A/N: I don't consider myself a fanfiction writer anymore but I couldn't resist doing a study piece on this last scene from "Both Sides Now." Spoilers for that episode, so beware.
As always, no slash, friendship only.
What Changes and What Doesn't
The thing is – it stopped being about the pain a long time ago. True: the pain is still your ever-present bitch of a wife you can't pay to divorce you, but now it's more the scapegoat than the cause, even to yourself. The ordinary, human part of you that lies whenever it's convenient enables you to tell yourself that if the leg weren't a problem, neither would the drugs.
It takes the hallucinations to make you admit that's bullshit.
And maybe you are crazy. Maybe it is late, onset schizophrenia. Just like maybe you wouldn't be in this place right now if Stacy had never betrayed your leg, if the infarction had never happened, if your whole life up until this point had been as much an illusion as Cuddy's lipstick in between your fingers and on your cheek in the bathroom mirror.
But as you ride in the passenger seat of Wilson's car on the way to the nuthouse, you silently acknowledge that everybody knows that isn't true. You know it isn't true. Somehow, this is about the drugs. The doctor in you knew that from the moment dead Amber showed up. The addict searched for any other possible explanation.
You and Wilson don't talk on the ride over. Neither one of you turns on the radio. You did as much talking as you could have, sitting on your living room sofa in the dark last night. You told him as much as he needed to know, and he made a few phone calls until he came up with the place you're headed to now. He didn't chide you about the whiskey. He didn't offer you any encouraging platitudes then, and he doesn't try now.
And you're grateful for that, grateful he knows you well enough to know that you don't believe in euphemistic crap for your own sake any more than you do for someone else's.
He's walking with you to the brink of your own private hell, while everyone else attends Chase and Cameron's wedding. And hasn't that just been the story of your entire friendship? You could've taken yourself. You could've called a cab. He knows it too. And you didn't ask him to take you. He didn't ask if he could.
This is your social contract. This is what you do and how you do it.
Staring out into the sunless road, you think back to those months in between Amber's death and your father's funeral, to what your life felt like without Wilson – which was about as pleasant as what your leg feels like without the pills or the cane. You never talked about those months with him, and he never brought it up either, the whole thing seeming irrelevant when he finally came back around. God knows you don't do those kinds of talks in the first place anyway.
Essentially, nothing changed. Amber's death and four months of the cold shoulder became nothing more than a raised scar on the body of your relationship, but that's okay. Not like it was the first scar. You know nothing's changed because today, it's still just the two of you, doing this. You knew when Cuddy took you into his office and he stood up and looked at you, straight into you, realizing what had come because he'd been waiting for it, fearing it, all along.
You could say thank you, but that's not your style. He doesn't expect it from you either, anymore than you expected him to lie to you about everything turning out all right. You both don't speak because you already know. You can script each other's words in your head and it'd be a waste of time to carry out the scene.
He's scared. You know that. And you're scared. And he knows that too.
He never wanted this life for you. He's been trying to get you clean for years. He's pulled almost every Wilson-manipulation tactic in his personal manual, trying to get you off this path – and he never had a chance in hell. You think he knew that, all along, but he loves you too much not to have tried anyway. He loves you: diagnosis for the symptoms of sticking around all these years while you didn't change, coming back after Amber, giving you this ride.
You look at him, and he looks at you.
Wilson is the one mystery that you can fail to solve without minding. You became his friend because he wasn't boring, and you will always desire his friendship because of the mystery: why he loves you. Why he would love a man who's led him to make this drive to a mental hospital when he could be at a wedding instead. You have no answers. You don't think he does either.
He's all you've got in the world, besides your job that you may never work again and the drugs that have robbed your mind in the end. Maybe he went along thinking you'd been taking him for granted; maybe that's the excuse he told himself when he tried to leave you. And maybe you'd thought that about yourself, before he left.
Then you surprised yourself, pursuing him until you won him back. Everything you felt – what the drugs couldn't solve – surprised you.
He stops the car several yards away from the hospital entrance. For a moment, you both sit there, looking at the building through the windshield. You open your door first. You both round the car and stand in front of the hood, and you start to strip yourself down of everything you know they'll take if you bring it with you. You put it all in Wilson's hands, until there's nothing left.
He looks at you, and you look at him. You don't speak, because you both already know.
He gives you your bag, and you take your cane. And when it comes right down to it, you make that walk on your own – because you have to.
He stands where you leave him and watches you go. You can feel his eyes on your back, and it's just as good as Wilson walking next to you.
He probably doesn't expect it from you, and you put it off as long as you can. Then finally, once you're in the door, you stop and look back at him. And that look is: thank you, I need you, I love you, you better still be here when I get out, tell me I'll get out, Wilson.
His mouth twitches a little, and his face softens. You'll hang onto that image the rest of the way now. And even when the door closes behind you, you know he's still out there, standing around like an idiot with your wallet in his coat pocket and your watch in his hand.
The drugs aren't about the pain anymore. And if you don't kill yourself making it happen, your life doesn't have to be about the drugs anymore – because that idiot's waiting for you.