087. Disease
Pitched Battle
House had always liked a good disease. Well, actually he'd always liked a rare, confusing and puzzling disease that stretched his mind and made him think outside the square. One that had strange symptoms or, even better, one that had symptoms common to any number of other diseases or medical problems so that you had sort the wheat from the chaff.
He liked the challenge. He liked the timeline – that ticking clock that hovered in the back of his mind, counting down the seconds of his patient's life and telling him how long he had to come up with an answer. Most of the time he beat that clock though many times it had been down to those last few final ticks. But not all of the time. But sometimes he lost, sometimes those seconds ticked away to nothing before he'd found the answer, sometimes death won a round leaving him frustrated and angry.
But now, for the first time in his life, House hated disease.
As he watched Wilson sweat and bleed and cry out in his fevered delirium, House hated the disease that had his friend in its clutches. This was worse than when Foreman was sick…much worse, a thousand times worse. Foreman was a colleague, maybe someone he kind of respected, but nothing more. Wilson was his friend, his only friend, his best friend and…maybe more? That was thought he couldn't handle right now, shoving it as far down in his brain as he could so that he could think. So that he could win. Because he had to win this one, had to beat the clock this time. If he didn't…it didn't bear thinking about.