This chapter gives a little more insight into Wilson's thoughts.
And yes, the end is near, and the Huddy is coming.
Thanks for all of your FANTASTIC reviews, they've really put a smile on my face.
Wilson woke to see five people in his room.
And he didn't want to talk to any one of them.
House had left, presumably to take care of the patient, something that he would have insisted on doing, even when everyone else was trying to get their bearings together in the face of Wilson's suicide attempt.
But Cuddy was still by his bedside, and he wondered when she had come back, perhaps it had been just minutes after she had left with House.
Cameron had also returned, and he wasn't surprised to see that Robert Chase had his arm around her, as they stood together off to the side, both blond and red-rimmed.
Remy Hadley was standing with Eric Foreman, and he too had his arm around the woman beside him, and Wilson wondered for a moment just how much he had missed in his misery.
Only Chris Taub was missing from the circle, and he briefly speculated as to why the short plastic surgeon wasn't at his bedside.
He hadn't been friends, exactly, with the man, but they had been on friendly terms.
Then, he remembered that Taub hadn't been at Kutner's funeral, instead choosing to be with people who still needed hope, and he remembered what House had said about his employee, that he had once tried to commit suicide himself, and Wilson realized that perhaps it was too painful for him.
Cameron had an expression of utmost remorse on her face, and she wasn't looking at him.
He knew this meant that she felt she was responsible for his suicide attempt, but Allison Cameron didn't know the full story.
Sure, her actions with House had brought the feelings that he had been experiencing all up to the surface, but his desire to end his own life had been long in the making.
He fed on neediness, and prided himself on being able to fix people, to identify with them and become their friend.
Of course, that often became a problem in his profession.
Over the years, he had befriended many patients, and when it was their time to die, he gave them comfort that may not have been there otherwise.
True, he did form a few bonds that could have been considered inappropriate for a professional, but what did it matter?
It turned out that it mattered a great deal, because the burden of seeing people that he knew for months and years, die because of what he couldn't do began to become noticeable.
Like many people in his country, he turned to anti-depressants, all while trying to keep tabs on his reckless best friend.
There was a part of Wilson that admired House greatly, and another part that saw him as the biggest idiot in the world.
But whatever kept his gravitating towards the man, it drove him to help him, and over the years, helping turned to enabling, and he became the provider of one of the world-famous diagnostician's favourite vices, Vicodin.
He still couldn't describe how it had felt, knowing that he had partly caused the delusions his best friend had suffered from in the spring, knowing that through his reluctance to hurt the man, he had let him become too dependant on the painkiller.
Seeing him walk into a mental hospital had almost been too much to bear; he hadn't even been able to cry.
The look, that House had sent him, before the door had closed, it still haunted him, he still thought of it, even when his friend was manipulating people and being a general jackass.
But it didn't haunt him as much as Amber's death did.
He still couldn't let go of her; it had been longer than he had been with her since she had died, but the pain was still raw.
He remembered what Cameron had once told him, that the pain did get better, but it never went away.
But at this point, he wasn't even sure that it would get to be less than it had been when she had first passed away.
House would have said it was stupid, to be grieving for so long for something he hadn't even had for that long, but House didn't understand just how much Amber had meant to him.
For once, he hadn't been in a relationship that revolved around his partner's needs, for once, he had been with a strong woman that could put up with the friend that pushed every relationship he had towards the edge.
He often thought of House as indestructible; even through all of the times he had nearly gotten himself killed, Wilson knew, somewhere, that House was going to be alright, that he would make it through whatever it was.
He had seen him through the infarction, through both of Stacy's departures, through the Vogler reign, through the Tritter debacle…
He supposed that this feeling of his friend's immortality had transferred to Amber, for her strength and steel seemed to also be indestructible.
And then, she had died.
A young woman, full of hopes and dreams, ambition and potential, fell prey to the circumstances that Gregory House had brought about.
For this, he had hated the man more than he had hated anyone before, but not for killing her.
No, he had recognized that House hadn't meant to bring about her death, and he could see, even through the façade of nonchalance that he had put up, that he did feel some amount of guilt about what had happened.
He resented him for being alive.
For being able to survive anything, for being able to escape from a bus crash with only a few scrapes and bruises, for being able to survive sacrificing himself for a woman who was to die anyway, for being so ever present in Wilson's life that he was able to destroy everything good that had ever happened and come out unscathed.
He had resented him for his inhumanity, for his refusal to conform to the norms of the rest of the human population.
He had loved Amber, but he loved Gregory House even more, and it nearly broke him, to realize that the man who had become his best friend was nothing more than a monster, someone who could do things without taking real responsibility.
He came back to the world after his time off to a friend who reminded of everything that Amber had been.
And that had been too much.
When his reality had been shaken again, with the mental breakdown, his road to destruction had suddenly become much shorter, and his speed had picked up.
House came back from treatment, a changed, and yet, not so changed, man, and he had to deal with his problems once more, as if worrying about his well-being for months hadn't been enough.
Then, came the conference.
He had been so focused on his patient, the one that had been in so much pain that there was no pretending to treat it anymore, that he hadn't noticed that Cuddy was in an actual relationship.
He, of course, had really screwed that one up.
He was angry at Cuddy, sure, for thinking that a man like Lucas was a better choice than someone who was really and truly in love with her, but he was angrier at himself, for not taking care of his friend properly.
He should have subtly (oh, and he was SO good at subtlety), asked her about her life, perhaps casually slipping House into the conversation, perhaps wondering aloud if she still had feelings for him.
Maybe then, he would have noticed her nervousness, and her reluctance to talk about her personal life.
Maybe then, he could have stopped House from confessing to things that were difficult for him to confess, things that he certainly didn't do for just anyone.
It was his fault that the crushing blow of rejection had been spread from House to the members of his team, new and old, causing a rippling effect that reached far and wide.
Suddenly, personal problems were brought to the surface, and the tangle of conflict threatened to strangle each and every one of them.
One would think that Wilson had escaped the drama unscathed, but his outward appearance gave no clue to what he was really feeling.
It was all his fault, really, that House had become so inwardly conflicted that he had to take it out on the people around him, that Chase and Cameron's marriage was ruined because of what House thought he needed, that he had dragged out the diagnosis of a patient into a needless game to entice his two former fellows to come back.
He hadn't been a good friend, and House had done nothing but try to improve in the past few months, he had even saved his professional reputation.
And Wilson repaid him by letting the man go back to what he once was.
But all that hadn't even been enough to push him towards suicide; no, it was a nine-year old boy that he was treating.
Usually, he could deal with child cancer patients, but this one had been different.
It was his eyes.
The last time Wilson had looked into those eyes, he had been saying goodbye to his first ex-wife.
After months of the bitterness and guilt that had surrounded the death of her son, they had finally been forced to part ways, a life lesson that Wilson was forced to learn, soon after becoming a practicing oncologist.
He had met her when he had taken her son Callum's case.
He had had colorectal cancer, and the prognosis had been terminal.
The cancer had metastasized to the point that any treatment was futile; it had been caught too late.
But upon inquiry, he had been unable to tell the sweet green-eyed boy that he was to die.
And so, he had been caught up in a web of lies that went on for months.
He had fallen in love with the boy's young mother, a woman who had been through enough tragedy in her life that any God would have spared her the death of her only son, a son that had been with her since she had graduated high school.
She had been very much broken, and he had very much wanted to fix her.
The proposal created a pocket of happiness that was too short lived, and even getting married, one of the first true happy moments of James Wilson's life, did nothing to soften the blow that Callum's death had been.
The worst thing, perhaps, was that Callum had died hating his step-father, the man who hadn't had the courage to tell him his fate.
The marriage fell apart, an occurrence that would become only too familiar, and he moved from where they had lived, from place to place to place until he met Gregory House at a medical conference, and the rest, of course, was history.
He was shocked, twelve years later, to find a boy with the eyes he had fallen in love with early into his practice, sitting with a man whose features he shared.
His ex-wife had died five years earlier, in a car accident, and the father had raised the boy.
But, like his brother, his colorectal cancer had been caught too late.
And, once again, there was nothing to do but wait for him to die.
He had told his Andrea's son, for the second time in his life, that he was to die in six months to a year, the day that House had told Cuddy what he really felt towards her.
And of course, in his desolation and anger at life, he had overreacted to his friend's actions, drinking himself into a stupor.
Of course, he had convinced himself that there really was nothing left to live for, not when another son of Andrea's was to die, not when House had screwed things up with Cuddy so badly that there really was no hope left, not when Amber's death still hung over him like a shroud.
So the gun that he had in his briefcase had made its way to his hand, and had travelled with it up to his temple.
A blur, then nothing.
A hospital bed, a room full of people who cared about him.
His friend, who called him an idiot and told him that he loved him.
Everything in his life had led up to this, and for the first time since he had woken up, he truly regretted what he had tried to do.
He hadn't gone through med school, three marriages, and a helluva friendship to be put under the ground, forty years too soon, with a hole in his head.
But this was where he had ended up, and he hoped that he would never have to end up here again.
He felt like a coward, a failure, a disappointment, and he wanted nothing more than the people in his room to go away.
He feigned sleep for a little while, and he could sense his colleagues filtering out; his parents and his one sane brother had already been by and exchanged words of grief.
Before long, Cuddy was the only one left, and he opened his eyes, sitting up.
"Where's House?" he asked, just barely looking into her eyes.
"He's with his team. Working on the patient." she answered, emotionless.
"Has he, has he been in here since you left together?" Cuddy made a face at the word together.
"No." she said, trying but failing not to make an irritated face at him. "And we did not leave 'together'."
"Right," Wilson smiled, making an 'I-don't-believe-you' face at her. "You were just holding hands because you were cold."
She blushed furiously at that.
"We shouldn't be talking about me, we should be talking about you." she said, trying to change the subject.
His face turned sour at that, and he looked away.
"We don't need to."
"Yes, we do. Forgive me if I want to know why my friend tried to kill himself."
He turned back to Cuddy, regarding her sadly.
And he talked to her for hours, about his marriages, his practice, and his friendship with House.
At the end of it, Cuddy was crying, and Wilson's eyes were red and his speech shaky.
And House was standing in the doorway, tears on his face, once again. He had heard nearly everything.
It seemed he had done more crying in the last twenty-fours than he had done in the past twenty-four years.
But everything had been brought back up to the surface, things he hadn't dealt with fully before, his childhood and his insecurities, his addictions and his depression.
None of it had done anything to lift him out of the mood he had been in for the past few weeks.
He walked over to Wilson's bedside, and sat next to Cuddy, pulling her into his arms, as Wilson regarded them with a melancholy smile.
The three sat in silence, as they shared the same air, fleeting expressions drifting between them, before House struck up a conversation about hospital food.
He didn't return to his office for hours, and his team had the sense not to interrupt him, not when he was with Wilson and Cuddy.
The patient was cured, six hours later, but neither House nor Cuddy had left Wilson's bedside for more than a bathroom break.
They shared stories of their college days, House slipping in snide remarks about Cuddy's capacity for partying, Cuddy slipping in remarks about House's capacity to piss off authority figures, while Wilson chuckled lightly, eating the Thai takeout that Cuddy had ordered for them earlier.
Jokes were made about Wilson's attempt on his own life (by House, of course), but never did they slip into more serious topics, no one being comfortable with being so open again.
Cuddy answered frequent calls from Lucas, and every time she got up to talk to him, House shared a look with Wilson.
He rolled his eyes, seemingly mocking the PI's obsessive caring about his girlfriend, but his best friend knew better.
It hurt him, when he saw her smile while talking to Lucas.
He wanted her smile like that when she was with him; he wanted her all to himself, no walls between them.
But walls seemed to be what their relationship was all about, now.
When she sat down, his arm was always around the back of her seat, and she never made any comment about it.
He would take what he could get.
And this closeness, their playful discussions about the Twilight fad and the overabundance of short-shorts in the winter climate, seemed to be all he was getting for now.
Miraculously, Wilson's suicide attempt had brought the three of them together, for they never seemed to run out of things to talk about, not when there were nurses to gossip about and people to mock.
The day turned into night.
Cuddy looked at her watch, and saw that it was nearly six o'clock, the sky having gotten darker some hour and a half previously.
"I have to go," she said sadly, giving Wilson a small smile. "I told Lucas I'd be home around six."
"Go," Wilson said, waving her off weakly. "Go home to your family." House's chest clenched painfully at Wilson's words; since when had she and Rachael and Lucas been a family?
Cuddy got up to hug Wilson; he moved himself to wrap his arms around her.
"I'm sorry." he whispered in her ear, and she leaned back, looking into his eyes.
"Don't be." she told him, placing a kiss on his cheek, before removing her arms from him. "You're going to be fine, Wilson."
Cuddy turned towards House.
"So, I guess this is goodbye." he said mockingly, brushing fake tears out of his eyes.
He stuck out his hand for her to shake, looking at her expectantly.
She surprised him by pulling him in for a tight hug, and when they separated, she couldn't help but feel the electricity between them, electricity that remained even through lies and suicide.
She looked up at him, and he stared at her with what could only be described as caring, albeit Housian caring.
An overwhelming sense of love towards the man standing before her washed over Cuddy, and suddenly she couldn't move, not under the gaze of those ice blue eyes.
She remembered how much she had felt when he had kissed her in Wilson's kitchen, how much she had felt when he had kissed her after she had lost Joy, and it terrified her.
She wanted to kiss him; she wanted to feel everything that she had felt when his lips were on hers, his hands on her body.
And so, she quickly strode out of the room, wanting to get home to her family before she did anything rash.
House stood there, looking at that spot she had previously occupied, and didn't move for several seconds, before whirling around to sit down next to his best friend.
"You two had a bit of a moment back there." Wilson commented.
"Shut up." House muttered, as he stared out at the hallway.
"I'm serious, you looked like you were about to kiss for a few seconds."
"Stop deflecting!" House whined, putting a huge pout on his face. "We're should be talking about YOU!"
"That's what she said." Wilson muttered, rolling his eyes. "All you two do is evade and evade and evade, deflect and deflect and deflect, you rationalize EVERYTHING. It's getting really tiring. If she could just figure out that she's just dating Lucas to replace you, then-"
"Then she'd go falling into my arms, I get it. I'm not in the wrong this time, I'm actually trying."
"She slept over, that night." Wilson said, with a look of epiphany. House nodded.
"Did anything… happen?" House rolled his eyes.
"Like what?"
"Like, oh, I don't know, you proclaiming your undying love for her? Oh wait, you already did that."
"Don't remind me." House said bitterly. "Biggest mistake of my life."
"Oh, I doubt that."
"I don't know, Wilson, it kind of drove you towards attempting to kill yourself."
"You're not seriously blaming yourself for my suicide attempt, are you?"
House was silent.
"House, it had nothing to do with you."
"Yeah, how come it happened after you found me in bed with Cameron? If it really had nothing to do with me, you would have offed yourself some other time, not after confirmation of my self-destructiveness."
"Yeah, maybe that had something to do with it, but it wasn't the whole story. It was Andrea's son, House, Ryan. He's nine years old, and I had to tell him what I had never told his brother. Everything I had felt when Callum had died came rushing back to me, and I looked back on my life and realized that I really was a failure. I couldn't help you, I couldn't help… I had to let him kill himself, House. You have no idea what that was like."
"No, I don't. But I know what it's like to want to kill myself. This life, in all its shittiness, is all we have. Taking that away from yourself is the worst thing that you can do, because even suffering is something more than not existing."
"You don't know that. You don't know that there isn't something better, pain free, after we move on."
"I don't know. But I want to live like this is my last life, because in all likelihood, it is. And you shouldn't have been so quick to want to get rid of it, just because you had been feeling-"
"What, empty? Useless? Like I couldn't do anything right for anyone anymore? Like just getting up in the morning was too much of an effort?"
"Yeah, all those things! You could have talked to me, I would have listened; though I would have made insensitive comments, I would have listened and known what you were going through because I feel those things everyday! But I still get up, because I have something to live for, life! You can't just give up, because, because, because it's too much for you! There are people who care about you, Wilson, people who wouldn't have let you sink this low, if you had just let them. I wouldn't have let this happen."
"Are you sure about that, House? Or would your full attention have been diverted at the last moment by some fancy new case?"
"You son-of-a-bitch." House snarled. "You're the most important person in my life, and I can't even get you to trust that I would do anything to keep you alive."
"More important than Cuddy?"
"Yeah, more important than Cuddy. If she died… well, I'd probably pull a 'James Wilson after Amber' and drink myself to oblivion, but I wouldn't kill myself. I'd know that you would be there for me, trying to get me up off the barstool and back into real life. But if you died… I don't think I'd survive it. I told you, I love your sorry ass, and if anything happened to it…"
"I thought you weren't going to say it again." Wilson said sadly, and looked up at his best friend, smiling weakly.
"I wasn't. But you forced my hand. Don't make me say it again. I get all sorts of icky feelings."
"You really mean what you said?"
"Me saving you at the conference was just the tip of the iceberg. If you try anything like that again…"
"I know, I know, you'll watch me twenty-four hours a day." He tried to smile again, but House's face remained grim.
"I know, that it hurts you that I don't trust you sometimes… but I can't always put my faith into you. You've proven time and time again that you can't be relied upon… and yet, you've proven that you can be the most loyal friend in the world. I'm sorry, that I have to question every good thing that comes out of your mouth, but it's just become habit, over the years. I guess that for every bit of you that I admire, there's a bit of you that I have to despise. And I'm sorry for that."
House nodded gruffly.
"Come here, you stupid suicidal maniac." he said after a long pause, and pulled Wilson into a crushing hug. "Don't scare me like that again."
"I won't." the oncologist said. "Now go get that devil administrator."
House pulled away, grinning.
"Don't worry. I will." He sat back down and looked at his watch. The watch that Lawrence Kutner had given him.
"I should get going." he said. "I think I'm starting to smell worse than you."
"Thanks, House. Really means a lot to me." The diagnostician just shot him a fake smile.
"You're not going to try and strangle yourself with your sheets, are you?" House asked, just to be sure.
"No." Wilson answered, and smiled at his best friend. He wasn't going to think of anything along those lines for a long time.
Not when he knew how much House wanted and needed him to be alive.
He watched the crippled man get up stiffly, popping a few pills before walking out of his room.
House stopped at the door, looking back at his friend.
"I kissed her." he said proudly. "She stopped just before the point of no return, of course, but she sure kissed back…" Wilson gave him an encouraging smile, before waving him off.
He knew that somehow, everything was going to be alright.
Someday, everything would be resolved, and though he would never find anything that resembled peace with a man with House in his life, he would find something close to happiness.