Every career field has its casualties, eventually. Cops get shot; lawyers get disbarred; doctors die of fatal diseases; actors, musicians, models, comedians OD; people of every race and creed crumble and fold under pressures they had not imagined. Some of it was random chance – or fate, if you believed such things – cancer didn't care if you were eight or eighty. Accidents didn't bother about whether someone was secretary or brain surgeon.
But, it had to be admitted, Gregory House's corner of the world had had more than its fair share of casualties. Cameron's peace of mind, sliding the needle full of morphine into an old man's vein and sobbing in a chapel for absolution from a god in whom she did not believe. Chase's self-respect, shouting down in a crowded hallway and hearing the father he loved despite himself shrug off all responsibility for a rotten childhood in that clipped accent. Foreman's pride, groveling for his job to Cuddy because no one else would hire him with such a Housian slant to his medicine. Wilson's faith in humanity, groping blindly for the machine that would stop his girlfriend's heart. Taub's stability, sitting up nights now wondering if his irresponsible confession of infidelity could still come back to bite him, and the still nagging desire that perhaps he wanted a child to give him a little immortality. Cuddy's willpower, playing the tug-of-war for authority with her diagnostician every day when they both knew he'd somehow, some way, get what he wanted and she wouldn't hate him for it.
Lives too, they had lost. Thirteen, the ticking time bomb of decaying nerve endings and creeping dementia, not dead yet but living daily with the knowledge that she was a little closer than she had been the day before, and that soon each tomorrow would be worse than each yesterday. There was Amber, of course, actually dead, a doctor dying of a badly prescribed drug, and there was too much tragedy in it for anyone to properly appreciate the irony there. They hadn't liked her, even a little, but even fairly sincere hatred is a far cry from wishing someone dead, so they had mourned her as one of their own.
And Kutner – inoffensive, nonchalant, optimistic – facedown on his bedroom floor with a hole in his head and ice in his eyes. For anyone to take their own life was a serious matter. For a doctor to do so, it was like a priest breaking vows. First, to do no harm. To others, primarily, but how could one cherish the lives of others when they did not cherish their own?
Accidents happen, mistakes are made, chance claims its pound of flesh tax from everyone. They were willing to accept Amber's loss because they understood this; that unforeseen error cannot be prevented, and that humans excel at nothing if not error. Thirteen was doomed by genes assembled before her birth, a fifty-fifty coin toss and she had lost, unfortunate but irreversible. Kutner was another thing again. A faint chance, perhaps, if House ever found proof enough, that another hand had done it, but if not, the answers had been there, they must have been, and men and women who made their living at piecing together the barest scraps of information had not managed to see this in front of them.
Wilson had been depressed lately, Taub lack-lustre, but Kutner? The man who swore to Taub he saw no point in suicide and couldn't understand people who did, cold under Foreman's frantic hands with his blood smeared across Thirteen's face.
It was clear now, to every last one of them, that they would all be casualties in one way or another of this era of their lives. Chance had less power here than fate, and it was coming for them.