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“Glioblastoma. Grade III, bordering on Grade IV. There’s no visible necrosis yet, but there are early signs of microvascular proliferation.”
Wilson wants to joke that this is his line. That if anyone is going to be handing out incurable cancer diagnoses, it’s him. That House doesn’t wear sincerity half as well as he wears on everyone’s patience, and that it’s a little late in the game for a career change.
The MRI glaring at him on the wall and the diagnostician resolutely staring at the floor suck the glibness out of him instead.
“Wilson—" House begins, as if he’s learned by osmosis that this is the part where he’s supposed to infuse his voice with concern. Wilson wonders if it’s real, or if he’s mimicking one of his infamously schmaltzy soap operas.
“So…” he exhales slowly, dragging the vowel out. “I guess we shouldn’t have bought those season tickets for the Mets.”
“You could still make it,” House insists, but the belief doesn’t reach his eyes. “If anyone’s due to cash in on karma for a better cancer prognosis, it’s an oncologist.”
They both know that it isn’t true. They both know that he has to say it anyway.
“Got any other friends who enjoy senseless masochism and exercises in futility?” Wilson quips.
At least his glibness was only on pause.
“Wilson,” House says again, and the familiar note of feigned affront is a vast improvement on borrowed worry. “I only have friends who enjoy senseless masochism and exercises in futility.”
Denial sets in.
Not for Wilson, but for House. For the most part, Wilson is strangely at peace with it. He knows the drill. He knows exactly how much time he has—weeks, maybe months if he’s lucky—and exactly how the disease is likely to progress.
Persistent headaches, check. Nausea and fatigue, check. Aphasia, check.
It’s the last one that’s the most ironic, because it means he can’t call House out on how desperately he’s avoiding dealing with any of it. He can’t find the right words to tell him that ordering moo goo gai pan every night and crashing on his couch isn’t going to do anything to defuse the ticking time bomb in his head. He can’t muster his usual exasperated eloquence to tell him that he’s going to have to face reality, sooner or later.
If House is unnerved by his linguistic impairment, he doesn’t let it show. He just rolls his eyes when Wilson stumbles over his words and jokes that he’s a little young to go senile.
It isn’t until Wilson knocks over the coffee pot and clutches the counter to avoid following suit that he finally sees House falter.
Ah, yes. Motor weakness and ataxia, check.
“What?” Wilson jokes weakly, knuckles turning white around the formica in his effort to remain upright. “Like you’ve never broken a… a…”
This is where House usually steps in. Feeds him the word he’s looking for, before there’s enough of a gap to remind him why Wilson can’t find it on his own. Before the silence stretches on too long and that stubbornly buried truth pops out of the recesses of his mind like a malignant Jack-in-the-Box.
Not this time.
Not this time, because when Wilson manages to regain his footing, he finds House staring at the array of broken glass like he shattered with it.
“Why the hell won’t you fight it?”
It seems like a non sequitur, unless you know House well enough to know that conversational preludes usually take place exclusively in his head. It’s the first time he’s said it, but Wilson knows that it isn’t the first time he’s thought it.
“Too advanced,” he manages. Sentence fragments are easier these days. Nouns—and walking—are harder. “No chance.”
“Is that what you tell your patients?” House snorts. “They walk into your office looking for hope, and you just tell them to go home and die?”
“You’re not my—"
“Oh, shut up!” House snaps, rounding on him with his cane like an old man with a cloud to curse. “I’m here. This isn’t just happening to you. I'm the one cleaning up your vomit.”
“You don’t—”
“I know I don’t have to, you absolute imbecile,” House cuts him off. “I want to, because I care, and the least you can do is—”
Wilson silences him with his mouth, and in any other situation, he’d be insulted by how long it takes House to kiss him back.
“Your breath stinks,” House rasps when they part, but he’s staring at him like he’s the world’s biggest medical mystery wrapped in a Vicodin-laced bow.
“Not as much as your timing,” Wilson sighs.
The decline is as rapid as he expected.
One day, he’s borrowing House’s cane for stability, and the next he’s trying out wheelchairs. It’s better this way around, he thinks. Unlike House, he’s not too proud to ask for help, and God knows he’s more popular with the nurses.
“How does this one feel?” Nurse Moran asks, trying not to tear up at the tragedy of it all.
“Well, it’s no…” Wilson falters.
“... Monster truck?” House supplies.
“Exactly.”
“Are you sure you’re able to handle this?” Her expression hardens when she meets House’s eyes.
“What, you don’t think a cripple can push a wheelchair?” House scoffs. “Don’t worry; I left my ruby slippers in the car.”
“I’ll be fine,” Wilson reassures her, earning a supportive squeeze to his shoulder.
“Hey, hands off the patient!” House squawks in protest, leaning on the wheelchair like it’s a walker and awkwardly pushing him out of her reach.
“Please excuse my fourth wife,” Wilson calls out apologetically, and it’s the most he’s smiled in years.
Wilson knows that his mental faculties are deteriorating, but he’s pretty sure the apartment didn’t look this way this morning.
“What happened to the…”
“Piano?” House supplies, wheeling him up to the state-of-the-art hospital bed he’s apparently had installed in his—their?—living room. “The ivories got too ticklish, they finally had enough. Up and left me for a little old lady with a hard-on for Schubert.”
“But you love—"
“Playing the theme from The Love Boat?” House shrugs, averting his gaze even as he helps Wilson onto the elevated mattress. “Just wait until you hear me play the theme from Miami Vice on guitar.”
It’s a familiar deflection. Wilson is used to witnessing this phenomenon when Stacy’s name is brought up, or House hits a dead end on a tough case, or anyone at all has the audacity to suggest that he might be in possession of a beating heart.
He’s just not used to seeing it on his behalf.
“Thank you,” he says, catching House’s arm before he can straighten up. The answering flush is worth the exertion.
“You know”—House breathes unevenly, head bowed—“if you’re trying to get me into bed, there are easier routes than cancer.”
Wilson wants to laugh and tell House that there are never any easy routes with him. That they’ve danced around each other for years, flirting and fighting and sabotaging each other’s relationships in the name of a friendship that has never really fit the classic definition of the word. That if it took cancer to get him to acknowledge it, well. There are worse ways to go.
Instead, he tightens his hold and asks:
“Is that a no?”
It’s the worst sex he’s ever had.
He can barely move his arms, let alone his hips, and the drugs he’s on to mitigate the neurological decay make it hard to, well, stay hard.
House takes it personally, frowning at him like he’s an elusive disease he can’t figure out. He changes his approach, adjusts his differential, swears under his breath until—
“Hey,” Wilson interjects softly. “Get up here.”
At his behest, House crawls up the too-narrow bed until their faces are level, and the sudden apprehension on his face at the increased intimacy makes Wilson’s ego grow three sizes. There’s a twisted part of him that wants to exploit it, to push House’s buttons like he usually does, to see what it takes to make House look away.
“Off,” Wilson demands instead, tugging weakly at House’s belt until he complies. “Now move.”
It’s—
It’s clumsy at best, House with his bum leg and Wilson with a body that’s rapidly forgetting how to function. He can’t really do much more than loosely grip House’s hip as he ruts gracelessly against him, and he has to stave off the urge to throw up more than once.
But then House’s thrusts stutter, and his face twists, and it’s—
The best sex he’s ever had, actually.
Not technically, of course, and definitely not in the sense of his own orgasm, insofar as he’s not sure if he even has one. But seeing House like this—watching the light die and flicker anew in his blue eyes like a reignited flame—he finds it impossible to keep score.
“Wilson,” House pants against his shoulder, shaking with… what, the force of his release? The stress of the last few weeks? Decades of foreplay?
“Say it.”
“I love you,” House whispers, his voice trembling almost as much as his body.
“I know.”
Maybe there’s a little darkness left in Wilson after all.
There’s no tearful goodbye. There’s no romantic first-last date on the rooftop in the waning sunlight, no maudlin scene where he has to disconnect his life support, no hand-written letter to carry in his pocket until it yellows with age.
One day, House goes out to pick up his medication, and when he gets back, Wilson is dead.
His first instinct is to call 911, or do CPR, or rifle through his stash of pilfered medications for a syringe of epinephrine.
His second, when he realizes it’s too late, is to break things.
It’s only when his apartment is trashed that he collapses on the couch and cries. He’s alone, and isn’t it fitting that the source of his relief is the same as his tears.
Alone. Alone like he was when Stacy left. Maybe more alone than he’s ever felt.
He mixes enough painkillers with vodka to put a horse into a coma and closes his eyes with the intention of never opening them again. When they have the audacity to defy him, he empties the contents of his stomach into the bag from the pharmacy and passes out.
By the time he wakes up and regains his senses enough to remember why he’d been trying to self-medicate, it’s been hours. Wilson is pale and stiff to the touch now, and yet somehow aggravatingly handsome even in death.
Dick.
He knows that he should call the hospital, notify his parents, let them take the body away. It’s not like he can just keep him here.
Well.
Not forever, anyway.
At first, it’s almost normal. Sure, Wilson has been reduced to a human popsicle, but facts have never been a match for House’s abiding commitment to delusion.
It’s easy to prop him up on the couch and make wisecracks about Cuddy’s ass and imagine how he would respond.
“You should have seen the dress she wore last week,” House crows. “She looked like she was smuggling cantaloupes across the Canadian border.”
I’m glad to see you're taking that sexual harassment seminar to heart, Wilson answers with an exaggerated roll of his eyes.
“Wait,” House gasps. “Are you telling me that wasn't a how-to guide?”
It goes on like that for hours—House grandstanding out loud and Wilson humoring his deflections—until night falls and his stomach rumbles in protest.
Dinner makes it harder to pretend, but House orders a pizza with Wilson’s least favorite toppings.
“Want some?” House asks, holding the black olive and onion-laden monstrosity close to his blue lips for consideration.
“Too slow!” Withdrawing it from reach, he folds it in half and inhales it. “Get your own.”
When exhaustion sets in, he hoists Wilson back into his hospital bed and climbs in beside him. There's a faint smell emanating from his body now—baby wipes and body odor—but he chalks it up to bad hygiene.
“Now your breath really stinks,” House deflects, eyelids drooping with every passing second.
Wilson isn't ideal pillow material anymore, but his cologne is intoxicatingly familiar and his hair is still achingly soft against House’s cheek. Like this, he can almost imagine that he's merely resting as he falls asleep.
Almost.
It gets weird.
Okay, fine, it gets weirder.
House makes a trip to the hospital. Not during the day, because Lord knows he's not in the mood to field any sympathetic glances or inquiries into Wilson’s declining state. No, he goes at night, when he can show his badge to an underpaid security guard who doesn't know him from Adam.
He sneaks into the morgue and is relieved to find that it's empty. There's no telling when his luck will run out, so he works fast.
Formaldehyde, scalpels, needles, mask, gloves, tubing. It's not as good as breaking into a funeral home, but the right tools won't do him any good if he gets arrested. He can’t bear the thought of Wilson (literally) rotting while he (metaphorically) rots in jail.
At home, he assembles a poor man’s embalming station. He slices open Wilson’s carotid and femoral arteries and watches his blood drain into a bucket. It almost looks like grape juice, but there’s no mistaking the sickly metallic scent wafting through the air.
He pumps his veins full of formaldehyde to slow the decomposition and cuts him open to remove his insides. The stench is worst in his stomach, where his intestines are beginning to putrefy. It’s all he can do not to make a bad joke about how he’d like to buy a bowel.
House turns away from the wave of methane and ammonia and drains his organs in the sink. They’re remarkably intact; glioblastoma, for all its lethality, rarely spreads beyond the brain. As he reinflates them with preservatives, he idly wonders if this is grounds for a broken lease.
It isn’t until he’s about to sew him back up that House hesitates. He’s returned most of what he took out, but he can’t bring himself to relinquish the heart resting in his palm. It only seems right that he keep it, all metaphors considered.
What are you going to do, pickle it? Wilson scoffs.
“Watch it,” House warns as he rifles through his refrigerator, “or I’ll downgrade you to eternity in a Miracle Whip jar.”
To his credit, he makes it three whole days without thinking about it.
Yeah, right, Wilson laughs.
Okay, he makes it three whole days without seriously thinking about doing it.
It's objectively wrong. Immoral on every level. Illegal and loathsome and every other adjoining adjective in the thesaurus.
It's also impossible not to wonder as he sets down a fresh set of clothes and unbuckles Wilson’s belt.
Correction: it’s impossible not to stare.
“Is that for me?” There’s a requisite note of affected shock in his voice as House surveys the post-mortem erection, but his pulse is pounding in his ears.
Is that for me? Wilson parries, indicating the incriminating bulge in House’s pants.
House doesn’t even realize until he draws attention to it. He’s so consumed by the gears working overtime in his brain that he missed the blood rushing south.
You do realize that you're sick? Wilson asks, and the imagined derision only makes him throb harder.
“Isn't that the entire premise of our friendship?” It’s meant to be mocking, sardonic, dismissive, but his heart isn't in it. His cock isn't, either, because it's in his hand.
House isn't sure when that happened, but what is it that Confucius said? Waste not, want not?
Unbelievable, Wilson whistles. I can't believe that you waited until I was dead to seal the deal. No; actually, I can.
Graceless doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s like a bad joke; a cripple limps into a bar and tells the bartender he has a date to fuck his friend. The bartender says he’s sorry, but his friend died last week. The cripple pulls out a condom and says:
“Better late than never.”
His muscles are trembling as he climbs onto the hospital bed between Wilson’s legs. It’s not as bad as walking without a cane, but his thigh wasn’t meant for this kind of strain. There are a dozen positions that would be more comfortable, but his options are limited when Wilson is lifeless and stiff like fired clay.
Somehow, I always imagined it would be the other way around, Wilson chimes in when House spreads his thighs.
“Stop being such a pillow princess, then,” he shoots back, but he knows Wilson’s right. He’s thought about this at least a hundred times over the last decade, and virtually every scenario has had House on his hands and knees.
You really want it, don’t you? Wilson whispers, and the knowing lilt sends a shiver down House’s spine.
“Shut up,” he gasps, but his cock is already leaking helplessly against Wilson’s hole.
You want to fuck me.
House fumbles with the lube, emptying nearly half the tube by mistake.
You want to fuck me, and this is the closest you’ll ever get.
It’s not as messy as he envisioned.
He half-expects blood to gush out of Wilson when he bottoms out, but most of it has been relegated to the bucket on the floor.
What he doesn’t count on is how cold it is. How long it takes for his inconveniently alive cock to temporarily warm the dead flesh around it. He digs his fingernails into Wilson’s hips and tries to thrust, but his muscles are unyielding.
“Come on,” he grunts through gritted teeth, like he’s trying to resuscitate a flatlining patient.
House.
“Just a little more,” he groans, synapses firing as he gains the friction he craves.
House.
“That’s it,” he gasps, and the sudden give of Wilson’s flesh tearing around him is enough to push him over the edge.
Once he starts, he can’t stop.
He fucks him as often as he can get it up, first with a condom and then without. He knows that the formaldehyde will probably kill him if he keeps pressing his luck, but he can’t help it. Marking Wilson in death gives him a high that even Vicodin would be hard-pressed to match.
He tells himself that it’s transfer addiction, but that implies it's new. Not all painkillers come in bottles, and House would be lying to himself if he claimed that drugs are the only thing he’s ever been dependent on.
When he’s decimated Wilson’s asshole beyond repair, House moves on to his mouth. He pulls his teeth out with pliers, one by one, and forces his cock down his throat. He imagines the look Wilson would give him if he could open his eyes, and he comes just from the resentment that he never bothered to silence House this way.
I knew you’d enjoy it too much.
Desperate to know what it’s like, he sacrifices the remaining muscle in his bad thigh by climbing on top of him. He doesn’t know how much time he has left until Wilson’s dick rots off, and even the lure of extreme circumcision jokes isn’t worth the pain of always wondering how it would have felt.
It’s no surprise that he impales himself too roughly, underestimates how rigid it is, scrapes himself raw. His blood tinges the lube pink, trickling down his thighs and staining their skin. The answering machine chimes with another missed call, but all he can hear is Wilson’s voice taunting him.
Well? Is that the best you’ve got?
If it wasn’t messy before, it is now; every push deepens the bruising and every twinge brings him closer to breaking. He’s bleeding too much, and the anguish in his leg makes his eyes prickle with tears.
That’s it. I knew you had it in you.
He doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that he probably needs a doctor, or that he’s probably contracted three diseases from fucking a corpse, or that he’s probably going to die in his own apartment.
This is what you deserve.
The dam breaks, and all House can do is pass out from the flooding pain.
When he wakes, fever and delirium take hold.
House knows that he probably has a perforated intestine, that the contents of his stomach are probably leaking into his abdominal cavity, that he’d be lucky to make it if he went straight to the hospital now.
But Cuddy would have questions, and his team would be stubborn enough to find the answers, and they’d take Wilson away from him.
How did you think this was going to end?
It’s that paralyzing fear—with a little help from the internal hemorrhaging—that fuels his mania. Incapacitated by paranoia, he barricades the door. He rips the landline out of the wall and smashes his cell phone and flushes his pager down the toilet.
Did you really think you could hide forever?
When the landlady knocks on his door to investigate the smell, he knows their hours together are numbered. It’s only a matter of time before she comes back with the police and they force their way in.
You know they’ll never let you see me again.
Dizzied by infection and the threat of separation, House stumbles to the refrigerator and rifles desperately through the contents. When he finds the jar with Wilson’s heart, he unscrews the lid and hesitates.
I thought you loved me.
“I do,” House pleads. “You know I do.”
Then what are you waiting for?
When he brings the knife down, it’s his own heart he slices open. He feels it tear with every poisoned bite, feels it ache with every covetous gnash of teeth, feels it gush with every ravenous swallow. He feels his legs buckle and he watches the room spin and he shoves what’s left of the organ down his collapsing throat.
I believe you, House.
When they find him, they pronounce the cause of death as asphyxiation as a complication of sepsis.
It doesn’t take long to figure out what happened; Wilson’s body lies defiled and poorly embalmed, his blood is in a bucket on the floor, and shards of the formaldehyde-soaked jar are inches from House’s blood-streaked hand.
Chase throws up. Foreman shakes his head. Cameron laments that it’s a terrible way to die.
She doesn’t understand what it’s like to consume the person you love. How it feels to keep a part of them alive inside of you while the rest rots. Why it’s better to die devouring Wilson than to live another moment without him.
They can’t understand, but Cuddy tries to preserve their legacies anyway. There's no avoiding the sensational newspaper headlines—doctor found dead living with other doctor’s decaying corpse—but she manages to keep the worst of it from going public. It's her finest PR work yet; portraying a man guilty of necrophilia and cannibalism as a lonely doctor stricken with unbearable grief.
They don’t bury them together, but they don’t pump House’s stomach, either. Why bother? Sewing the ventricles back together won't change anything, and there’s already been enough desecration to spare.
They lay him to rest with undigested slivers of Wilson’s heart still trapped inside him, and they don’t understand how good it feels to finally even the score.