** Here's an update! Since I will be on break as of 3pm tomorrow, I'm hoping I will have lots of time to write in the near future. I would say that the story is probably somewhere between 1/2 to 2/3 complete... and I have the next story decently outlined, and the 3rd one brimming on the back burner in my brain. I may be asking for a little bit of reader opinion on some aspects of the 2nd story coming up pretty soon, so keep your eyes peeled :-) As always, thanks for the reviews, and please keep them coming!! They make my day :-D
Once House and Wilson were alone in his office, Wilson knew that he needed to be very careful with how he directed the next part of their conversation. Judging from House's abnormally agitated demeanor and the lines on his face that seemed more pronounced than usual, he was obviously telling the truth about suffering from lack of sleep. Even in the short time they had talked, though, Wilson was entirely convinced that House's issues weren't purely physical in nature. The mind of the most brilliant doctor in the entire hospital showed clear signs of instability.
"Ok, House. We're alone. Now can you tell me what's really going on?" Wilson asked sincerely as he sat back down at his desk.
"I already told you. I'm hallucinating. I probably have sleep apnea," House answered, avoiding eye contact as he sat down across from his friend.
"He can tell you're lying," Amber announced condescendingly from her current position on Wilson's couch. "He always does that thing with his eyebrow when he's suspicious of something. And right now, he's suspicious of you." House didn't verbally respond to her, but he did look over his shoulder, acknowledging that he had indeed heard what she had said. Wilson noticed.
"Who's talking to you right now?" he probed carefully.
"Someone who's not actually here. Beyond that, it seems irrelevant," House replied, intent on keeping his emotions from showing on his face.
"Your mind made a choice, subconscious or not," Wilson stated simply. "It means something."
"You know he's just going to keep asking," Amber interjected sing-songily as she kicked her feet up onto the coffee table.
"Kutner," House said, this time meeting Wilson's eyes. As anticipated, his face immediately showed a deeply concerned expression.
"Good choice. He feels bad," Amber affirmed.
"You gonna help me, or not?" House inquired, still looking Wilson straight in the eyes.
Still reeling from the information, it took Wilson a second to respond. "Yes… of course I'll do anything I can… but I think first that means getting to the real root of the problem," he chanced, hoping that House wouldn't storm out of the office. When he didn't, Wilson continued. "You and I both know you don't have sleep apnea. Now, I can't pretend that I know exactly what this is, but this much I do know. You're a vicodin addict who's been under an inordinate amount of emotional stress, which means it's likely that these hallucinations and sleep issues are drug induced."
"They could also be psychiatric," House conceded as he closed his eyes and messaged his increasingly sore temples with both of his hands.
"Well, for your sake let's hope it's the drugs," Wilson stated truthfully. "If you have some kind of major psychiatric disorder, they'll take your license permanently. If it's the vicodin, all you need is rehab."
House's face remained blank at the mention of a return to rehab, and inwardly he remarked on the casualness of Wilson's tone when mentioning it. Coming from Wilson, "all you need is rehab" sounded like "take two of these and call me in the morning." A simply suggested fix for an all too complicated problem.
But deep down, House had known that rehab would be the destination of their conversation before it even began. Wilson could tell that House was uneasy with his suggestion but took it as a good sign that he hadn't gone berserk. Somewhat reluctantly, Wilson continued to push his luck.
"So…do you think this was all brought on by Kutner, or might this also have something to do with Chase's bet?"
"When I first found out about the bet, part of me really wanted to kill him," House revealed honestly, the double meaning with Chase's allergic reaction to the stripper's strawberry body butter at the bachelor party not fully resonating with him until that very moment. Wilson didn't seem to make the connection, thankfully.
"Who did you bet on?" Wilson asked curiously, already fairly certain of what his friend's answer would be.
"Myself," House replied, almost inaudibly. Wilson smiled half-heartedly.
"I had a feeling," Wilson confirmed. "But I can't believe you trusted Chase with that. If he told…"
"He's not going to tell anyone," House broke in with a strong tone of obviousness. "That ass-kissing twit is so grateful that I decided not to make the rest of his life a living hell when I found out, he'll do anything I tell him. If Cameron denies him sex for not telling her, he'll withstand abstinence to keep my wrath at bay."
In spite of all the tension in the room, Wilson couldn't help but chuckle a bit at House's deflecting, but resilient sense of humor. Incidentally, House had finally confirmed his friend's suspicions in a roundabout sort of way, but Wilson had to know for sure.
"You slept with Cuddy," Wilson uttered in a bewildered tone. It wasn't a question.
"No, I just projectile-spooged in her hoo-ha from across the room. My aim is that good."
This time, both of them laughed out loud a little to relieve the strain. Afterwards, though, a somewhat uncomfortable silence overtook them. Recognizing his role as the facilitator of their conversation, Wilson persisted with his well-meaning interrogation.
"So… when did you two… get together?" he asked cautiously.
"All that medical school and you can't work out some simple obstetrics math? Let's try a word problem," House began sarcastically, getting up and pacing the room to expel some of his nervousness. " 'Lisa is approximately five months pregnant at the end of April. Greg believes that he is the father of Lisa's baby. If a woman's pregnancy lasts for nine months, during what month must Greg and Lisa have gotten jiggy with it?' "
Playing along, Wilson cast an upward glance as he counted through the problem on his fingers like an obliging second grader. "Late November or early December," he finally answered. "Ok… so obviously this was after you kissed her when she lost Joy… and I'm guessing after you tried to go over there to ask her out but couldn't bring yourself to knock. So when?"
House had done a pretty good job of exuding some semblance of confidence by using his sense of humor up until this point, but it was just too difficult to have a serious discussion about his night with Cuddy. As the voice of his most prevalent insecurities, Amber piped in once again as House resigned himself to settling on the arm of the couch.
"Aren't you proud of your conquest?" she mocked. "Don't you want to revel in it in the name of male camaraderie?" Wilson observed House's closed off body language as his hallucination spoke to him, and whoever he did see talking to him was plainly trying to shame or humiliate him. Suddenly, Wilson realized that House must have lied to him about who he was seeing.
"House," Wilson said sternly. Startled, House's head shot up, a wounded look present in his eyes. "You aren't seeing Kutner, are you?"
"What makes you think that?" House snapped.
"If your mind had chosen Kutner, it wouldn't be to punish itself. Whoever is talking to you is obviously trying to knock you down, and your mind would have chosen Kutner as a person to build you up. Who is it, really? Who's knocking you down?"
House knew he couldn't continue lying to Wilson when he consistently countered with sound logic such as this. "Amber," he finally answered. "I'm seeing Amber."
Initially, Wilson was a bit shaken at the mention of his departed girlfriend, who in many ways he viewed as the love of his life. But once he adjusted to the idea, it made complete sense. Amber represented House's helplessness. Amber represented House's guilt. Both were emotions that had been overused and raw in the face of Kutner's suicide but had already been steadily brewing in the year since her tragic, if accidental death. Add Chase's publicly broadcast wager on the father of Cuddy's baby, and one had the perfect recipe for a manifestation of damaged psyche stew.
Getting his mind back on the situation at hand, Wilson noticed that House's head now laid in his hands, and that he looked utterly defeated, both mentally and physically. Wanting to offer some comfort, Wilson walked over to his friend and awkwardly gave him a few reassuring pats on the back.
"It's ok," he said absently, and House looked at Wilson as if he were the crazy one. "I mean, it's not ok… it sucks, it's terrible. In the last year, you've lost two people who mattered to you in one way or another, no matter how much you want to think that they didn't. And Amber mostly mattered to you because she mattered to me… but Kutner…" he paused, choosing his words carefully, "… Kutner was you with a cheerful disposition. And if you've managed to navigate through your hell of a life thus far without offing yourself, you can't bring yourself to understand how he could have."
House's eyes had moved to his own lap during the speech from his flesh and blood conscience. They again met Wilson's after he had finished talking, however, silently thanking his best friend for verbalizing what he never could have himself. What House didn't know was that Wilson wasn't quite finished.
"And Cuddy," Wilson started again, her name causing House to avert his eyes once again. "You can't even bring yourself to think about what you would do without her."
"Well, I better start figuring it out, don't you think?" House asked rhetorically. "She's as good as gone as it is. First Rachel, now a new baby on the way that'll actually be hers? Even if it is mine, which she says it isn't, it's obvious from her complete avoidance of me in the last few weeks that I have no current role in the equation, as far as she's concerned."
"I didn't realize you'd actually asked her if it was yours," Wilson said, surprised.
"Of course I asked her, as soon as I found out she was knocked up. But she says I wasn't the only one… she says there was somebody at a medical conference…" House trailed off, becoming lost in his own thoughts before he could finish. The brief silence gave Wilson a minute to piece together his own puzzle.
"And you just accepted that at face value?!" Wilson practically yelled, startling House. "You must really be off your game," he added, shaking his head.
"What is it that I should have done to prove she was lying? It's not like I was there," House stated obviously. Suddenly, his signature expression of epiphany crossed his features in a wave.
"Finally," Wilson snorted, taking a stab at a little humor. "For someone who gave such a riveting lecture on mathematics awhile ago, I can't believe that angle hadn't already occurred to you,"
"I wasn't there," House restated to no one in particular. "So, how do I know that she was?"
"Exactly," Wilson said, but the complicated pulley and lever system of House's brain was already humming away as he got up from the couch and made his way toward the door. "Where are you going?"
"Apparently, I forgot about a long-overdue appointment I had to hack into the boss's computer," House answered mischievously.
"That's my boy!" Wilson commended, but House turned around, surprised, just as he reached the door.
"Usually I don't receive such a ringing endorsement from you for my subversive and illegal shenanigans… what gives?"
"Well, she was subversive first… I guess I'm just chalking it up to 'an eye for an eye.' "
"Ah, that's right. Your people always did go in big for that old testament stuff, didn't they?" House asked as he turned the knob on the door. "I doubt Cuddy will share your sentiment," he added as he hurriedly exited Wilson's office and headed back for his own.
He looked over his shoulder as he walked down the hall, and for the first time that day, Amber was not on his heels. House knew better than to think that she was gone for good, but he had a feeling that even some temporary relief from her unrelenting psychological harassment could only do him some good at this point.
Wilson breathed a sigh of relief he hadn't realized he was holding in when House left his office. Quickly, he began working out what his next step should be as the unwitting middle man in what easily resembled one of House's soap opera plots between his two friends. Even though he was sure House would get to the bottom of Cuddy's apparent charade on his own, Wilson thought the best case scenario for House's fragile mental state was for Cuddy to come clean and tell him the truth herself. With the best of intentions, Wilson rolled his figurative dice one more time and headed for Cuddy's office.