finally put out.
In the years that passed since Wilson's death, the thing that most surprised her about the whole miserable thing was how peaceful Wilson had been. Death hadn't scared the oncologist. All he'd ever really been concerned about was House, and she just knew that, had it been possible, he wouldn't have told the man a thing about his illness until the day before he died, he wanted him to be happy just that much.
She still remembered the last thing House ever said to her, too, because she knew as soon as he said it that she would never see him again either.
"He said he couldn't leave without saying goodbye, Cuddy," the words were so low that she doubted he'd even spoke at first, "he didn't want to take that away from me. Said that, if I got to say goodbye, I could move on." His very tone said that this would never be so.
When they found him in his apartment three days later, dead from an overdose, she wasn't really surprised.
Time was relative, and it had already been an eternity for Gregory House.
-End-