A/N: Hope ya'll don't mind the short chapters.
Chapter 2
The last time House dipped his soul in death, he was on a white-lit bus with Amber Volakis, telling her he didn't want to go back to life because Wilson would hate him. This time, he's sitting on his bathroom floor, broken glass glimmering next to him. He looks up and sees Hannah standing in front of him, smiling with those dark eyes. She has both her legs. His wrists are whole, and his legs are painless.
"What are you doing here?" he says to her.
Still smiling, she says, "Come to help you get up."
He goes quiet for a moment, knees up before him and arms resting on them. His guilt unfolds in the pit of his stomach, sickening him.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I couldn't save you."
His blue eyes peer at her tentatively, expecting her to be furious, but her gentle expression remains.
"You think I blame you for that? You did what any doctor would. There just some things you can't control. You're not God."
He looks at her legs directly in front of him, the mocha skin smooth and clean.
"I want to be," he says.
"I know," says Hannah.
"Tell me something," he says. "Why do I deserve to live instead of you?"
He pauses, and she doesn't reply.
"You had a husband," he says. "A life. All I have is—this job. And I screwed that up too."
"One patient doesn't mean you're a failure," she says. She squats down in front of him, pretty eyes searching for his. "And I think you're wrong. I think you do have more than just this job."
He feels like a little kid talking to a mom—but he knows Hannah didn't have any children. He's both grateful and torn up about that fact; now, she'll never have any.
"How do you know what I have?" he says.
She looks at him so patiently.
"I know you have Wilson," she says.
House scoffs and breaks into a sarcastic grin.
"Right," he says. "The one who kicked me out of our condo for a woman he's already divorced once, that Wilson."
He keeps his head turned to the right, deliberately not looking at her because he's not sure how obvious he looks. She reaches out and lays a warm hand on his arm; a shock of cold shoots through his whole body.
"You and he have a lot of history," she says. "Don't you? Kinda like a married couple."
He wants to roll his eyes and play into the gay joke but doesn't.
"Look," she says, voice soft and well-meaning. "I don't know if you've ever been married to someone but—what I learned from my marriage is that, when you really love someone and you love em for a long time, there gonna be times when you hurt each other. When you do the wrong thing. I don't know him…. But I'm pretty sure you love him."
House meets her stare.
"And he loves you," she says. "That's gotta count for something, right?"
He hangs his head, reaches over with his opposite arm and lays his hand over hers. His chest feels tight, and he swallows down pain. He looks at her again and says,
"It doesn't make me less alone."
She purses her lips in sympathy. The whites of his eyes are pink at the edges and covered with a wet sheen.
"It should've been me," he says, his voice a breathy sound of grief. "It should've been me instead of you."
She tilts her head to one side, keeps her hand on his arm.
"But it wasn't, baby," she says. "It wasn't."
One tear hurries down the side of his face.
"Now, that man is waiting for you to go back to him," she says. "And you gotta go."
He barely shakes his head.
"No," he says. "I tried, Hannah. Now, I give up."
She doesn't try to argue. The two of them look at each other, there in the bathroom, in the light at the end of a dark hall.
In the morning, Wilson wakes up on the couch in his office, after sleeping for a few hours once the doctor let him know House was in the clear. He wakes up for no reason at all, except maybe the pale sunshine tip toeing through the glass sliding door behind him. He looks like hell in yesterday's clothes, hair messed and face aged with exhaustion and worry. He sits up and swings his legs over to rest his feet on the floor. He turns on his cell phone and sees he has two new voicemails, both from Sam, and he rubs his brow with one hand as he listens to them.
He slips back into his loafers, checks his watch, and figures Cuddy will arrive soon if she hasn't already. He'll call Sam later, he decides as he leaves his office and makes the trek down to House's room.
He stops at the door, looks at the man through the glass. House lies still in his bed, oxygen wire in his nose and across his face. His left wrist is wrapped in bandages, tucked discreetly at his side. They pumped his stomach last night, put him on some drug or other.
Wilson just looks for a long time. He leans against the glass door and the glass wall of the room and shuts his eyes to breathe.
For so long, he lived with the buried fear that House would do this one day—that it would stop being a game he played, flirting with his own self-destruction, pushing boundaries out of boredom. That a day would come when he meant it.
Wilson never thought it would hurt this way, a pain so deep as if from a bottomless hole stabbed through him. He feels drowned in emotions, too many at once. He can't process them all. His legs feel weak, as if they'll fall out from under him if he tries to move.
A warm hand touches the back of his shoulder.
He turns and finds Cuddy behind him, her face filled with devastation, eyes as if she might cry.
"Someone just told me," she says, voice low and rough.
He can't bring himself to speak. He has that look he had when he knew Amber was a lost cause, eyes of a beaten puppy, cheeks flushed. Heartbroken.
Cuddy opens her arms, all the more motherly in instinct now then she was when Amber died. Again, he lets her hold him as he quietly breaks down. He's taller than she is, but that doesn't stop him from sagging his weight against her. It's early enough in the morning that only a few nurses are anywhere nearby and they're far enough away not to see him as he cries. Cuddy does her best not to join him. His own arms around her, he grips one of her slender shoulders hard in his hand. She rubs the flat of her palm up and down his back.
"It's okay," she says. "It'll be okay."
But this time, Wilson thinks, it honestly might not.
