Wilson felt like he had been passing by the same scenery for hours; gas stations, the scrubby grass and vegetation that tended to grow chaotically around heavily used traffic arteries, the occasional fallow field, the occasional shuttered factory. It was the new face of the Rust Belt. He cursed the fifty five mile an hour speed limit, he'd have been there by now if they were following (or not following with impunity) New Jersey traffic laws. He was driving South, from Cleveland, where he had been attending a conference.
He let something happen and then later wallowed in the guilt. It was something he tended to do and it could be called a compulsion. House would definitely call it a compulsion and he would probably be right, like he always was. He was going to see Cameron who had left rather abruptly almost two years ago. House never told him what actually happened, and it was a situation with too many exigencies and too many players who were far too good at deception for him to get the unvarnished truth or really, any truth at all. He knew that Chase did something and he knew that Cameron was unhappy about it. He knew that Cameron was also unhappy that both Foreman and House knew but neglected to tell her. He heard the end of a heated discussion in House's office. He had seen an email from Cameron to House, Wilson had his password, it read: 'Thank you for showing me who I really am.'
It was all rather cryptic. What was even more jarring was the level to which he was in the dark on that particular matter. Office gossip, especially the variety that included House's team, was something that he actively indulged in. He salved the feeling of being a busy body with protestations to himself that he was merely looking out for his friend, who was a brilliant medical mind but stunted in area of office politics and general human interaction. He had said as much in the past but House couldn't be bothered to care. Wilson knew that some of it had to do with the fact that as a world renowned diagnostician, he didn't have to dirty his hands with that kind of thing, but it was mostly because he couldn't do it. He was unable to compromise, unable to really manage, and he had Cuddy and Wilson to shield him from interactions which he found unsavory or intellectually bankrupt. It made Wilson feel weak on occasion, it made him feel used in ways that House couldn't understand, but House was his friend for a reason and Wilson knew who he was. He respected who House was.
Justifying House's behavior could occasionally be a daunting task. He was currently dealing with the constant push and pull House was engaging in with Cuddy, it had become unbearable a year ago and yet they were still stubbornly going at it, without a resolution in sight. Wilson had concocted and dismissed numerous schemes that were more complicated than his usual 'tell one person one thing and the other person something else' or 'give a nice calming pep talk after a particularly intense fight' strategies. He was in a holding pattern, he didn't want to play this one wrong. He played it wrong with another woman who had 'feelings' for House. That woman had just sent House a long, rambling email thanking him for 'showing her who she really was.' He mentally slapped himself for being that cold and calculating with his 'friends' before continuing on with the exercise.
This Cleveland conference was something of an escape. Wilson covertly volunteered to speak at it in the hopes that House would just assume that it was a work related obligation but if anything, House's sobriety had made him even more paranoid when it involved peoples' motives. He couldn't prove it, but he was almost positive that House had someone going through his trash at this point. They couldn't have a conversation without House bringing it up and Wilson wondered whether it was the lie itself or the fact that he couldn't figure it out that really bothered House. He hesitated, was almost actually scared to think that it implied any kind of actual feeling for Cameron. House didn't need that at the moment and he assumed Cameron didn't either. Wilson hoped it was the lie, because that implied that House cared about him in some nebulous, undefined way.
House's paranoia had made the new candidate interviews nearly unbearable and eventually they just scrapped them and made Foreman, Taub, and Chase permanent attending physicians in House's department. Nothing was going to change ever again as far House was concerned. Cuddy just gave up this time, gave him what he wanted. Wilson was pleased and he looked forward to things calming down, normalizing to whatever extent they could in House's universe.
Chase was having problems. A reporter had been harassing House's team, something about the African Dictator they treated around the time Cameron and Chase broke up. House had massive amounts of contempt for this woman and thus, getting even the most basic strands of a story out of him was like pulling teeth. So, like any normal, well adjusted person would do, he emailed Cameron in Ohio and invited her out to dinner to troll for information that way. It was only a four hour drive from Columbus to outside Athens, it was practically down the street! He tried to feign shock when Cameron seemed suspicious on the phone, when they were ironing out the particulars. Sometimes he wondered if existing within House's craziness had made him crazy.
When Chase started showing up for work still drunk from the night before, Wilson knew House was going to say something. House usually ran these types of things past him before moving forward. He never really took his advice, but he always talked to him. In some ways, Wilson was not unlike House's window on the world, or at least the part of the world that normal people inhabited. He knew that Wilson cared about other people, their motives, their dreams, that he knew how to listen and how to tell people what they wanted to hear. Wilson was already rehearsing what he was going to say, weighing his options, trying to decide what the best advice would be. When he returned later in the day to find House, Chase, and Foreman all huddled together in House's office, having some kind of intense conversation, he quietly slipped away before they detected his presence.
He caught House up on the roof. He was smoking a cigarette. House played the statistics game every time Wilson brought up the fact that as an oncologist, it was hard for him to watch his best friend smoking. Wilson couldn't win, and no revised statistics from Duke University helped. He found himself constantly seconds away from grabbing the butt out of House's mouth and flicking it off the roof. He hated their rooftop conversations, it made him feel off balance and constantly on the defensive. He couldn't help but nag and House seemed to revel in those back and forth sniping sessions.
"You know. This is a smoke free campus. This roof is technically considered part of the campus," House looked annoyed.
"The Dean of Medicine has a thing for me. Now that the Government is actively against smoking and smokers, it has once again become the cool, rebellious thing to do."
"You'd need to flip your collar up too. Maybe get a barbed wire tattoo around your bicep. Go for broke, start wearing an eye patch."
"An eye patch with the cane might be overkill. Although Cameron might fly back here and fuck me again, right on my desk, if you sent her a picture and a concurrent sob story about a racquet ball injury," time stopped for a moment, as House realized he'd said something he shouldn't have said, something Wilson didn't know.
"Again?"
"Apparently the lack of narcotics loosens my lips. You don't hear that often. In all fairness, I'm completely sober, I didn't know what I was saying," House was visibly chagrined, he'd given Wilson a free one and was obviously kicking himself.
"I repeat, again?"
"It was when Tritter had his little crush on me. Mixture of hero worship and daddy or mommy issues. It was no big deal."
"You didn't…she didn't…" He was having difficulty forming words.
"It didn't work out very well. You can only smack Allison Cameron in the face fifty or sixty times before she gets the hint and moves on."
Things were falling apart. This time it seemed like it was just him dealing with the situation. Foreman and Chase had checked out months ago and Taub seemingly never checked in. It should have been the perfect set of circumstances, finally a team that understood, that really 'got' House and the way he operated. No one really hammered on the ethical issues, they all covered for each other, the question of whether something was ethically or morally suspect rarely popped up anymore within the Diagnostics Department. It had been like that for some time. It was actually a strange grey area. One couldn't really see what was different unless one looked very closely. That made sense, House's team was still made up of great doctors, they knew better than many what the lines really were, what the letter of the law was, how to get around it. They knew how to follow the letter of the law while ignoring the intent. In many ways, it was the perfect team. No one ever mentioned the word 'ethics' but they all knew when they were entering a grey, and even a black ethical area. It was dangerous and Wilson was worried that eventually Cuddy would miss something big and House and his team would go down hard. He didn't want to see that.
House was distracted when Cameron left. It happened very fast, Wilson's spies (nurses he charmed information out of) hadn't even caught on to it. Wilson knew Cameron loved Chase. He talked to her about it. What Wilson also knew was that their relationship grown during a time when there was a great deal of upheaval in both of their lives. When they started having sex in the hospital, he knew that Cameron was on self destruct, he knew she was trying to check out. He should have said something but he didn't, and he felt vindicated when it seemed like everything was working out. In their scant few conversations after that, in their emails before she returned, she seemed happier. Cuddy dangled a department head position in front of her and she jumped at it. They maintained a stilted friendship when she returned. She comforted him when he lost Amber, he tried to organize Chase's bachelor party. Now she was gone.