Isolation
Author's note: I don't own House. I also don't agree with his views on suicide.
This is what House gets.
For calling the nurse a "ho bag."
For trading his pills (they're useless—but what can he expect from fake doctors?) for cookies at lunch.
For having a sense of humor during group therapy.
For not going to individual therapy.
For trying to leave the premises.
For beating the shit out of his roommate.
For trying to beat the shit out of orderlies.
For being him.
…
He is alone. He is also very, very bored. Even the room is dull, the same soft, padded white all the way around. His dull, hospital-issued, dime-a-dozen shoes don't have laces—as if he'd be dumb enough to kill himself that way—and they've taken his belt. He has no cane, no books, no piano—nothing. Even the orderly who delivers the meds House steadfastly refuses to take is under strict orders not to speak to him. He is truly all alone.
He hadn't really been trying to run away; after all, he had checked himself in and—by New Jersey law- could check himself back out. No, he was just trying to do something in this place in which nothing ever happened. House had always thought the crazies were the interesting ones, but the ones in Mayfield quickly put an end to that hypothesis. They either do everything compliantly or do, literally, nothing at all. House is certainly not compliant, but neither is he catatonic, so he settles for the unhappy medium known as "raising hell."
Of course he wound up here. What did you expect?
…
"What did he do now?"
House first hears the voice when the orderly opens the door to walk out. At first he does not, cannot, believe it. He must be hallucinating again, going insane before he even got to revisit sanity. There is no other explanation. He is, as his room reminds him everyday, isolated. No one would come.
But the boredom is killing him and so he gets up anyway and hobbles, unsteady and uncertain, to the door with its small, shatter-proof window. For a split second, familiar eyes meet his, and House nearly gasps in shock. But before he can do anything, the face on the other side of the glass turns and moves away, becoming smaller. Retreating. Leaving him once again.
House pounds his hands against the glass, hitting it with all his might. He screams at anyone who might hear—the doctors, the nurses, the figure in retreat—but no one responds; no one rushes to his aid; no one even turns around.
He collapses backward onto the white safety padding, exhausted. He thinks about what he just saw, trying to disbelieve it and yet unwilling to dismiss it. House knows now that little is outside the realm of psychosis. Love. Passion. Sex… All of those things, those seminal aspects of human mind, can be created out of nothing, with no meaning at all. This was, too, no doubt. There is no other reasonable explanation.
He had been desperate and so his mind had created great, physical, throbbing, breathless love. Now, he was lonely and so his mindhad created something else, a pair of eyes House had first seen twelve years ago in an antique mirror, hands that had once thrown an old bottle across the room, a voice that had greeted him as he had awoken, so many times, from the verge of death.
When he was desperate and despicable, his mind had made him a lover.
When he was lonely and bored, his mind had made him a best friend.
Of course, Wilson would be there. He always was.
Right?