Half-Awake in the Middle of the Night…

After two years, Wilson had gotten used to the screaming. Usually, it started sometime after midnight and before five in the morning. Of course, now it came in two varieties: the original Greg House version and the new, improved Rainie Adler version.

The rare nights when no screaming intruded, Wilson found himself half-waking in the middle of the night, out of habit. On one of those nights, Wilson found himself fully awake, idly thinking.

He wondered if House's decision to be Rainie's lead physician had been the right one. He wondered whether House's attentions were actually helping Rainie through the healing process. And he wondered whether his friend was helping his own recovery or hurting it.

Looking at it from his recent, more removed, vantage point, he had to admit that whatever House was doing seemed to be working, probably because House had been able to give Rainie something that no one could give him: the benefit of experience.

Wilson thought back two years. Starved, nearly out of his mind with terror, physically decimated, and ultimately semi-catatonic, House had been a shell of a person for nearly a year. Even as he started to improve, a year ago, it was a slow, tortuous struggle toward any kind of normal life, and it had really only been in the last three or four months, since he'd put himself in charge of Rainie's care, that he had returned to a semblance of his former self.

The first time Wilson saw Rainie Adler after she'd been released from prison was a couple of days after she was admitted to PPTH. He tried to remember what she was like then, but found, perhaps because she was a stranger, that his memories of her weren't clear. She was frighteningly thin, he recalled, and—like House—had fresh bruises marking her skin. Her eyes. He remembered her eyes, and yes, he had to admit, they reminded him of House's—haunted and dead.

Of course House's situation was a little different. He'd been stuck in the prison hospital for an extended period, and then, when he really couldn't handle it, been forced to go through the trials, which precipitated the catatonia. And there was his leg. House had had a preexisting condition before his trauma began, which probably extended his recuperation.

On the other hand, Rainie, unlike House, had suffered a much more severe emotional toll, from the pregnancies, the abortions, and from losing both her husband and her child.

So maybe they balanced out.

Now, here it was, only a few months later, and she had gone through all her legal trials and had handled them fairly well. Not only that, but Wilson had seen her laugh on numerous occasions. House hadn't really begun to laugh again until… well, until after Rainie came along.

Weighing the evidence, he had his answer. Whatever House was doing helped her, had made her recovery go quicker and easier. House, the curmudgeon, the man who hated people, somehow made Rainie Adler's life better.

And his own, in the process.

Twice a week, House, Rainie and Jacey met in the living room for their group therapy sessions. Each session delved a little further into what had happened to them, with House and Rainie finding themselves both stunned and reassured to discover how similar their experiences had been.

The sessions were intense and wrenching, often ending with one or both of them in tears, but always with Jacey's assurance that they were safe, and that it would get better—really, it would—with time.

Between sessions, they never discussed it, even though both were exhausted and strained, on edge from all the emotional rawness.

"Your turn," said Jacey Liu, looking at House, who was staring back at her belligerently.

"Don't have to talk about it. It was in the papers," he said, pursing his lips tightly, as if by pressing his mouth shut he could keep the feelings from spilling out.

"How you felt about it wasn't in the papers," said Jacey, equally determined. "Tell me how you felt."

"It should be obvious how I felt," he said, and then said nothing more.

Jacey waited a moment to see if he would say anything else. He wouldn't. She tried a different approach.

"Have you given any thought to how other people felt—the people you work with? They saw you come into work injured, grow more withdrawn, less like yourself. And then Dr. Cameron was murdered and they were told you had done it, killed her in a particularly brutal manner. How do you think they felt?"

When Jacey said Cameron's name, House winced involuntarily. Out of the corner of her eye, Jacey saw Rainie watching House attentively. He waited a moment before speaking.

"Doesn't matter how they felt," he said.

"Why not?" asked Jacey, pushing him to respond.

"Because the outcome is the same."

"What do you mean?"

"No matter how they felt, I would still have done what I did."

"Why?"

House said nothing. Rainie laid her hand on his right arm. He flinched and pulled away from her touch.

"Why, Greg?" asked Jacey. "Why would you still have done what you did?"

Still no answer.

"Listen to me, Greg. This is important. Why did this matter so much to you? Why were you willing to subject yourself to constant torture, believing it would last the rest of your life? What mattered so much to you that you were willing to go through that?"

House's breath grew shallow. Rainie saw tears developing in his eyes. He blinked them back.

And still no response.

"Come on, Greg. If it mattered enough to you to go through this nightmare for it, how can you be afraid of saying it aloud? Something that important should be spoken."

House drew in a deep breath and exhaled it slowly as he struggled with himself.

"First, do no harm," he said quietly.

For a while, it seemed that would be all he would say. Then, after a moment, very softly, Rainie spoke up.

"Choix cornélien," she said. "An impossible choice. No way to win... and no way to do no harm."

Abruptly, House turned his head and gazed at her, their eyes meeting for a long moment. Then he nodded in agreement.

"No good outcome," he muttered. "The only choice I had was to do as little harm as I could. Either I submitted to the contract, or they died, painfully. It was that simple. I was less important than seven other people. I did the math, and I signed the contract."

His head dropped. When he spoke again, his voice was bitter and angry.

"Of course, it didn't matter that I did everything they asked. They killed Cameron anyway. It didn't matter. None of it mattered."

"Certainly it mattered, Greg. Because of you, six people are walking this earth who wouldn't have been alive. It's not your fault that the seventh isn't."

He looked unconvinced.

"You were there when it happened. How did it start?"

House shook his head.

"No. Not a chance."

"Why not?"

House hesitated.

"Because…" He spit the words out: "No one else should have to hear about it—go through it vicariously like that. It was bad enough that I went through it."

Jacey let him sit a moment before pressing onward, changing tack.

"Tell me about Wilson."

House looked up suddenly, startled and a little apprehensive.

"What about him?"

"Tell me what happened with Wilson. He's your best friend. His name is at the top of Thompson's list. And yet the two of you had a very public argument and you stopped speaking. Why?"

House stared at her stonily.

"You know why."

"Tell me anyway. Why did you push him away?"

House snorted and turned his head away, determined not to answer.

As she sat waiting, Jacey Liu saw Rainie looking at her rather intently, as if she were trying to send a message by mental telepathy. After a moment Jacey leaned back in her chair and, opening Rainie's case file, began flipping through the pages casually. Ah. There it was.

"Rainie?"

House, caught up in his own thoughts, for once hadn't noticed what was going on around him and appeared relieved that the spotlight had left him.

"Yes?"

"Tell me what happened with Evan."

A hint of a smile crossed Rainie's face as she made fleeting eye contact with Jacey. Good good good. You got it.

"I picked a fight with him."

House looked up, his eyes wary.

"Why?"

"To save his life."

Now she had House's attention.

"Explain, please. How could picking a fight save someone's life?"

Rainie's eyes flickered ever so slightly in House's direction before she answered.

"Because he was getting too close. If he figured out what was happening to me, they were going to kill him. The only way to save him was to make him go away."

Now she stared pointedly at House, forcing him to look at her. He found himself riveted by her eyes on his.

"Isn't that how it was, Greg? Isn't that what you did to Wilson? You made him so angry with you that he'd leave you alone? Made him hate you… so you could save him?"

House looked stunned.

"It's true, so please don't deny it," she continued in a low voice. "I know exactly what happened. I figured it out." Her voice grew quieter as she drifted off into her own memories. "Later on… when things, well, started to get bad, I remembered what you did to Wilson… so I did the same thing to Evan when my time came."

When my time came. The phrase began to run laps in his head. When her time came, when the pain and fear were building to a shattering crescendo and she realized just how dangerous these people were and just what her future held, she remembered what he'd done to Wilson, and she did the same to Evan.

The toughest thing, the most painful thing he ever did—more painful than the torture, the rapes, the pain, the dread, the hopelessness—was to pick that fight with Wilson. What he really wanted to do was tell Wilson, tell someone, tell anyone, what was happening. He wanted to tell Wilson how scared he was, how terrified. He wanted to break down and reach out for his friend's comfort, sympathy… but he couldn't. He didn't dare. Not if he wanted that friend to stay alive.

Instead, he chose to spend that endless future completely alone by pushing his best friend away… to keep him safe, so no one could harm him. And the constantly surprising Rainie Adler figured it out. Then she went into her own level of hell with her eyes wide open, and chose to do the same thing to her best friend when her time came.

"How could you?" he said under his breath, not quite aware that he'd said it aloud.

She shrugged.

"Choix cornélien. An impossible choice. Destroy the friendship or they would destroy it for me. I did it for the same reason you did. It was the only way I could save him. I loved him enough to allow him to hate me if it saved his life."

House lowered his head, his eyes apparently searching the carpet for something.

"Greg, I knew what you'd done, and why. But I also knew something you didn't know. I knew that, despite everything—despite the changes in you, despite the way you broke off your friendship with him, despite Cameron's murder and seeing you sent to prison—Wilson still cared about you, still believed in you. All I could hope for was that Evan would… might…"

Her voice broke. She tried again.

"…that Evan might feel the same about me. That he might still love me the way Wilson still believed in you…"

Suddenly, the dam broke.

Half an hour and half a box of Kleenex later, House finally stopped crying.

He wasn't surprised to find himself exhausted.

What he didn't expect was to find that the elephant—the one that had been sitting on his chest for six years—had shifted its position ever so slightly… just enough to release some of the pressure it exerted on his heart.