There is something that terrorizes the man who terrorizes so many others. It is something someone unimportant once said to him.
"And one day our friendship will break, and that'll just prove your theory that relationships are conditional and you don't need human connection, or deserve it, or whatever goes on in the rat maze of your brain."
It made him stop thinking or breathing or acting or sniping or being. He wasn't addicted to pills, he didn't care how loud or quiet or unnoticed he became. He was just a crippled old man staying in one place for the rest of his life, scaring anything and anyone away.
Someday, Wilson would not be his friend. It hadn't even occurred to him, not really.
And then the moment passed, Wilson looked away, and he almost cried. Everything that he was came crashing back and, after his epiphany, he saw what his life had become.
Days or weeks or years or lifetimes from now, he would not have Wilson. He would not have anyone. He would be nothing, no one, alone, alone, desperately completely horribly alone.
But that moment, too, passed. Life rolled inexorably forward. He clung to Wilson like a child, talking to him constantly, coming into his office without anything to beg for. He tried and he tried to find a part of himself that would keep Wilson there for another month, a week, a day.
He failed. Wilson hated him. Everything had gone to Hell in a hand basket and he had known that it would since Wilson had said It. Had known it longer than that, really.
Now Wilson had found a wife that worked and gone off somewhere House-less to tell people that they were going to die. And House was alone alone alone.
If he knew anything now - which he obviously didn't - it was that the only good, honest thing he had ever done was to befriend James Wilson.
But he was a broken person. He could only offer a broken sort of friendship (or love, maybe, when he was detoxed enough to think) and Wilson hadn't needed that. Hadn't needed to put up with it.
And he was going to die alone alone alone and Wilson probably wouldn't even hear about it until months later at some conference.
He had known, every second of every day all his life, that he was going to die alone. But without Wilson?
It was too much, too cruel.
House died.
Alone, alone, alone.
Hearing what Wilson said... I'm in tune with House. I've written quite a bit of him in first person and I know him a little bit (I like to fantasize), and hearing It made me cry. So now I tried to make you cry, too. So there.
Things get weird when I stream-of-conscious House, too...