A/N: Written for LJ's [H]ouse Secret Santa 2013, my Secret Santa gift for lieueitak. Thanks to the guest reviewer who caught the metro/subway glitch and cared enough to inform me.

Genre: Hurt/ Comfort, Christmas fluff
Rating: Teen, for language
Length: about 8,400 words
Characters: House, Cuddy, short appearances by members of the team.
Pairings: None
Comment: Set about three and a half years after the series finale. The title is adapted from the preface to Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
Summary: Three years after Wilson's death House has strange visions.
Disclaimer: The characters don't belong to me, the plot is yanked from Dickens, but the mistakes are all my own.
Warning: Features a suicide attempt.

Part 1

Christmas 2015

"I'm dreaming of a white Christmas", the sultry voice in the radio crooned.

"That's easily said, singing in a fucking studio in fucking California in the fucking sunshine!" House muttered, slamming the door of the supplies room shut with his hip. He regretted it immediately as a sharp bolt of pain seared up his leg.

"Whazzat?" Robin asked, looking up from the griddle.

"Fuck the snow!" House said, tumbling three egg cartons off his arms onto the counter and thumping frozen hamburger patties next to them. "What?" he added, as Robin gave him the eye and started checking the eggs. "They're gonna be turned into pancakes anyway."

Robin eyed his leg and said, "Go take a break."

He didn't particularly like being patronised, but he didn't want to be in this bloody kitchen, cooking food for people who had no families to go to on Christmas and hung around diners pretending they didn't bloody care. Besides, his leg was giving him bloody hell. He needed a few more vicodin if he was to last the shift. So he merely nodded and headed for the back door.

Sanjit came in. "Three orders blueberry pancakes, a hamburger deluxe, and a steak, medium, with fries. Mind it's medium, not rare like the last time! Hey, Greg, where do you think you're going?"

"Break," House muttered, giving Sanjit a challenging stare.

"It's okay, boss, I've got this," Robin said quickly.

"Five minutes," Sanjit said, "then I want you back in here. And don't let the guests see you smoking!"

House snagged Robin's cigarettes from his coat in passing - Robin was used to it and didn't even complain anymore - and went down the long corridor to the back exit. He pulled in a sharp breath as a wave of icy air hit him and seriously considered forfeiting his smoke by staying inside. He could have his smoke in the corridor, but Sanjit was a rabid non-smoker, and there was just so much he could get away with.

The stoop was cleared and the traffic in the back alley had already turned the snow into muddy brown slush, but along the walls and on the bins the two inches of snow that had fallen in the afternoon gleamed and glittered in the dim light of the alley lamps. House's leg answered with a dull throb. He still had two hours till the end of his shift, then a ten-minute walk to the subway, and at the other end another twenty minutes to his apartment along footwalks that no one bothered to clear; he needed another two vicodin to survive this hell.

He took out the bottle and gave it a habitual shake before opening it. The bottle was light and the rattle dismayingly hollow; there were only three pills left inside, where there should have been ...

He frowned as he tried to piece together how many pills he'd taken and when, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out where they had all gone. Well, there was no point in being stingy: he'd need to score some more anyway, and wasn't it Christmas, a time of jollity and good cheer? So he chugged the remaining three pills before lighting up Robin's cigarette, and watched a few more flakes swirl in the yellow lamplight.

A door on the other side of the alley opened and a group of men came out, joking and laughing raucously, some wearing Santa hats, others brandishing bottles, detritus from a Christmas party. Three of them had slung their arms around one another's shoulders and were singing 'We wish you a merry Christmas' with more fervour than talent.

As they disappeared around the corner, House dropped his cigarette butt on the ground and straightened, preparing to go back inside again. A movement caught his eye: one of the revellers had got left behind and was now retching violently at the base of the street lamp that lighted the corner. House wrinkled his nose in disgust. He'd have to avoid the puddle when he went home; there was no need to crown this crappiest of Christmas Eves by slipping in a pool of vomit.

There was something familiar about the man: his size, the way he was bent over with one hand on the lamp post, the other stemmed in his hip, the coat he was wearing. When he straightened, House saw that his hat sported moose antlers instead of a white pompom.

"Hey!" House yelled, limping off the stoop and down the alley.

The man turned and faced him. Brown hair flopped over his forehead, almost covering a pair of bushy eyebrows. The man smiled crookedly. One of the antlers gave House a cheeky little wave.

"Wilson!" House gulped, speeding up. He'd almost reached Wilson when he stumbled, his cane slipping on a patch of slushy ice. The ground rushed up to meet him.

"Whoa there!" an unknown voice said. A hand helped him up and ineffectually brushed the mud off his coat. Damp seeped through his pants.

He looked up. Wilson was gone. The man who was holding his arm looked nothing like Wilson. He was taller and younger for one thing, had grey eyes and short blond hair, and wore a perfectly normal red Santa hat with no sign of antlers.

"I'm fine," the man said. "Too much booze, that's all. No need to kill yourself trying to help me."

"Where's Wilson?" House asked through clenched teeth. This wasn't funny!

"Who's Wilson?"

House glared at him, but the man's face was guileless. House changed tack. "Was there someone else here just now, someone with a hat with moose antlers on it?"

"Heh, you're as drunk as I am!" the man said, picking up his cane and handing it to him. "Gotta go; the others are waiting. Mind the puke!"

House hobbled back to the diner, cursing himself for straining his leg on a 'bad leg' day because of some odd trick of the light. Yes, that must have been it: the reflections off the snow, the stark contrast between the dark in the alley and the bright lights at the street corner, his tiredness, the constant throbbing in his leg that was moving upwards into his head. Maybe he should get his eyes checked.

The sound of sizzling fat and a waft of pancakes greeted him when he got back to the kitchen.

Sanjit's voice penetrated through the haze that the warmth of the kitchen and the vicodin were inducing. "You took ten minutes!"

Wilson gave him a sympathetic grimace before turning back to the hearth, Wilson in his blue apron, flipping a pancake expertly before setting the griddle aside and reaching for the bowl of batter, acting for all the world as if he'd always been cooking pancakes in a seedy diner.

House lunged forward and twisted him around. The batter sailed off the counter onto the floor at Sanjit's feet, splattering him generously from the waist down. Sanjit yelped, Wilson cursed.

Except that it wasn't Wilson any longer. It was Robin, looking at him wide-eyed and fearfully.

"Calm down, Greg!" he said. To Sanjit he said, "I got this," hands raised placatingly.

But Sanjit was not to be placated. He marched up to House, backing him up against the counter. "You're stoned," he said. "Again! I've had enough - you're fired."

"Boss, it's Christmas!" Robin pleaded.

"Yeah, yeah, it's Christmas," Sanjit mimicked him. "But I'm a Hindu and I've got a diner full of customers who want their food, and I don't need jokers who get high on the job and trash my kitchen. Here!" He thrust some bills in House's hand. "Take your pay and go! And don't come back!"

Out in the alley House looked at the crumpled bills. Sanjit had been generous despite his anger; the money would cover vicodin and a bottle of booze. He'd consider the ramifications of losing his job (once again) some other day. As for mistaking Robin for Wilson, he was tired, that was all. Tired and sentimental. His mind was going back to Wilson because Wilson had died around Christmas. It had snowed the day Wilson had died, and now the snow and the tiredness and the pain were getting at him. Nothing to be proud of, but nothing to worry about either. Nothing that a bottle of whiskey wouldn't set right.

Twenty minutes later he'd scored some vicodin and got himself a bottle of bourbon. He'd bought the good stuff, using up the last of Sanjit's money. He needed to chase Wilson out of his head, and he didn't want to be puking his guts out on cheap swill before he'd gotten himself a nice buzz. He paused in front of a store, checking out his reflection in the pane. He looked a sight; no wonder the guy at the till of the liquor store had eyed him with suspicion when he'd bought the most expensive whiskey on the shelf! His pants were torn at the left knee from the fall, his trainers were scuffed and damp, his coat had a generous patina of mud, and judging by the smell emanating off him, some of that mud was in all likelihood the contents of the Christmas reveller's stomach. His hair was in need of a cut, sticking off his head like a mop, his manly stubble was morphing into an unkempt beard, and his eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep. He looked like a homeless vagrant.

No matter; who cared what he looked like? It wasn't as though anyone was waiting for him at his apartment with a meal of Chinese takeaway.

"Ghost of Christmas Past," he muttered, preparing to turn away from the store window.

Movement in the window of the adjacent store caught his eye. It had televisions of all imaginable sizes in its window display all showing the same programme, the evening news, and there were loudspeakers installed outside so he could hear the newscaster trying to make two inches of new snow sound like a major catastrophe.

"The snow all across the country has been lighter than expected, but could still cause severe traffic disruptions in the Midwest and in the North. Folks, if you can, then stay at home!" the newscaster was saying. "We're switching live to Chicago, to the ER at Memorial Hospital. John, how are things at your end?"

An eager young reporter hovered in the entrance of a large white-tiled ER, a few garlands draped along the walls being the only concession to the festive season. The waiting area in the background looked no different from any other day of the year, with the usual assortment of drunks who'd hit their heads, parents with wailing infants, and stupid teens with avoidable injuries.

"It looks like a busy night here at the ER, Matt. There's been a pile-up on the Interstate, but the ER staff are competent and motivated this Christmas Eve, so there've been no casualties."

House huffed in disgust. As though there was a connection between the competence of the ER staff and the stupidity of commuters on snowy nights! Sheer force of habit had him scanning the people in the waiting area, looking for symptoms that were of more interest than the standard broken leg acquired by falling off the ladder while decorating the Christmas tree.

"I've got the head of the ER here to update us on the situation," the reporter said with the air of someone presenting a major celebrity. "Dr Cameron, what can you tell us about the situation in the ER tonight? Is the pile-up on the Interstate causing you problems?"

House drew in a sharp breath.

The camera zoomed out so that the person next to the reporter was in the picture, a woman with long brown hair, clear skin and bright eyes. Her half-smile was polite, but distant. "No, Matt. The weather report gave us ample warning, and I staffed the ER accordingly. We've got everything under control. People coming to Memorial Hospital tonight needn't worry that they won't receive adequate medical attention."

That was definitely Cameron giving the reporter a well-deserved set-down. Was it a coincidence that he was seeing Cameron on television right after he thought he'd seen Wilson or was he losing it?

Someone had stopped beside him and was also watching the newscast, a short, balding guy who was definitely three sheets to the wind. "Wow, who cares about adequate medical care when there's chicks like that 'un running around the ER!" he said, giving House a nudge.

"Yeah," House agreed absently. "Can you read what the caption says?"

"'Dr Allison Cameron, ER head, Chicago Memorial Hospital'", the man read. "Why, are you thinking of phoning her? Chicago's not exactly next door. And she doesn't look the kind of gal who'd date guys like us."

"You never know," House said. So it was Cameron on television and not a figment of his imagination. He listened with half an ear while Cameron explained to the reporter how triage worked, noting the wrinkles that had appeared around her eyes, the plumpness of her cheeks, the slight grooves around her mouth - first hints that she was nearer forty than thirty.

"How do you feel about spending Christmas Eve at work, away from your family?" the reporter finally asked.

"My shift just ended, which is why I can afford to stand here talking to you," Cameron said, "and I have the day off tomorrow to spend with my family. At Chicago Memorial we believe in cooperation: staff members without family obligations volunteer to cover holiday shifts, so that those of us with families can spend the holidays with their loved ones."

So Cameron had a family, did she? Good for her.

"Thank you, Matt," the studio newscaster said. "It's good to know that our health care is in competent hands. But it's not only ER staff around the country working on Christmas who ensure that we get the best health care possible. Our correspondent Debbie Patton is in Princeton, taking a look at a completely different aspect of health care."

House took an involuntary step backwards. This time there was no mistaking which hospital he was looking at; he knew those brown-panelled corridors better than the streets around his apartment. Surely this couldn't be real! Cameron and PPTH, both on television on the same programme! But a moment later his powers of logic kicked in again. Chances were that Cameron, on being approached by the broadcasting company, had referred them to Foreman, who was always eager for publicity. In the year that House had worked under Foreman donations to the hospital had plummeted for reasons that were only marginally connected to Foreman's skills as an administrator. He was black and he had no boobs, two major disadvantages in a community whose donors tended to be older white men with unacknowledged racial prejudices.

Foreman, in a black suit and a blue paisley tie, was showing the reporter around pediatric oncology, where a male nurse dressed up as Santa Claus was reading to a group of bullet heads. Oh, that was well played and should get Foreman a nice tidy sum! Would Foreman have the nerve to ask for donations straight out? As Foreman and a teary-eyed Debbie left the oncology ward, the camera panned briefly to the sign above its door: James Wilson Memorial Ward.

By the time House's heart rate had returned to normal and his ears had stopped buzzing, Foreman had introduced Debbie to Chase.

"Our Diagnostic Department is still unique in the country," Foreman was prosing on. "The patients who are referred to Dr Chase and his team usually have a long odyssey behind them, years of suffering and countless misdiagnoses. Dr Chase is their last hope, and we're proud that every year we can give a small number of patients their health and their lives back. It's a cost-intensive process, but even though we only save a handful of lives, it's worth it."

Ah, so the board wanted to close down Diagnostics? The cancer kids had been a clever move, but this publicity stunt for Diagnostics was brilliant.

Chase simpered into the camera and flirted with Debbie, all the while explaining how each and every patient made a difference. He told touching tales of patients with rare and exotic ailments who, successfully diagnosed, were returned to their loved ones' arms. He left out all mention of painful procedures, misdiagnoses, or violations of patient rights.

"Could you tell us about your current patient?" Debbie asked.

The camera swung around the conference room where Adams, Park, and someone House didn't know sat around the conference table staring at the whiteboard. Park was gesticulating, the others were frowning. House leaned forward to read what was written on the whiteboard, but the camera wasn't focused on it, so the writing was blurred.

"Our patient has multiple symptoms," Chase was saying, when suddenly his pager went off. The team's pagers must have done so too, for they all jumped up and made for the door.

"I'm sorry, but our patient has seized. I'll have to go," Chase said, giving Debbie's arm a quick squeeze before he, too, sprinted off.

Foreman cut in again. "Yes, our diagnosticians are dedicated to saving lives. I hope that we'll be able to continue this exceptional work in the coming year despite reduced funding and reallocation of resources."

Oh, nice! In your face, Board of Governors!

The camera focused on the whiteboard for a few seconds, enabling House to read the symptoms written in Chase's neat public school handwriting: rash, tachycardia, numbness in the extremities, kidney failure. And now, seizures. His brain started working, sorting and grouping the symptoms. Would liver failure be next or was the seizure a sign that the problem was a neurological one?

He realised that he'd never know. He was officially dead; he'd never diagnose again.

He could be out there writing on the whiteboard. He could be the one sending the team off to do countless tests. He could be the one to shoot Foreman down, refusing to talk to the stupid journalist. He would still be head of diagnostics if he hadn't messed up his life. He would be spending Christmas Eve with his team solving a medical puzzle, if only ...

"Could've, should've, would've," he muttered, turning away.

It was warmer down in the subway station than on the streets, but it was draughty and the damp was seeping from his pants into his bones. He took two more vicodin, because it really didn't matter any more. When his train entered the station, a rush of passengers disembarked, nearly knocking him off his feet. When he'd steadied himself enough to board the train, the doors slammed shut behind him and the train immediately lurched into motion. With his bag of liquor in one hand and the cane in the other he couldn't hold onto anything; losing his balance he tottered a few steps before he slammed sideways onto a seat. The woman in the seat beside his shifted as far away as she could, muttering something about drunk hobos being a nuisance and security on the subway being a disgrace.

Okay, so he was a muddy mess, and he smelled of vomit, and he'd taken a generous swig of whiskey just outside the metro, but a bum? Nevertheless, the last thing he wanted was that old witch calling in security and getting him thrown off the train, so when his leg stopped screaming death and dire damnation he got up and moved to a seat at the back of the car, spreading himself over two seats and stretching his legs out to discourage people from sitting down next to him or opposite him. Across the aisle two Japanese tourists were poring over a travel guide, but the other seats were mercifully empty.

He'd closed his eyes and had almost dozed off when a voice penetrated his drugged haze.

"Mom, it's just two stops. Can't we stay close to the door?" It was a girl's voice, petulant.

Steps approached his end of the car. He tucked his chin firmly in his chest, kept his eyes closed, and stretched his legs as far as they could go.

"Hang on, Rachel," a woman's voice closer by, almost at his end of the car, said.

No, it couldn't be!

"Mo-om, no!" the girl whined. "Gosh, Mom, this is so embarrassing!"

He cocked one eye partially open. Just beyond his scuffed old boots (wait, what boots?) stood a pair of red heels, complete with well-turned ankles and shapely calves clad in black tights.

"Mom!" The owner of the petulant voice was approaching too, now. "It's just another bum! You can't go chasing every bum in New York in the hope of finding him."

"The correct term is 'homeless person', and this time it's him!" Red Heels said. "Hello, House."

He opened his other eye warily and looked up. "Sorry, ma'am?" he said, making his voice as low and hoarse as he could.

"I'm not an idiot, House," Cuddy said, her lips thinning in annoyance. She sat down opposite him.

"Dunno what you're talking about, but my name ain't House."

"See, Mom?" the girl said, standing two rows away and regarding him with animosity. "Come and sit somewhere else; it's smelly back here."

"Rachel, don't be rude!" Cuddy said without taking her eyes off him. "Adams said she saw you in a downtown New York soup kitchen last winter, but that you legged it when you spotted her."

Wilson's money wouldn't last forever, but so far he'd never been in a soup kitchen. So Cuddy was hunting down vagrants because Adams needed glasses? What irony! And what bad luck that she should have got into the train that he was travelling home in. Any other night he'd have been travelling home much later, probably hidden behind a magazine and not, emphatically not, looking like a bum.

He glanced down himself and noted that his pants looked a lot worse in the harsh neon of the subway train than they had earlier on. In fact, he could have sworn that they weren't the same ones. These were about two sizes too big for him, cord pants shiny with age and in need of a good wash. And his boots! Since when did he wear old military boots? Had the booze and the vicodin knocked him out to the extent that someone had robbed him of his clothes right here on the subway?

"Mom, we need to get off at the next stop!" the girl said. "Come on!"

Cuddy ignored her. "House, if you need any help ..."

"You've got the wrong guy here," he reiterated stubbornly.

Cuddy rolled her eyes. "God, but you're an obstinate mule!" She opened her purse, took out a card and a pen, and wrote something on the back of the card.

"Mom, this is our stop. I'm getting down! I don't want to miss the Nutcracker!"

"We can get off at the next stop and walk back. Rachel Cuddy, you are not leaving the train ... Crap!"

The girl, Rachel, had got off the train and was looking back at Cuddy challengingly.

Cuddy rose hurriedly and thrust the card under House's nose. "Here, that's my number. Call me if you need anything."

He stared down at it, at the familiar handwriting, the curly twos and neat zeros, without taking the card.

"Fine, be an ass!" Cuddy said. She dropped the card into the grocery bag holding his bottle of liqour and sprinted down the aisle and out of the train just in time before the train pulled out of the station.

He leaned back and closed his eyes again. Jesus, what an evening! His job gone, his leg hurting like hell after his fall in the alley, Cuddy of all people on the subway, his clothes stolen by some prankster ...

He could hear the Japanese across the aisle discussing the scene they'd just witnessed in shocked, muted tones. What a spectacle that woman had made! And that poor man, surely no one deserved to be accosted like that!

The Japanese tourists! They'd been in the carriage already when he'd boarded it - surely they would have noticed if someone had switched his clothes while he was asleep.

He opened his eyes and looked at them. "Did you see someone take my clothes and shoes?" he asked them in fluent Japanese.

They stared at him in shocked silence for a moment, then the man answered politely, "Your clothes, sir? Are any of your clothes missing?"

He pointed down at his feet, to the military boots .. and found himself staring at his trainers, orange stripes on cream leather. His pants looked normal again, too; muddy, but definitely his own pants, the ones he'd put on this morning.

Odd.

He tried another approach. "Was there a woman talking to me just now?" When he said it like that it sounded crazy, but how else was he to find out what was going on?

At that the couple nodded vigorously. Oh yes, those two women. Terrible! But they hadn't really understood what was going on and he hadn't seemed in any danger, so they hadn't interfered. They hoped he'd forgive them, but if he'd asked for assistance they'd have come to his aid at once.

"What did she ... they want?" he asked, a bit surprised that they'd refer to Rachel as a woman. She'd seemed about twelve or so, no older.

The couple looked at each other and the woman giggled in an embarrassed manner. "They were ... uh ... prostitutes, I think" the man said.

"They were dressed very indecently and they behaved very badly," the woman stated baldly.

House grimaced. They wouldn't be the first persons to think that Cuddy dressed like a hooker, but she'd been tightly wrapped in a winter coat that had concealed more or less everything. And Rachel had been dressed like pretty any other pre-teen going out for an evening at the ballet.

"I think they were propositioning you," the man said.

His lips tightened as he reached down into the grocery bag for the card that Cuddy had dropped in there. His fingers encountered one - so he hadn't imagined that! He drew it out, but instead of the pale cream card that Cuddy had waved under his nose it was black and shiny, with a woman in an unmistakeable pose on it. 'Lara will fulfil your wildest fantasies', it promised. 'Just call 7181-SEX!'

He stared off into the distance, unseeing. He should have noticed it straightaway: there was no way Rachel could be twelve or even eleven yet. She couldn't be older than six or seven at the most. And his clothes: no matter how stoned he was, he'd have noticed if someone had swiped his pants. His leg would have screamed bloody murder at being manipulated in and out of pant legs.

He got up. Thrusting the card at the surprised Japanese tourists, he hobbled off the train.

It was almost midnight when he finally got back to his apartment after walking about five miles through the streets. He'd hoped the night air would clear his head and offer some sort of solution, but he'd always come back to the same conclusion: he was hallucinating again.

He shouldn't have been surprised - he'd known it could happen again, would happen again, now that he was using regularly and without much control. But somehow he'd believed it would take longer - or maybe that he wouldn't be around that long.

He considered the implication of his various hallucinations. Wilson was clear enough; Wilson was always on his mind, sometimes banished to a remote corner of it for long enough that he could find some measure of contentment, but never quite gone. He'd been bound to resurface sooner or later, and now that House was aware of the danger and totally clear that any Wilson he saw wasn't a real Wilson, there was no reason for him to fear seeing him. He'd need to learn to control his reactions, the way he'd controlled them when he'd hallucinated Amber. He'd continued functioning at a high level; why shouldn't he do so now?

Foreman, Chase and Cameron? He still wasn't sure whether the news programme had been a hallucination or the real thing, but it didn't really matter either way. They existed, they were working somewhere, and as long as he didn't hallucinate bumping into them on the street, he could function well enough.

The problem was Cuddy. Just like the last time, he'd hallucinated her in a situation that though possible in theory, was more than improbable. A situation that cast him as someone in need and her as his saviour angel. A situation that she'd never, ever get herself into, because he was the guy who had driven his car through her house. On purpose. Endangering her and her family. Causing her to quit the job she loved and the surroundings she'd been familiar with all her life. There was no way she'd go looking for him or pressing him to accept her help, because she owed him nothing whatsoever - certainly not compassion.

Yet once again he'd been convinced of the reality of his hallucination, despite all indications to the contrary. He'd even envisioned himself as more pitiful than he actually was, simply to justify to his own deluded mind that Cuddy would rush to his help. How pathetic was that?

Or maybe, he thought morosely, he'd simply taken a peek at his own future. Wilson's money might last another year, maybe two if he was frugal, there was no new job in sight, and he had his addiction to finance; it didn't take a genius to figure out where he was headed. The figure in the subway was who he could expect to be in two or three years.

The evening was a warning, a wake-up call. If something didn't change, he was headed for disaster. But there wasn't much he could do. He needed to detox, to get his life under control again, but he knew that he wasn't up to it. Even if he could finance a detox (and he couldn't, there wasn't enough money left for three or four weeks of in-house treatment) he had nothing, no perspective, no future, that would motivate him to go through that gruelling ordeal and embrace sobriety afterwards. How stay sober when there was nothing to distract him from his constant craving? There'd be no Wilson waiting to receive him once the doors of the psych ward opened, no job to return to, and certainly no Cuddy to forgive him. He'd stayed sober for almost two years after the last detox; this time he wouldn't last for two months, and then the cycle would start all over again.

There was no workable Plan B, no alternative diagnosis. He needed to detox; he couldn't detox. Something had to give, and that something was him. He'd lasted three years without Wilson, three years as a dead man. That was longer than he thought he would, probably a lot longer than Wilson had expected of him. Wilson had made his wishes clear before his death: he'd provided as best he could for House and he'd been upbeat and cheerful to the end, probably to hammer in the concept that it was possible to live a happy and fulfilled life despite pain. But Wilson only had to make it through six months, and Wilson hadn't been alone. He, House, was alone and being a 'dead' man, he always would be. He hadn't offed himself over Wilson's grave and he'd tried these past three years, he'd really tried, but now he'd reached the end of his tether. Even Wilson couldn't demand more of him.

Sitting on his couch he took out the bottle of vicodin he'd scored and the bottle of bourbon. He shook the pills out on the coffee table and counted them. If he wasn't hallucinating more pills than he had, they'd suffice. He poured himself a generous shot and downed it. Then he settled back on the couch, determined to be comfortable at the very least.

He didn't feel bad about doing this: there was no one who'd miss him. The only person who could possibly mourn him, his mother, believed he was dead anyway. The world would be a better place without him, now that he wasn't saving lives anymore. There was no one whom he owed anything.

Except Cuddy. He owed her an apology. When he'd been in prison, he'd believed he'd be released after completing his sentence, return to PPTH, be subjected by her to some abject form of punishment, and then someday, he'd be brave and honest enough to tell her what a little piece of shit he was and how sorry he was. Maybe she'd forgive him; maybe she wouldn't. But the knowledge that one day she'd know that he understood what he'd done to her had buoyed him - until Foreman came to see him and he'd realised that day would never come. It was only when he'd heard that Cuddy had left Princeton that he had truly understood the impact of his crime.

Maybe her appearance in his hallucination wasn't simply born of his ongoing desire to see in her his saviour, but also from the need to get some closure. He could see the phone number his hallucination had given him as clearly as though he still had it in front of his eyes. It had had a Princeton area code, but the remainder hadn't been Cuddy's old number. That didn't make sense: if his hallucinated Cuddy was the Princeton one, the number should have been her old one; if she was the post-car-crash Cuddy, she should have an out-of-state area code. (He had refrained from finding out where she'd moved to, but he'd bet half his vicodin that she'd put at least two states between herself and Princeton.)

He poured himself another shot. This was a stupid line of thought; hallucinations didn't have to make sense. They were merely manifestations of his subconscious, and his had come up with an agglomerated phone number that represented the Cuddy he mourned and the one she'd become.

He put the twenty-five vicodin pills that he still possessed into a neat row and picked up the first one. Show time!

His eyes, however, were magnetically attracted not by the pills in front of him, the quick escape route, but by his phone on the side table. This was ridiculous! He couldn't gain anything by phoning some unknown person in Princeton at this unearthly hour.

The number on the cream card flashed before his eyes, obliterating the whiskey and the pills. Slowly he picked up his phone and punched the corresponding buttons.