Hey, happy new year! Just a short chapter here; next time will be the great intervention meeting.

Cyrus had appointments all day but hurried down to House's office at half-past three to see how he was doing, finding him with an ice pack on his knee and pouring over a medical journal.

"Hey," House said when Cyrus walked in.

"Hey. I heard what happened. How bad is it?" Cyrus asked, grabbing a chair and moving over to sit in front of House.

"Partial ligament tear," House grumbled. "Crutches, compression, PT are all on my docket now."

"Damn," he whistled.

"Yeah. I'm so thrilled. This is gonna make life harder for quite awhile."

"Yeah," Cyrus agreed with a sigh. "Can I get you anything? Coke? Chocolate?"

"Coke would be great."

"Be right back."

Cyrus was back in a few minutes with the coke and settled down with his own soda. "Working on something for a case?"

"New journal issue," House answered as he took a painkiller and washed it down with coke. "I forgot to send the intervention request to Wilson. I'm too tired tonight so it'll have to wait until tomorrow."

"Can't imagine why you'd forget," Cyrus said with a sarcastic smirk that House answered with his own. "How are you getting home tonight?"

House shrugged. "Cab I guess."

"I can drive you home."

"Sure, thanks. I can worry about cabs tomorrow morning," House accepted. Cyrus wanted to tell him he'd drive him in the morning too but he was pretty sure House wouldn't let him. He did live on the other side of town and House valued his independence. But it took effort not to ask.

They left the hospital forty-five minutes later and although House rolled his eyes and groused, Cyrus made sure that he got safely inside his apartment door before leaving him for the night.

He didn't arrive at work until nearly eleven the next day and when he did he was definitely hurting and grumpy. The team quickly got him settled and headed off to find something to do away from the conference room. About 1pm he looked up as someone knocked on his door and pushed it open.

"Parks," he acknowledged. "Not the best day for a visit."

"Not a visit. Just thought you might want to judge whether my ravioli is up to snuff," she said, putting down a steaming container on his desk. His mouth started watering from the aroma.

"Smells good," he offered as he picked up the fork she'd provided, speared one of them and popped it in his mouth. "Mmm. This… this is really good," he said, nodding and giving her a slight smile.

"Glad it passed the test. Enjoy," she said, heading for the door.

"Parks," he called out. She stopped, holding the door open, to look back at him.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome," she smiled and left him to his meal.

He was getting ready to go home at 5pm when Wilson showed up in his office.

"Are you serious? You want an intervention?" Wilson demanded, running his hand through his hair in agitation.

"I am serious. I want to clear the air between us and I think we need someone else as an arbitrator to do that. Even if it only means our departments working together smoothly again and nothing more."

Wilson stared at him for a long time, finally sighing and letting his hands slap against his legs. "Fine. For the patients benefit then. Thursday at 4pm. Don't be late and don't try to reschedule because this is the only time I'll offer it."

"Thursday at 4pm."

Wilson left again and House let out his breath, hoping this wasn't a mistake. He picked up his cell phone and sent a text to Cyrus about the day and time of the meeting. A few minutes later, Cyrus called him.

"I've made sure that I'm free for the meeting. When do you want to meet to practice?"

"Are you free tomorrow night? My place? I'll order dinner for us."

"I'll pick up some beer. See you then."

By the time Cyrus arrived at his apartment on Wednesday evening House had worked himself into a state of agitation as he tried to put some of the things that he wanted to talk about on paper. Cyrus got them each a beer and put the rest into his fridge.

"How's the knee?" he asked, handing a beer to House.

"Pain's not too bad today, mostly more stiff than anything else."

"So how do you want to do this? Many interventions start by reading a letter to the other person. Is that something that you'd like to do? Or do you just want to try to talk it out with him?" Cyrus asked as he settled down on the sofa next to House.

"Letter. I don't want to leave out anything important. I started jotting down some things," he said, handing the paper to Cyrus.

"Alright, let's work through these points and write a few sentences for each, just the bare bones. I'm sure he'll have some rebuttal and questions and you can elaborate from there. I want you to be careful about accepting blame though, House. Only accept what's actually your fault, what you could control."

House looked away and clenched his jaw. "You don't know everything."

"I know that. But I also know that you feel very guilty and that has the potential to make you accept anything he wants to blame you for. That's neither true nor necessary," Cyrus explained calmly. "There are always at least two sides to every issue and you only need to take responsibility for your side. He has to own up to his side too."

"So I remember what you told me about Amber. Let's go over these other points first. Tell me about the Vogler Fiasco," Cyrus asked with a puzzled look at the title House had given it.

"Vogler was a billionaire owner of a drug company that bought his way onto the hospital board with a donation of $100 million." Cyrus whistled. "Yeah. Lot of money but a lot of strings attached to it. Anyway, he zeroed in on me and my department. Said we didn't treat enough patients each year and our expenses were too high to be profitable. He also didn't like that I wouldn't kiss his ass in gratitude for his money. He turned my team against me and each other, tried to turn Wilson. Ordered me to fire someone. I came up with a way to keep them all and get onto his budget figure and he refused. Said I had to learn to follow orders. I chose someone finally and he wouldn't accept my choice. Told me to pick someone else. Then he made a proposal that if I would give a speech for the debut of his company's new drug, I could keep all of my fellows. Well, the drug was a joke, just a grab for a way to extend the patent, and the speech he prepared for me was 14 pages long."

"I read through it, decided I wouldn't put my reputation to it, and did a couple of sentences at the conference. After that, he tried to revoke my tenure to have me removed. He got voted down because Wilson held out. Then he voted Wilson off the board and had another vote to get me out. Cuddy held out this time. He tried to vote her off too, she told the board to think about whether they wanted to make their own decisions or be owned by Vogler. In the end, Vogler, and his money, left and we kept our jobs. Wilson was pissed at me for not just sucking it up and giving the speech or wearing a labcoat, which was something else Vogler was trying to make me do."

"So, you would like to try to explain to Wilson why you refused."

"Alright. So what about the Tritter Incident?"

House grimaced. "That was one of my lowlights. I, uh… I was forging prescriptions with Wilson's pad. Put him on the spot and endangered his license and practice. His bank account got frozen. Wilson tried to cut a deal for me and him with Tritter that involved a 2 month stint in rehab which I vehemently refused. I stole drugs that were for a patient who had just died, wound up overdosing on Christmas Eve with the stolen drugs and bourbon. Wilson found me and left me on the floor of my apartment."

"Wait. He left you there?" Cyrus demanded.

"He said I'd already vomited up the pills but yeah. I woke up on the floor the next morning."

Cyrus jotted a note down to have Wilson explain this.

"Anyway, I went to the cop, tried to take the deal, he refused. Did a half-ass stint in rehab where I cheated on it. Wound up going to court. Cuddy lied on the stand for me. I'm not sure why. I've never dared to ask her for a full explanation. I did apologize to Wilson but with everything else going on, I don't think it meant much to him."

"Anything else?" Cyrus asked.

"I've taken a lot of money from Wilson over the years. Bail money, buying a motorcycle. I wanted to try to explain this somehow. Maybe offer some repayment if he doesn't get offended by the idea.

"After I got out of Mayfield, I lived with Wilson for awhile. But he made me leave when Sam came back into town. I wasn't ready to be alone yet but I felt like the unwanted third wheel around them. What I guess I want to know is why he bought me the organ and then turned around and asked me to leave. I don't even know what happened to it."

"What kind of organ?"

"A big console organ, since my piano wouldn't fit in his apartment and he knew how much I liked to play."

"And I want to talk about the trip to my father's funeral. I refused to go, my mother called him to ask for help getting me there. Him and Cuddy drugged me to get me in the car. I tried to begin to explain why I didn't want to go, but this was a couple of months after Amber died and he didn't want to hear anything from me."

"I can see why you wanted an intervention. There's a lot of heavy emotions here to deal with," Cyrus said soberly.

The two of them worked for hours writing out what House wanted to say with edits from Cyrus to keep him from taking too much blame on himself and any questions that he wanted to ask Wilson.

"Well, I think this will serve as a good foundation," Cyrus said yawning and stretching as he got up from the sofa. "Will this be in your office?"

House frowned and sighed. "I'd rather do it in his office to be honest. More privacy. But maybe less privacy would prove to him that I'm really trying."

"I'll come to your office tomorrow at three. And we'll close the blinds. The whole world doesn't need to watch. Take my advice; put that away and get some sleep. Do you need anything tonight?"

"No. Thanks for this."

"Good night then."

The team was sitting at the conference table when he arrived that morning, sharing bagels that someone had brought and looking through a stack of patient files.

"Good morning. I have something to talk to you all about," House said, coming over to stand at the head of the table and waiting for everyone to look up.

"Listen close because I'm not going to say this again or at least not for a long time. I'm proud of you and this department. You've all grown individually and as a team and professionally as well. I know I don't give you a lot of support or encouragement. I probably won't start giving you encouragement either, but… I will put a serious effort into giving you more support."

The team share a round of amazed looks before Chase dared to ask a question.

"Thanks. We appreciate it. You want some coffee? There's still bagels left," he offered. Foreman wordlessly slid the bag closer to House's end of the table.

"That would be great," House answered, taking a seat and extremely grateful that none of them had made a big deal over his speech, though he knew they were affected by it and would discuss what it meant in length for days, hopefully out of his hearing.

"So, what's up with Wilson?" Thirteen asked as she slid the cream cheese to him. "He's been in a snit for weeks now."

"Not sure, though I've got some ideas. I made an appointment with him tomorrow to hash it through. It shouldn't bleed over to you and definitely not to our patients. If it does, tell me, I'll handle it. I'll get Cuddy to handle it if need be," he said, nodding thanks to Chase for the coffee as he took a bite of his bagel. "He's angry at me, for personal reasons."

"Do we have any potential cases?" he asked and the team dived into discussing and arguing which of the files might seem interesting enough to entice House to take them. None of them were but he knew they, like him, needed more challenging work than the clinic to do.

"Alright no great mysteries here. Take these two cases on, divvy up the rest among you and send a consult answer back. Make sure to document it. We'll have some extra billing to show for our time. That'll make Cuddy happy," he smirked, getting back up carefully and heading to his office to read his email and maybe do the same. Maybe.