One-shot, character analysis piece. Hints of H/W Slash.
4,999
Maybe House was like a puzzle.
It would make sense, after all, he loved to make sense of things that people couldn't describe. It wouldn't be a stretch to guess that this obsession sprang from his own inadequate feelings about not being able to puzzle out himself.
And who could blame him? That riddle, that mystery picked at every person who crossed his path, who found themselves staring at the hospital walls long after he'd passed by.
Chase saw the pieces and was quietly mystified at the challenge it presented... But if he couldn't solve the challenge, and if he failed, he couldn't deal with that. So Chase didn't want to solve House. It was too much for him. But he kept looking back to House, sometimes, because after all... it was hard to replace a 5,000 piece puzzle with one only half of its' size.
Cuddy was pretty sure she'd figured out all of the pieces. Every now and then, she had to come back to the puzzle and turn pieces around, playing with the corners so that they would fit into the molds that she imagined. It almost worked, but the picture was always changing, and there were holes that kept dancing throughout.
Cameron came at it from a better angle than Chase. She actually wanted to solve the puzzle of House, to understand him. She had her own idealizations, like Cuddy, but not: she wanted him to be like the picture on the cover of the box, and when she tried to put the pieces together, it didn't fit. She didn't try to push them in, but left the pieces out on the table, hoping that if she asked nicely enough, or looked at them prettily enough, they'd break open and pop into the right place.
House himself wouldn't think about it that way. He wouldn't think about it in a way that made sense to anyone else, seeing as he found himself to be a whole person, whether or not he felt that it was deluded to say so. He'd rather imagine that he'd had all the pieces. He preferred the idea that the puzzle was solved, of sorts, but that someone had smashed all of the pieces into him in the wrong way, and they could not be solved. Ever.
But that wasn't true, either.
Wilson knew better.
It had taken him the better part of a decade, but he'd figured out most of the problem. After all, if House was a puzzle, he wasn't unsolvable. He was, after all, human, even if he was more calloused than most. It would just take more time than most, more patience... a more inquisitive eye to solve the puzzle.
And there was something else that gave Wilson the advantage over everyone else:
He held the missing piece.
Review for more Housefic!