Hi everyone... just another thank you for all your lovely

reviews, they're much appreciated and do help to cheer

me up with all that is going on with our poor Wilson and

House at the mo in season 8 :( Enjoy this update, the

next one shouldn't be too long :D xxx

'Day one, day one… start over again.

Step one, step one… I'm barely making sense.

For now, I'm faking it… 'til I'm pseudo-making it.

From scratch, begin again…

But this time I as I, and not as we.'

{Alanis Morrisette: Not As We}

This didn't feel real.

Sat in Cuddy's car as she drove him to House's apartment, his gaze unfocused as he stared unseeingly out of the open window, and with three cases full of some of his and House's meager possessions in the back, Wilson was surprised to faintly register that the world had adhered to that over-used cliché in appearing to simply carry on without him.

By contrast, his world had been violently shaken on its axis, his life stuck on juddering, vicious pause, and yet the lives of all these others just… went on.

Like normal.

Without him.

And nothing whatsoever about that depressingly ongoing fact felt real.

Sickeningly happy, carefree couples strolling along hand in hand, children running and yelling incessantly as they played, heeled women and suited men flying in and out of coffee shops, time only for the cell phones glued permanently to their ears, bored teens slouching at street corners, impatient horns blaring from irate drivers in the heavy traffic, pointless music drifting quietly from the radio to break the subdued, wrought silence he and Cuddy had found themselves immersed in… whilst all these enviously, ordinary life-living people of New Jersey had sat at home last night, enjoying their evening, laughing with friends and family, arguing over control of the TV, making the most of life at its most normal, life at its best… his world had halted right there at 10:11pm, never having been so openly vulnerable as to when he'd been abused and abruptly discarded on his own hard, cold floor; naked and his whole body hurting so fucking much, overwhelmed with fear, fear that had hardly lifted once he'd managed to close that door he should never have fucking answered, the shame that had engulfed him still coursing through his veins even now, as hot as the blood that had pooled in his mouth, pooled all around him, creeping forth from his battered body to join the slick mess that covered him in all its sick glory, the liquid iron sliding bitterly down his throat, so much that he just couldn't stop gagging, and House's face was there suddenly, thankfully, swimming before him, his best friend so scared, helpless… so guilty-

'Wilson.'

Wilson flinched then at the uneasy utterance of Cuddy's voice, the hairs on the back of his neck stood horribly on end as he looked down to find her tiny hand attempting to grip the tense, trembling fist that was his own beneath it; the usual, grating sounds of the outside world rushing quickly back to him as he realized they'd come to a standstill in the heaving traffic, clammy and sweating now under the dusty glare of the midday sun.

He should have gone with House on his bike, his friend no doubt weaving easily through the congested streets at this point to make it to his apartment in record time, free of the constraints that came with traveling in cars.

Because Wilson had come to recognize that this car was stifling… it was boxing him in.

And he couldn't breathe.

He couldn't breathe.

It took Cuddy a moment to realize what Wilson was doing as he suddenly ripped his hand from hers, breathlessly unclipping his seat belt and fumbling frantically with the handle to finally fling the door wide open, almost slamming it into the car next to them, her tormented friend practically falling from the car in his haste to just get out.

'No, Wilson – Wilson don't! Come back! Wilson!'

Wilson was already stumbling forth, his legs on autopilot as he hurtled forwards, vehemently hating these people who inadvertently blocked his way, shoving them roughly aside in his panic, Cuddy's voice fading away to merge with the background hum even as she yelled his name so desperately, feeling nothing but the ground that his feet pounded hard as he ran, destination unknown, gulping in great lung fulls of air, forcing the oxygen down his throat as his screaming mind focused on only one thought, able to think of nothing else but that one, forceful command:

Run…

Run.

Fucking RUN.

He couldn't have stopped for anyone at that point, not even House.

And it broke his heart.

-[H]-

House groaned quietly at the name that was flashing on his phone for the eleventh time since Wilson had decided to make a break for it, the damn thing vibrating insistently on the coffee table until he eventually snatched a hand out to answer it.

'What?'

'You know 'what' - has he called yet?'

'In the half hour since you last called? No,' replied House tersely, Cuddy's non-stop phone calls that she'd plagued him with all afternoon since arriving at 221B minus a certain Oncologist now positively doing his nut in, 'I remind you of our last conversation we had, and the one before that, and the one before that, and the one before that – I'll call you when he comes home. Capiche?'

Cuddy said nothing for a moment, her voice choked slightly when she finally did speak up.

'It's been nearly nine hours, House. Anything could have happened. Anything. God, if I'd just caught him-'

'Cuddy, if you'd managed to catch him he wouldn't have thought twice about lashing out,' sighed House, heaving himself from the couch to limp to the darkening window, his exasperated voice now surprisingly forgiving given the fact that, ultimately, she'd failed to keep his best friend safe on the theoretically simple task of transferring him from A to B, 'This isn't your fault. By the sounds of it, he just wanted to get away, via whatever means – you couldn't have stopped him. None of us could.'

He wished he was lying, but House knew better than anyone the tendencies Wilson had to bottle up his problems, it came with the territory – work for years to become the Department Head of a specialty that was heart wrenching at the best of times, and you honed that particular personality quirk to become very, very good at hiding your emotions. Hell, put that amount of effort in in the first place, and House would argue that that revealed an awful lot about a person's natural tendency to hide away. Wilson had simply developed and refined that instinct within his career to make it an outright skill. Because, of course, fail to do that, and he'd have become an emotional wreck, close to his patients but utterly useless to them given the fact that they're the ones who have to face the battle in the fight for their lives, not him.

Take this morning, for example – Wilson, out of the three of them, had been the one who'd seemed almost normal, willingly assenting to House's reticent suggestion of moving out into his apartment and calmly gathering some of his stuff in a suitcase to do just that. He'd been a little on the quiet side, of course he had after last night, but apart from the bruising to Wilson's face and the winces that came with every aching movement House was quite sure that others would never guess the horror he'd endured overnight.

And yet, for Wilson's two closest friends, in the cold light of day it had become more and more obvious to both House and Cuddy that he was simply going through the motions, functioning on numb autopilot to get through each passing hour. House could count on one hand the number of times that Wilson had been able to bring himself to look properly at him that morning, the guilt flaring horribly in his chest each time Wilson had managed to raise those tortured brown eyes to gaze sadly up at him, hopelessly ashamed and lost no matter what they were talking about, any faint smile he'd somehow mustered traveling no further than his lips.

So yes, hiding emotions was one thing… dealing with them, however, was another issue entirely, and one that Wilson, for all his daily psychoanalysis of House, had never been any good at doing. House only had to think back to glasses shattering antique mirrors to know that Wilson was as incapable of the rest of humanity in dealing with his emotions in some constructive manner.

And he only had to think of the hurt in those eyes to know that the emotional battlefield Wilson had innocently found himself caught in the middle of was pretty goddamn huge.

'Cuddy, you know Wilson, he'd never admit it, but he's frightened. And angry. He'll be in some bar somewhere trying to drown himself in a sea of beer, and when he's done he'll either go back to the condo, come back here, or go over to you. Trust me, given Wilson's previous history, I'm guessing he'll end up here, most probably surfing home on a tidal wave of his own vomit after an all-day bender, with a trail blaze of broken antique mirrors left in his wake. I wouldn't expect anything less.'

'And you couldn't have realized all that this morning, before he went AWOL this afternoon?'

'Huh - that's rich, coming from the woman who admittedly went and lost our post-rape Head of Oncology in the first place,' retorted House sarkily, taking one more desperate glance of the unnervingly Wilson-free street before turning around to face the stillness of the darkening living room again, his anxiety and concern for Wilson hidden behind his usual blunt sarcasm and the continual rubbing of his aching thigh as much as Cuddy's was hidden behind panicked snapping.

'House, I know… I'm sorry. I just… God - just… just call me or something when he's back, okay?'

'You know I will,' promised House quietly, his voice genuinely comforting for only a fleeting moment before carrying on in his usual manner, 'Wait, hang on…hang on… yep, definitely a déjà vu moment. God, doesn't it just like totally freak you out when that happens?'

'You're an ass,' came Cuddy's resigned reply, the saddened smile evident in her voice even as she hung up before House could come back with some witty comment to her very Wilson-esque insult.

He carelessly lobbed the now silent phone onto the couch then, exhaling slowly and swallowing down the jittery panic that had been niggling at him all day, panic that had really only taken hold once he and Cuddy had visited all the usual haunts Wilson might have retreated to only to find each of them ominously absent of their quite clearly distraught friend.

They'd arrived back at 221B in defeated silence, whereupon Cuddy had proceeded to go into OCD overdrive with the cleaning of House's dust-ridden apartment, unable to just sit there doing nothing, neither of them barely saying a word for the couple of hours she'd spent distractedly scrubbing every surface, working around a decidedly stationary House who had taken to either brooding on the couch nursing an ever-present scotch, or standing lonely at the window, subconsciously massaging his thigh, his painfully lifeless phone clutched tightly in his hand as bright blue eyes constantly scanned the world outside for their dark brown counterparts.

He'd snapped at Cuddy in the end – regrettable, yes, but God was she was grating on him, the fuss of it all as she'd vacuumed, polished, cleaned, tidied, arranged, plumped, sprayed, wiped… suffice to say, she'd gotten the message pretty quick, shakily asking to be informed of any updates on Wilson before leaving him to go back home to Lucas and Rachel, whereupon she'd proceeded to call him constantly throughout the day anyway.

And now, hours later, as House absorbed the unsettling vision of his gleaming apartment with distaste, the place reeking of a thorough, womanly clean, he couldn't help the surge of ungrateful annoyance that this was all just a tad… wrong.

Because the only person who cleaned his apartment and knew to leave his piano well alone, who didn't plump pillows, who cleaned but didn't clean clean, who left just enough organized mess to mark the slovenly manliness on the place, who did it all just right was… well, Wilson.

And he obviously just wanted to be left alone, wherever the hell he was.