In the Business (H/W) by lordess

Title: In the Business
Author: soundslikej
Pairing: House/Wilson
Rating: PG
Summary: At some point he had been an honest man, but now every breath he took was dishonesty.
Disclaimer: If House and Wilson belonged to me, there would be no slash because Wilson would be mine. However, they do not, so there is, and he is not.




“We’re in the business of saving lives,” he had heard Cuddy say at some point today, and thinking of it now he laughs with only a tinge of bitterness. Maybe she was, her and House and his three blind mice…but him? He was in the business of telling people they were dying, and that was a different affair entirely.

It was the kids that hurt the most, anyone would guess that, but he had grown accustomed to hiding how painful the others were too. The middle aged parents who left behind spouses and children, the elderly women who died without a single family member left to hold their hands, the men his own age, men that could just as well have been him but for a trick of genetics and luck.

His last patient today had called him an angel, and it had taken more self control than he wanted to admit to keep from laughing aloud in her face. That was what he was, after all. The angel of death, with the face of a child and eyes that had forgotten how to exist without lying.

It alarmed him sometimes how easy it had become to lie to his patients, to everyone. At some point, he had been an honest man, but now every breath he took was dishonesty. Not necessarily in his words, because there was often a brutal truth to them that startled even him, but more often with just his eyes, his expression. There was the carefully modulated face that said yes, you do have cancer, and you will most likely die from it, but aren’t you glad that you’re hearing it from someone so kind and sympathetic? There was the face he showed at home, the one that told Julie no, my day at work wasn’t that bad, I didn’t just sentence a seventy year old, a thirty year old, a ten year old to death. There were the eyes through which he viewed his life, the ones that had lost their rose colored tint years ago but still inexplicably held on to some dim and dusky version of it.

He could count on one hand the number of times he had been truly honest, truly vulnerable, since taking this job, and each one was with House.

Time had taught him not to cry for his patients, because there were not enough hours in the day, not enough tears in his body. There had been days, back in medical school, and early in his career, when the enormity of his job hit him with a force he could not withstand, and he had found himself on the floor of his office, or a bathroom, or his living room, crying as if he’d never stop.

He did stop eventually, though, because there were more patients to see, more death sentences to serve, and he didn’t have the time to indulge his self pity, or his self loathing, or any combination of the two.

He can’t remember now the last time he cried, for a patient or for anything else, and it saddens him a little to think that he’s become so desensitized. Maybe it’s strength, but he doesn’t think so. It feels more like numbness, a brittle wall between him and the reality of his occupation that could shatter to pieces at any minute.

It’s only a matter of time, he knows, before he breaks.

The fog is heavy tonight, so thick that he can barely see the lights of the rest of the hospital from the balcony. The railing is slick with moisture beneath his fingers as he leans out to peer into the haze, tries to make out shapes of anything in the darkness.

“You know, I’m a little crushed,” he hears behind him, and closes his eyes for a second against the brief wave of annoyance that washes over him. He straightens back up to turn and face House, schooling his face back into its mask of calm collectedness.

“Why’s that?” he asks, leaning back on the railing.

“Well I always figured if you decided to take a dive off the balcony, you’d at least leave me a note.”

“Do I really strike you as the note type? Or the diving type for that matter?” There is an edge to his voice that makes his words fall flat, takes the humor out of them.

“Always thought you were much more of a car in the garage man myself,” House admits, leaning against the doorframe. “So, which poor sap is it that’s got you out here at one in the morning this time?”

“It has to be a particular poor sap?”

“Nope,” he replies easily, “but it usually is. Kid?” he guesses.

Wilson sighs, letting his eyes trail off towards his office. “Kid. Parent. Grandparent. What the hell does it matter, they’re all dying anyways.”

“Well aren’t we optimistic.”

He frowns and pulls his focus back to House. “I’m sorry, but you don’t have the right to make any kind of judgment about my optimism,” he tells him. “You get to save people every once in a while. You get to figure out what’s wrong with a guy, send him up for some surgery, pump some medicine into his veins, and watch him walk out of the hospital on his own two legs with his smiling wife and kid trailing after him. Me? I get to tell him he’s dying. And maybe we can give him some treatment, give him another month, another year, another three years. But somewhere down the line, he’s going to find out that he’s been a ticking time bomb all along when the fuse suddenly runs out, and that wife and kid are going to be left with an empty hospital room and a funeral to plan. So do I get the right to stand out here on my own damn balcony once in a while and get a little upset about the bad hands I get to deal people every day? I’d say I do.”

House squints at him a little. “Is this anger I hear? Perhaps a touch of bitterness?” He takes a few steps closer to peer at Wilson intently. “Who are you, and what have you done with Wilson?”

Wilson jerks away from the finger House points at him, retreating back towards his office. “Not everyone’s you, you know,” he says roughly, and he doesn’t think that House hears him until he sees him rock back against the doorframe, raising an eyebrow.

“Now what could he mean by that?” House muses aloud to the fog.

“I mean that I can’t just…” he waves a hand impatiently in House’s direction, “I can’t just shut down like you do. I can’t look at a patient and see someone who is somehow less than I am, somehow unworthy of my time the way you can. You leave an exam room, and you forget a person. You cure a patient, lose a patient, it doesn’t matter, you just move right on with your life. I’m not like that. I can’t just walk away from these people and leave them in their compartmentalized little exam rooms. And maybe that makes me a bad doctor, what the hell do I know? All I know is that telling each patient they’re dying, and then having to watch them every step of the way, it rips me up so bad I just want to…” he trails off and shakes his head, leaning it back against the cool glass of his office window, trying not to feel the tears that threaten to choke off his words. “Forget it.” He takes a deep breath and straightens, looking up at House’s now humorless face, his inscrutable eyes. “Just forget it. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

A tiny smile tugs at the corner of House’s mouth. “You really think I’m completely heartless, don’t you?” he asks, his face unreadable.

He doesn’t have to think about his answer. “No. I don’t. I just think you’re a hell of a lot better at faking it than I’ll ever be.”

House nods, almost thoughtfully. “Well you’re wrong. I am completely heartless,” he replies, and Wilson feels himself responding to that tiny smile with one of his own, swallowing back the lump that had settled in his throat. House’s smile gets a little wider, just for a second, and he nods again, as if deciding that his work here is done. He turns back into his office, but before the door closes behind him he stops and says without turning, “It doesn’t make you a bad doctor, you know. It makes you a great one. Probably a better one than I’ll ever be.”

Wilson raises an eyebrow and is about to stammer out some kind of thanks when House saves him from that mutual embarrassment by adding, “But don’t tell anyone I told you that. I do have a reputation to maintain.” With that, he retreats back into the office, leaving Wilson standing alone in the fog.

He watches the lights emerge as the haze dissipates, and as he does he discovers that he doesn’t feel quite so close to breaking anymore.