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With a certain amount of satisfaction, House drew a black, squeaking line through the word on the whiteboard.
"Alright, so it's not Lupus. We still need something that explains both the kidney fai -"
"You're unbelievable!"
Under normal circumstances, House would have greeted this proclamation with a leer. Today he stared at his own reflection in the shiny plastic surface, before turning around wearily. Chase and Foreman were shifting awkwardly in their seats, exchanging glances that suggested similar words had already been levelled at them some time earlier.
"I see you finally decided to drop by," observed House. "Of course, it would have been nice to see an Immunologist before the patient's immune system was shot to hell, but now we'll just have blame that on these two." Chase and Foreman looked affronted.
"I've been in the clinic, working your hours," said Cameron coldly. She had her hair tied up in a professional-looking bun, her eyes sharp and her expression brimming with righteousness as she moved in from the doorway. House automatically reached for his pills. "And I thought that -- You have no patients all week, you don't treat anyone for days and this is your new case?!"
He needed coffee. He needed to not have this conversation, but Cameron was going to be like a droopy-eyed dog with a bone until they did, so House pretended he was contemplating the question while he twirled the marker-pen between his fingers.
"Unless you can find me a worthier citizen dying at a competitive rate. I take it from your death glare that you object?"
"Yes, I object! I can't believe you don't!" said Cameron, staring at him in betrayed amazement. Concern and suspicion crept into her voice; "Is Cuddy putting you up to this? Why would you agree to --"
"You don't have to like him, you just have to treat him," pointed out Chase, ever the first of his fellows to defend the position of the coldly, calculatingly cowardly. "You can't just let him die."
House wondered briefly if he preferred Chase's deference to Cameron's tight-lipped superiority, and decided that yes, right now, trapped back in this debate, he did.
"This is a little stronger than like and dislike!" Cameron said incredulously. "He attacked a colleague, a friend of ours, and . . . And left him to bleed to death in a parking-lot!"
"Unfortunately," said House, "that doesn't give us the right to let this guy bleed to death internally in a hospital bed." He wrinkled his forehead and looked at her inquiringly. "Sorry, you did just say you were against the whole 'leaving people to bleed to death' thing, right?" Cameron gave him a venomous glare and folded her arms.
Foreman sighed in exasperation, eyeing Cameron with the trademark look of contempt House had noticed he reserved for almost anyone who disagreed with him, and for a second they all stood in a silent stalemate. Cameron, with the air of one laying down a winning hand, finally asked; "Have you told Wilson?"
House glared. "About the fact it's not Lupus? Somehow I don't think that conducting a differential diagnosis is at the top of his agenda right now --"
"About the fact you're treating Harvey," she said, her voice steely.
"No one is telling Wilson anything about Harvey," snapped House, and the vehemence in his voice made Cameron's infuriating look falter. "You think it will improve his recovery? Think it will help us diagnose the other guy?" There was another brief silence, in which House turned around and glared back at himself in the surface of the whiteboard. "Then shut up, unless you have something useful to say."
"The anaphylaxis must have triggered something," said Foreman, clearly keen to move away from their conversation topic. "It's either that, or something in the hospital has made him get worse."
"It would help if we knew what triggered the anaphylaxis," muttered House. There had been oil, concrete, car fumes and Wilson. None seemed a likely trigger.
"Could be exercise-induced," volunteered Chase, without any apparent trace of irony. A sudden parade of vigorous, violent images unrolled in his vision as if on queue, and House felt his guts twist before he gave a slight nod and jotted it on the board.
"The initial trigger is interesting, but not enough. We need new info." House tapped the pen against the question mark floating before him in ink.
"Retest him," he said finally. "I want new information, I want new everything. Go back through every lab result, recheck, and throw in some new stuff as well. Anything we haven't --"
"You want us to redo every test?" asked Chase disbelievingly. "That's ridiculous!"
"You want us to have something useful to work with, that's what you three are going to spend the next twenty-four hours doing. Something's changed since he was admitted. I want to see what and why."
"You know, accepting Harvey as a patient doesn't give you license to torture the guy," said Foreman. House narrowed his eyes.
"Are you saying these tests have no diagnostic value?"
"No, I'm just saying --"
"Then go and test him. And quickly, before all the fun answers are left for the autopsy," he snapped, noting Cameron's uncomfortable look with a feeling of satisfaction that quickly turned sour. Just as he'd known, she hung back as the other two resignedly filed out and headed towards wherever Harvey's room was located. House had successfully avoided every implication that he should make a visit there himself because -- because it was normal that he didn't see the patient. He never saw the patient, he didn't need any special reason not to see the patient; the patient was this whiteboard, the patient was symptoms. Let it get personal, and you got distracted from the medicine.
Based on that theory, Harvey would be lucky to last another day, he realised angrily. Bad enough taking this case, without then doing a half-assed job because --
With an internal shudder and sigh, House turned back to his remaining fellow. Cameron's white, pinched face reminded him of her anxious hovering when Wilson had been admitted; she felt a sense of entitlement, he guessed, because she'd been there then and she was here now, to tell him something about himself or about Wilson that she presumed he hadn't been over twenty times already.
"This is it then," she said, with obvious resentment. "You've decided this is the 'right' thing to do? The fact that other people are . . . Involved - that doesn't make any difference to you."
House was surprised that, even from her lofty position of total disdain, she thought he had settled on a 'right' thing. It would almost be flattering under any other circumstances, or at least interesting. Right now, House wasn't sure that it was either; he was increasingly unsure about an increasing number of things, starting with why he was participating in this conversation, and it was making him want to smash in the whiteboard with his cane.
"My motives have nothing to do with medicine, and nothing to do with how you do your job," he said forcefully. "Why don't you start focussing all that energy on curing the guy instead of trying to set me on fire by glaring?"
"Taking this case isn't going to undo the fact you spent all night in the observation room," she blurted out, suddenly passionately earnest. House looked at her blankly. " . . . You don't have to prove you don't care."
Oh, God. House briefly wondered how fucked-up Cameron's version of him was. Cameron and Cuddy and this cyclical conversation and their little supposed nuggets of insight. It almost made him crave Wilson's psychoanalysis.
"How can I prove that I don't care about this conversation?" he asked curtly. "Oh wait, I know ---" He stepped into his office and grabbed the door. "Go do your job," he snapped, and shut it against her pursed mouth, and then tugged the blinds closed for good measure.
Now apparently, his every impulse was to be laid open for dissection, while the patient's illness was remaining impenetrable. He hooked his red ball with his cane and threw it hard against the wall. Suddenly, who's hand it was behind the curtain, and motive, was all that mattered; when it made no difference to whether the patient got cured, whether the medicine worked, whether the injury healed or not.
Because motive was what was interesting. House had always known that; that's why Wilson's version of what had happened to him had got stuck in his head like a scratch on vinyl, replaying over and over next to the jarringly different words of the cop. It would make no difference to his shoulder healing, to his fingers working, to the fact that he was still alive, and House still wanted to know.
He caught the ball once more and stared at it sitting precariously in the crook of his cane, and wondered for the thirtieth time that morning exactly what he was doing. Because even when they were shadowy beneath the actions that rippled out from them - all that was seen of them, like rings on water -- when it came to people, motives mattered.
Wilson gripped the windowsill until his knuckles turned white, because he definitely wasn't calling the nurse. Up and about, he thought savagely. Down and out.
He could shuffle around fine now; he'd clicked his PCA pump and taken the opportunity to go for a brief, painful afternoon stroll around his room while no-one else was there, speed up the recovery process, and after a few steps the world was reeling around him like he'd spent the past week drinking whisky instead of sipping water through a straw.
It had to be the meds, or maybe the fact his one arm threw him off balance; his side hurt, and he felt a little shaky, but the pain wasn't that bad: it was the fact the damn room kept spinning. He hated being dizzy. The feeling now automatically dragged him back to lying on the ground, with legs moving past him and blood spilling out of him. He remembered vividly with each lurch of the hospital furniture; it had been as if his sideways-car had been rising up to the ceiling, and he'd had the horrible sensation that if he didn't grip the concrete with both hands, he'd fall, and go sliding down an endless, vertical floor.
This was fine though; this was normal. Wilson knew: you sat up in bed and you felt like a king; then you got to the next stage of progress and it felt like you'd taken two steps back - you crashed into feeling like crap almost immediately. He leaned against the window frame, gripped the IV pole, and took a deep breath.
"You do know the blinds are drawn, right? Is that like zen or something?"
Wilson scowled at the window-slats and turned round as quickly as was possible without toppling to the floor.
"I was - " resting sounded too pathetic, " - thinking."
And now House was scrutinising him like he was one of his patients: perfect. He took a cautious step forward and decided to move House's mind away from his own catalogue of infirmities.
"You got a patient?" House looked at him sharply.
"What?"
"Patient," repeated Wilson, with exaggerated slowness. "You haven't come in to take control of my tv in two days."
House had spent most of his first few days awake regaling him with hospital gossip and atrocious daytime tv, and had then vanished abruptly from his calendar of visitors. Wilson had tried not to care; he had, to be fair, spent most of the time unconscious, and he was fairly used to the whims and flurries with which House bestowed or removed his attention. He'd felt irritated to realise he had been slightly disappointed, though; hospital was an exceptionally boring place to be when you weren't at work.
" . . . Yeah. New case." Wilson nodded and managed to cross the distance to the bed without too much hesitation. He stared hard at his own fist wrapped around the IV pole, willing everything around it to fall into stationary compliance. From some hither-before untapped notion of fair play, House didn't actually say anything else until Wilson looked up questioningly, ready to concentrate on something other than the nauseous whirl surrounding him.
"I got an interesting page earlier," began House, and Wilson immediately made the familiar transition from curiosity to vexation. He'd known this was coming. He lowered himself gingerly onto the edge of the bed.
"A little bird told me that you were planning on discharging yourself from the hospital. Tomorrow," he said scathingly. "I'm hoping it was a really stupid bird."
Wilson raised his eyebrows and met House's accusing stare straight on. Of course Cuddy had gone to House, to employ him as a battering ram against his resolve. House gave a disbelieving chuckle at his assent. "Aren't you meant to be a doctor?"
"Actually, yes. I have my own medical degree and everything," said Wilson, with forced amiability. "Which is why you can't browbeat me into doing anything different." He raised his good hand, trying to ignore the fact it made everything tilt on its axis again, and cut off House's oncoming protest. "I can lie in bed while my stitches heal just fine at home. I don't need round-the-clock care anymore. It's pointless my being here any longer."
"Apart from the fact it's several days too soon by anyone's sane estimation," said House, looking belligerent. "You won't have your little pain pump at home, you know. You looking forward to lying around in agony?"
"I won't be in agony," said Wilson - he'd been braced for House's ridiculous exaggerations. "I'll be on a different set of meds." He gripped the IV pole again, and fought the urge to put his head between his knees - his side would probably rip open. "Hopefully they won't make me feel like I've just gotten off a rollercoaster."
"Oh, so that's why you can hardly stand up. Constant dizziness. I wondered." House rolled his eyes. "Now I'm convinced."
"The meds make me dizzy, not incapable," said Wilson archly. "I can take care of myself."
He could tell House was looking at him and biting his tongue in not replying to that statement, but he didn't care. He slid carefully back into bed and let the world realign itself.
House was still looking at him disapprovingly. It was such a reversal of their usual roles that Wilson felt rather thrown. "Where is this sudden concern coming from anyway?" he demanded. "What do you care if I get seasick on the way to the bathroom?"
"What about the fact that you can't even take off that thing one-handed -" he pointed, with the same disgust that Wilson felt, towards the shoulder immobiliser (already he loathed the thing with a passion), - "let alone check yourself over? You thought about the fact you're going to be stuck alone in a hotel room if something goes wrong? You can't just go hop on a bus!"
"I'm booking the taxi and home healthcare this evening," said Wilson, as if House hadn't spoken. "One daily visit to help change the dressing is probably enough. I can afford it." Wilson felt a rush of exasperation at House's continued glower, and his own defensive behaviour. This wasn't something he needed to negotiate.
House looked unreasonably annoyed, even for him. "What's wrong with being here? The nurses love fawning over you. You get plenty of help."
"I don't need help! I don't need looking after, I just need to be somewhere with a bed, that isn't surrounded with --" Wilson cut himself off, because he wasn't exactly sure what he had been going to say. Cops, perhaps. Irritating nurses. Would-be murderers. "What does it matter to you were I am?"
"Cuddy agrees with me that --"
"Cuddy can't stop me, and neither can you. I'm not incapable of rational thought," said Wilson irritably. "I've thought it through for the last two days. I've decided."
"House --" Cameron appeared in the doorway, looking unusually sullen. "Need to talk to you. About our patient." House wheeled around and glared at her, and Wilson looked on with mild interest. Cameron and House at loggerheads was unfailingly entertaining.
"I'll see you later," said House, scanning Wilson briefly with his usual intense stare, before marching off to his office. Wilson fought a groan; apparently for House, the conversation wasn't over. He didn't need anyone else supervising him at the moment; his life had not been his own for over a week, and now he had promised himself the luxury of some privacy and dignity in peace - even if his hotel didn't exactly classify as a home.
"Look at you," said Cameron - she was still by the door - and for a moment, Wilson thought there was pity, or horror, in her voice, and he felt his insides burn and shrink at the same time. But he looked up and saw with relief that she was smiling at him delightedly. She'd been to visit him twice since he'd come off the vent.
"You look so much better," she said. Wilson felt genuine pleasure at her impulse to comfort him; it clashed with a rather acute sting of embarrassment. He gave her an uncomfortable little smile.
"Thanks. I feel much better." She nodded, and walked off in House's wake, and Wilson laid back against the pillows with only the tiniest wave of dizziness.
That was precisely why he needed to get the hell out of here. Everyone clustering around him to help, everyone watching and caring to an insufferable degree - it made him feel weaker. It reminded him that he wasn't the doctor anymore, he was the patient; of the other patient upstairs, and why Wilson had ended up in here - he felt like he was, in fact, miserably close to unravelling. He was constantly, stressfully aware of turning away from a large portion of his thoughts, and with every turn the dam seemed to be more in danger of breaking open and flooding him.
Obviously, Wilson told himself, it was only a feeling, not an actual threat; it was probably some sort of reaction to the fact he'd been stuck in a hospital bed for the majority of the last week. There would be no shame in feeling . . . worried, he knew that; he knew it was normal after something like this; he knew that certain things would probably, eventually, have to be thought about; but it certainly wasn't a process which required an audience. It would be something to think about when he was master of his own space again, and in control of other people's comings and goings.
Wilson had enough self-control, enough self-awareness, to know all this; he certainly wasn't the emotionally crippled one when it came to trauma or self-analysis. Which was why he couldn't understand why, when he was getting stronger all the time, he still - still, felt oddly adrift.
As predicted, Cuddy sidled in through House's office door after his conversation with Wilson, as the sun was sliding down sluggishly in the sky. He glanced up from his desk and nodded. "Hey."
"Have you spoken to Wilson?"
"Yeah. He's still just as dumb as when you spoke to him." Cuddy sighed and sat down in the Eames, propping her chin on her hands.
"Damn." She looked genuinely puzzled, House noted - people always credited Wilson with having far more common sense than he actually had. Must have something to do with the ties, he mused. "It's too soon. I don't understand why he's being so stubborn about this. He's always so meticulous about patient recovery." House shrugged.
"He's not the doctor, he's the patient. You know what they say."
"You couldn't change his mind?" She leaned forwards and looked at him suspiciously; "I know you've been avoiding him since you took the case, but feeling guilty about --"
"I didn't change his mind because he's a grown man!" interrupted House loudly, glaring at Cuddy. Since he'd started treating Harvey, things had returned to a grudging and strained shade of normal between them - she wasn't responsible for his choices, after all - but he wasn't above reminding her who's idea this was if she started getting Freudian on his ass. "He can make his own stupid decisions. Wonder-boy's as qualified as you are in judging his recovery."
"But you agree with me, that it's too soon?" pressed Cuddy. House shrugged.
"If he was still married, it wouldn't be a problem; you'd discharge him without blinking. He's not a stray cat; we can't just keep him here because he doesn't have a carer waiting at home."
"At his hotel room," said Cuddy worriedly. "He shouldn't be alone after all this, not for - what, twenty-two hours a day, according to his plan?" She shook her head and bit her lip, and House watched her fret. Personally, he wasn't surprised.
It was typical Wilson to want to vanish to a hotel room for a month while he was convalescing, and not emerge until he could act like nothing had ever happened, unruffled and calm and taking charge of everyone else as usual. And it was typical that Wilson wouldn't listen to any of House's highly-sensible reasons as to why it was a stupid idea, as House knew too well from his own periods of gruelling recovery. Of course, when House had been sick, it had been different; Wilson had decided he'd needed company, needed to adjust, he'd needed to get out and see people, but when it was Wilson -- House glared down at his papers in annoyance. Obviously you could never suggest to Wilson that he might have a problem, oh no, - when Wilson turned himself into a shell-shocked hermit, he was simply being practical.
Wilson, he reflected, was sometimes staggeringly blind for a person who spent so much time analysing everyone else's behaviour.
"Maybe . . . maybe this isn't such a bad idea," said Cuddy slowly, with a note of surrender in her voice. "You're right, we can't stop him. Maybe he's thinking the right way, being positive -- "
"He's thinking like a moron," said House dismissively. "He just wants to get the hell out of here, and I don't blame him."
"You haven't -- you didn't tell him about Harvey?" asked Cuddy suddenly. House shook his head. "And you're not going to?"
" . . Yes. I am," said House, after a pause. "Not yet. Later." When he can handle it, House had decided; when they'd already had something that classified as an actual conversation. Wilson might be intent on surrounding himself with polite strangers so that he could never let himself say anything of value, but House knew he was better off around someone he could get mad at, yell at, instead of continuing with the maddening calmness that he'd displayed since his admission. Unfortunately, House thought guiltily, that person, that traitorous bastard, had been avoiding Wilson like the plague for the past two days and concentrating on the man who'd put him in here. No wonder Wilson had spent the time plotting his little escape plan.
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" said Cuddy, in a voice that strongly suggested that she didn't.
"Unless you want him to find out from Cameron," House said. Cuddy frowned; obviously she too had endured Cameron's opinions on the subject. "He's going to find out eventually. He's not fragile." He looked at her defiantly as she raised her eyebrows.
"This isn't about you unburdening yourself," said Cuddy warningly, "not if it's going to . . . Well, if he's not going to take it that well. Right now, Wilson needs a break."
"I know." House desk-drummed pensively for a minute and sighed. "Unfortunately, you can't stop people from making crappy choices." Cuddy looked momentarily uncomfortable before she seemed to realise House was talking about Wilson. He stood up.
"What are you going to do?"
House tapped his cane twice against the floor, and realised with a pang of annoyance that the plan that had been sidling into his brain could actually work, and probably should.
"Give him a better choice," he said lightly. Then he frowned."I just need a little more time."
House didn't see Wilson until after lunch the next day; he was sitting up in bed, looking mutinous. He started talking before House had even closed the door.
"So, someone marked a change of meds on my chart," said Wilson. His tone was conversational, but he was eyeing House dangerously. "Which . . . is funny, because it looks like your writing, and I'm pretty sure you aren't my attending." His eyes tracked House's progress as he paced around the room. "The nurses are being suspiciously quiet about it too, actually. I don't suppose you'd know anything about that, though, would you?"
House opened his mouth to reply, and got no further: Wilson pounced.
"You drugged me!" Wilson looked furious. "That was your master plan?! I miss my cab and spend the next five days sitting in here instead of just booking another one? What's next, restraints? Or is it easier if you just keep me unconscious for the next week?"
"Maybe it's been a week," suggested House unrepentantly. Wilson pinched the bridge of his nose with his wrong hand; all of his gestures looked oddly unbalanced now.
"Oh, calm down. I just thought you could do with a rest before the journey. And - I needed to sort some things out." Wilson looked up at him suspiciously.
"Nothing needs to be sorted out," he said insistently. "I've already sorted everything."
"Well yeah, if you're going with your stupid hotel room plan," said House, rolling his eyes. He sat down in the visitor's chair, and tried to ignore Wilson's melodramatic exasperation.
"House, it is not ---There's no, -- What exactly is your problem with my not being here? I'm not going to drop dead in the lobby!" Wilson looked at him curiously. "Did you think I was going to check myself out and then collapse? I'm not afraid to ask for a little help if I need it," he said, rather pointedly.
"Not from total strangers, no!" snapped House. "You're being an idiot. You think it's nothing to suddenly be one limb down, you think youn can just cope better than anyone else?" Wilson opened his mouth in surprise, but House carried on, letting his irritation carry him forward. "You just have to make it look easy, is that it?"
Wilson's eyebrows had shot up to his forehead; he clearly hadn't been expecting this. "No, I . . . That's not what I meant. House, it's - this obviously isn't the same thing." He looked supremely awkward all of a sudden, and House had to stifle a sudden urge to grin.
"Maybe not in a few weeks, when it's healed," he acknowledged magnanimously. "But right now . . ."
And now House felt uncomfortable at the way Wilson was looking at him, so he tried to sound as professional as possible, scanning the hospital apparatus instead of Wilson's face. "You need to see how well you can operate before you can decide about moving back to the hotel. You could move in with me. Just for a couple of days, maybe."
" . . Seriously?" Wilson was trying for eye contact; he looked skeptical, disbelieving, as if House was laying some sort of elaborate Oncologist trap. House found it rather reassuring, and tried to hide his amusement.
"Why? So that I can wake up with my other arm strapped behind my back and my shoelaces tied together?" This time House couldn't quite mask a smirk; Wilson should have thought ahead before filing through his cane.
"Well, obviously, that too," he said. "But it's the smart thing to do. I'm around in the mornings and evenings, instead of some government-trained harpy; but I'll be here all day, so you can laze around popping painkillers uninterrupted," - Wilson rolled his eyes, - " and I won't actually charge you for the honour of my assistance - not that I'll be fawning over you like your nurses' fan club out there." He risked a glance upwards at Wilson's confused expression; was that hopeful, or horrified?
"It makes more sense than you dragging me over to your place every hour of the day because you need someone to unscrew the lid off the peanut butter," he pointed out, somehow managing to sound pre-emptively irritated by Wilson's behaviour.
Wilson still had the slightly dazed, scrunched look he wore when he was several steps behind in the conversation. House got to his feet rather quickly.
As an option, it sucked. It would probably suck for Wilson, it definitely sucked for House, - no way could he make Wilson take the couch this time. And Wilson wasn't being cornered, ordered, or conspired against; House wasn't bullying him, manipulating him, or even appeasing him to make himself feel better -- in fact, the entire thing was drastically different from House's normal modus operandi, and he felt rather disconcerted. But annoying and inconvenient as it was -- it was pretty much the only useful thing House was able to offer.
One of the better things to be given, he had figured, was a choice.
"It's just an offer," he said. He found himself scratching his eyebrow, before bringing his hand down quickly onto his cane; Wilson was probably still looking at him. "On the table. If you want it." He straightened himself out self-consciously and tried to sound airy as he headed back towards the door. "Think about it. I have to go. I have fellows to outwit."
House was already out the door when Wilson managed a slightly stunned, "Uh, . . Thanks." He was already halfway down the corridor when Wilson sat back in bed, and stared at the doorway where House had vanished in bewilderment.
Just an offer. For the first time in two days, without really knowing why, or what he would say, Wilson suddenly found himself smiling.