Part 2

A small motel was located about thirty miles away from the Scranton synagogue where the main funeral services for James Wilson had been held. It was right next the highway and had a small diner at one end. It was an old New England establishment but obviously well-maintained if the exterior painting and landscaping were indicative of anything.

Cuddy made note of those things as she pulled into the parking lot and shut off the engine of her car. She wasn't sure why she'd cataloged the information. It wasn't of any consequence other than a distraction from the other thoughts bouncing around in her brain.

After getting into her car at the cemetery, she had started the engine, turned on the heater then opened up Wilson's letter and read. The contents hadn't been a surprise really. She'd expected the words that greeted her tear-filled eyes, especially those at the end.

"He has helped me in ways that I would have never thought he could or would, but seeing me die day by day has taken a heavy toll. Lisa, I have no right to make any request of you regarding him and I won't. What I will say is that he is going to need a friend now, probably more than he ever has before. And whether you let yourself believe it or not, you might just need one, too."

Simple, direct, to the point. Even in his dying moments and from beyond the grave, James Wilson continued to advocate for House, a man the rest of the world believed dead. Even she had believed it for a few days, the news of his demise shattering something inside her that she'd thought already broken beyond repair.

But then Wilson had come to see her after House's funeral and she remembered the disbelief, elation, and amusement she'd felt when Wilson had informed her that the magnificent bastard was alive.

Initially she'd hated herself for being so happy. She wasn't supposed to be overjoyed that the man who drove his car into her home in a stunning burst of violence was still alive and well, and had faked his death. She wasn't supposed to be happy because the man bringing her the news also brought the news of his own terminal diagnosis.

But learning the reason House had done it had morphed Cuddy's self-hate into resigned affection for the man who induced it. It was an emotion she had only ever felt in connection to House.

It was just like him to do something so insane and shocking and then turn around and do something kind and selfless, but in a way that no one would know but the receiver of the gift.

What he'd given Wilson, of time and adventure, of something beyond IVs, needles, tubes, and medical treatments in his final days...

Cuddy couldn't help but love him for that, despite everything.

After spending nearly a year and a half year angry with him, in the last four months she'd come to terms with the fact that she would always love House, no matter what he did. She could be angry with him, hate him sometimes, but the love was a constant. She couldn't shut it off. She couldn't distract herself from it, couldn't even push it into the background long enough to begin any sort of new relationship. He had, as she'd predicted back at Michigan, utterly ruined her for any other man.

Cuddy wasn't sure if it was that love that had her sitting in her parked car, outside Room 18 of the Revere Inn. Or if it was the obligation she felt because of Wilson's letter. Or if it was because Wilson was right about her need for a friend. In truth, she only had one left and he'd been her first true one.

It might be one of those things, none of them, or a combination of them all. But, if House had kept his word to Wilson, then he was just on the other side of that blue door.

Staring at the burnished, bronze room numbers above the peep hole, Cuddy gripped the steering wheel so tight that her knuckles whitened. Her heart raced, spurred on by anxiety and doubt. She didn't know if she could go in.

She reasoned that just having driven to the motel might be enough to assuage any present and future guilt. She considered possibly parking somewhere else on the lot, away from the door and watch for him to come out, to see how he looked before speeding away, back to Baltimore where her job and daughter waited.

A surge of irritation coursed through her when she considered that she owed House nothing. Not after what he'd done. But the irritation died away just as quickly as it had come - as it often did.

Try as she might, she could not boil down and distill the full measure of the man in a single act. She'd done that to him already when he took a single Vicodin to give him what he needed to be there for her with her own cancer scare. And that distillation had been the catalyst for his rapid descent into a whirlwind of self-destruction.

She'd broken his heart and he'd then heaped pain upon pain upon pain on himself. It had been his choice to do so, she did not kid herself about that. But she knew him and had known he would take the path of self-loathing. And yet she'd done little to stop it. She'd only offered to salvage their friendship without addressing his deeper pain, or her own.

And that was the guilt she carried in it all.

She had passed judgment on his single-pill relapse after nearly two years of sobriety and shut him out. She'd ignored that he had come to her bedside, albeit late and with a opiate in his system, but he had come and she'd given him absolutely no credit for the effort in the end. She had essentially done nothing to help either of them.

Even Cuddy's own mother, Arlene, who wasn't a House fan by any stretch of the imagination, had scolded her on her impossible-to-meet standards. She had seen the unfairness in Cuddy's actions and tried to help her face it and get her to work with House to fix it. Arlene had just wanted her to see what House saw - that there was something worth saving and fighting for. That they were worth it.

But Cuddy hadn't done it and not a man of half-measures, House had instead definitively severed their relationship, amputating himself from her. He'd done it by destroying her house ... and her House.

With an inarticulate groan, Cuddy leaned forward and rested her forehead against the backs of her hands, which still held tight to the steering wheel.

She felt ill as she recalled that morning after the crane collapse, the loss of their patient, and her declaration of love, when he'd pleaded with her to turn off her phone, declaring "we're more important than what's going on at the hospital."

"Give the morning to us," he'd said, putting things into a perspective that wasn't skewed by his usual juvenile aversion to work but the one of a mature man with his priorities straight.

Cuddy knew that was the man she'd hurt. Not the jerk he put on display for the world but the wounded man beneath the facade. That man lived with all manner of pain day-in and day-out, struggled with addiction to dull those pains, and who so desperately wanted to love and be worthy of love while simultaneously fearing opening himself up to it again.

Raising her gaze once again to the door, Cuddy knew what she would find on the other side of it. Even if there was booze or Vicodin, hell, even a female "companion" to distract or alleviate the pain, there would still be an overwhelming pit of agony. There was no way House was functioning after watching his best friend die. No one would be, but especially not House who wore his pain like a scarlet letter. In truth, Cuddy knew that she was probably the only person who would comprehend the level of his grief, and that she was the only person left on the planet who truly understood him, was intimately familiar with all his faults and loved him anyway.

Taking a deep breath, Cuddy realized that she could not just walk away.

House was a goddamned black hole in so many ways, but he was also a light, and that part of him drew her to him, like a flame attracts the moth. Unlike the moth though, Cuddy was keenly aware of the possibility of being burned.

Cuddy felt that pull to him now, strongly, despite every pill taken, every cross word or crass insult uttered, and even the car he'd driven into her home. Despite all of it. Which, she mused bittersweetly, leaves me just as stuck as I've always been where House is concerned, unable to move forward unless I'm within his orbit.

"Dammit," Cuddy sighed heavily as she pulled her keys from the ignition and prepared to exit the car.