A/N: The lyrics on top are from Bjork's "Play Dead" - it's a great song and it's certainly not mine, so there. For a standard disclaimer see my profile. Spoiler Warning: the story takes place after Season Four finale, so go watch it first, or it won't make much sense.

Not Worth It

"I have to go through this.

I belong to here:

where no-one cares and no-one loves.

No light, no air to live in,

a place called Hate,

the city of Fear."

oooooooo

It's painful to watch them these days.

They never look at each other, not ever. Even without looking, they somehow manage to avoid being in the same room for more than a few seconds.

Wilson wears that stricken expression of someone in mourning, frozen in pain. He walks slowly with his head down. He doesn't make eye contact, not to mention start conversations. Wilson, who was always everybody's friend, universally liked by the patients, nurses, orderlies and other doctors – now he's a ghost. Cuddy suspects why he never looks up any more – every look of pity, every expression of concern, every "I'm so sorry, James" would only deepen his hurt, bring fresh memories back to the surface. Wilson must understand House better than ever now, the same unwanted pity making them both drive people away.

House is even worse. He's back at work now, after Foreman declared him free of any adverse effects of the interrupted brain stimulation procedure. He barely leaves his office, even when he doesn't need to be there. Even when he should be somewhere else, like eating lunch, or going home to sleep. Several times Cuddy catches him in the same clothes that he wore the day before – not only didn't he go home, he didn't even bother to bring anything to change into, like he always had before. He's still brilliant, he stills makes insane calls, browbeats patients and their families into accepting the treatment of his choice, he still solves puzzle after puzzle. But there is no more playful banter, no more mind games with his team, no more outrageous comments and inappropriate jokes. He just does his job – on time and to the very best of his ability. Including his hours in the clinic.

House looks down too, he's lost weight and his limp is more pronounced. It takes Cuddy almost a month before she finally sees a clear glimpse of his face and connects the facts.

"You're off Vicodin," she says and House slowly raises his head from the file he was reading.

"Yes," he says. His voice is tired and strained, but his face remains impassive. She looks at him for a long while in silence and finally notices his eyes - the shadows under them darker than before, strain in the corners, the bright blue irises clouded by pain.

"Why?" she asks and tries to imagine what might have pushed him to suffer the pain when he could have just asked... "Wilson?" He flinches and she leans forward, putting her hands on his desk. "You didn't want to ask him for the prescription."

He only shrugs, but he doesn't deny it either.

"House, there are plenty of doctors in this building who could do that, myself included!"

"No."

Cuddy stares at him. "Why?"

House closes his eyes for a moment. "What do you want from me?" he asks, his voice flat. It isn't right. He should be shouting, insulting her, making jokes about her blouse and... "I'm doing my job. I solved all my cases. I'm at the clinic every day. I'm even working on the old files you keep nagging me about," he says, gesturing to the papers in front of him.

"You're in pain."

His face hardens. "Was I late for work? Did I make a mistake, lose a patient? Did I blow up on some moron in the clinic? Did I harass any nurses?"

"No," she has to admit.

"Then what does it matter?"

Cuddy throws her hands in the air. "How can you say that?! Of course it matters! You shouldn't be in pain when there's a way to help you with it!"

"It doesn't matter." Cuddy wants to scream in frustration.

"Do you want to be in pain?"

"I don't care." She can tell that House means it. His eyes are empty of anything except pain.

She can't find anything to say, so she turns and leaves his office. She walks to the next office over, the other one where the light stays on long after everyone leaves.

"Hi," Wilson greets her and from his red eyes she can tell he was crying. Cuddy has to stop herself from saying something comforting, putting her hand on his shoulder, speaking in a soft, sympathetic voice. She knows he can't stand any more sympathy now.

"Do you know that House stopped taking his Vicodin?" she decides to be blunt.

A shadow crosses his face and his shoulders slump a little lower. "Yes. I... I went to ask him if he needed a refill."

Cuddy hides the small, sad smile by looking down. That's Wilson – always where he's needed. Even after...

"He didn't want it?"

Wilson shakes his head. When he speaks, his voice is so soft that she has to lean forward to catch his words. "He said there was no sense wasting it on him."

It hits her like a slap on the face. "What?"

"Then he told me to get out of his office and to stay away." He looks helpless, lost.

Cuddy rushes out of his office and while her heels are counting out the steps to the Department of Diagnostic Medicine, in her head she's already calling House a stubborn, melodramatic idiot and telling him to get over himself.

The lights in his office are out and there's no-one inside. He's already left.

She almost runs towards the elevators and then out, heading straight for House's parking spot. It's empty too, so instead she goes back inside, grabs her purse and leaves the half-finished budget reports from Radiology on her desk.

oooooooo

Twenty minutes later she's pounding on the green door at 221B. He doesn't answer until she threatens to call the cops and make them break the door down.

"I'm tired," he says in a way of greeting and Cuddy can see that he really is. Driving must have been hard for him with his thigh cramping and aching, she thinks watching his trembling hands and ashen face.

"You can go to sleep as soon as you stop being an idiot!" she plants her fists on her hips and glares at him.

He sighs and takes a wobbly step to the side to let her in.

Cuddy goes straight to the coffee table in front of his couch. She pushes aside some takeaway boxes and slams the Vicodin bottle down.

"Here! Stop this idiocy and take it, before you collapse!"

House slowly limps towards her, one hand on the cane, the other tracing the walls and furniture in case he stumbles and needs extra support. When he reaches for the bottle, his hand is shaking. He holds it for a moment in a tightly clenched fist, his eyes closed. He's breathing fast and Cuddy can see beads of perspiration on his forehead.

The bottle flies across the room and smashes into the wall, small white pills scatter everywhere.

"No!" he screams and Cuddy takes a step back, shocked.

House drops down on the couch and hides his face in his hands.

Very slowly, she kneels down in front of him, puts her hands on House's forearms and holds on when he tries to jerk them free. "Why?" she whispers. "Why would you do that to yourself?"

He doesn't look up. "I'm doing my job. What else do you want?"

She reaches up and pushes his chin up, makes House face her, look at her. "House, please, I don't understand. This is about you, not about work..."

"There's nothing else," he interrupts her.

"But why?! Why suddenly nothing else is important?"

"Because this is the only good thing that I'm capable of doing!" he screams at her. "And I can do it just fine without the fucking pills!"

"But you are in pain!"

"So fucking what!" he roars at her and shakes his arms free. She loses her balance and her back hits the hard edge of the coffee table. Cuddy winces and sits on the floor in front of House.

"House, you can't possibly mean it! You don't want to be in pain!"

He glares at her and now she can see some emotions in his eyes, something besides the dark swirls of pain. "What does it matter what I want, and how the fuck would you know anything about it?" He sounds cold as ice, but in his eyes there's fire - anger, contempt, hatred.

"Then tell me," she whispers and tries very hard not to show that she's afraid of him now. Or maybe afraid for him. That hatred in his eyes is directed inside.

He smiles, an ugly, bitter smile. "You really want to know?" he asks, and Cuddy nods.

"I want this to stop," he says and Cuddy feels as if she's been punched, because 'this' means 'everything'. Not just the pain, not the broken silence between him and his once best friend, not the guilt and self-loathing that are written clearly on his face. House says 'this' and means 'my life'.

"But if it does, every single fucked-up thing will stay exactly the same, and there won't be anything right to balance it. I can't fix what happened, but I'm going to make something right, as much as I can, for as long as I can, in the only way I can, and I don't give the flying fuck about anything else. I'm going to lose, because there's just too much fucked-up stuff on the other side of the scales, but I'm going to try anyway."

He glances at the other side of the room, where the white dots are scattered on the dark wood of the floor and then turns back to Cuddy.

"So take your damn pills, your damn pity and your damn concern, and give it to someone who's actually worth it," he spits out and stands up with visible effort. He has to take a few seconds to steady himself. Then he lets out a shaky breath and one tentative step after another he limps to his bedroom and slams the door shut.

She sits alone in darkness for a long time, before she manages to pull herself together, stand up and leave.

oooooooo

Two weeks later Wilson seems to wake up. One tiny step after another he pulls himself back to who he was before. Or at least as close as possible in such short time. He's talking again, he's looking people in the eye, on good days there's even a hint of a spring in his step. He even smiles a little, and Cuddy can feel a surge of relief every time she sees it. Even if, for now, the smiles are only possible because of antidepressants. It's a first step and Cuddy knows Wilson will recover and one day the smiles will be real again. She tries to ignore the coldness in his eyes every time House is anywhere in sight. He's doing better, she tells herself.

House isn't. If anything, he's getting worse. Not on the professional level – there he's still a resident genius and for the first time in anyone's memory he's actually doing most things by the book. The only times he's not, are when he's convinced his patient needs the rules to be broken or they won't survive. It seems not to occur to House that those wild leaps may cost him his career. Or rather, he doesn't care. As long as the patient can walk out of the hospital, nothing else matters.

The personal level is a completely different matter. He's treating his team worse than ever, expects the same level of dedication from them – something they can't give. He has even less patience for the idiots who come to the clinic, for his patients and their pathetic attempts to hide things from him, for the families demanding explanations and expecting their loved ones to get better right this moment. He insults the hospital staff – something he always did, but now there's real venom in his voice. It's no longer a game, a careless banter – it's aimed to hurt, and House always knows where to strike.

The wall between him and the rest of humanity has grown higher and now there's barbed wire curling on top.

Then, late in the evening after one especially difficult day House is pacing furiously outside his office and he runs straight into Wilson, absorbed in his newest patient's file and not paying attention. House stumbles and drops his cane. He has to reach out and lean on the wall in order not to fall.

The file of the sixteen year old with leukemia falls to the floor too, the puddle of white printouts spread between two men, staring at each other.

That's when Cuddy, on her way to talk to Wilson about the board meeting next week, rounds the corner and sees them. She freezes mid-step and quickly moves back, where they won't see her.

House looks away first. He stares at his feet and says "I'm sorry," so softly that she barely catches it. She's not sure what he's apologizing for and maybe he doesn't know either. Wilson doesn't move, he stands in the middle of the corridor with his hands outstretched, like he's still trying to catch the falling paper. House pushes himself from the wall and slowly, painfully kneels on the floor. He starts collecting the papers and Cuddy can see that his hands are shaking.

"Stop," says Wilson in a flat, cold voice and House's head jumps up. "I can pick up my own damn papers." He leans down, gathers the remaining pages, then he rips the rest out of House's hand and walks away. Cuddy wants to go after him, calm him down, distract him with the upcoming board meeting, but House is still there and the look of absolute agony on his face stops her dead. She aches to go to him too, but knows he wouldn't accept her help and would throw her sympathy back in her face. So she stays in the shadows, silent, and watches as instead of getting up, he sits with his back to the wall and wraps his too thin arms around his knees.

"I'm sorry," he whispers and Cuddy leaves, because she knows he won't accept anything she can think of saying.

oooooooo

There's nothing else left to do, so Cuddy waits – for something to change, because one of the tragedies of life is that things always change. House once said that to Stacy, and Stacy repeated it to Cuddy before she left.

A week passes, then two, then a whole month. Wilson is almost fine and for now 'almost' is good enough. It's certainly more than Cuddy expected in those horrible weeks right after Amber's death. She's grateful for 'almost fine' and silently prays for it to one day change to 'really fine'.

She hopes that day comes soon, because if it doesn't, it may be too late for House. He's been hanging by a thread for weeks and now he's falling, with no-one to catch him. Cuddy watches him helplessly and waits for the inevitable crash – the one after which he won't get up, because the one person who was there all those times before, won't come to pick up the pieces. She knows House has neither the strength nor the will left to do it himself.

By the end of the month Cuddy decides that she can't wait any longer. If the time is not enough to change things, she will have to do it herself.

She goes to House first and tells him he has to talk to Wilson. House shrugs and tells her that Wilson doesn't want to talk to him.

"Do you want to talk to him?" she asks.

He gives her the same reply he uses every time anything other than his work is mentioned. "It doesn't matter," he says and Cuddy realizes there are two things, not one, that are still important to House. There's the job and there's anything Wilson might want.

Wilson is finishing some paperwork when she finds him and he asks her to wait a minute until he's done. She sits on his couch and looks around his office. She starts when she realizes the photo of Wilson and House that always sat on the shelf is gone. She loved that photo – taken a year before the infarction, both of them looking so young, both of them happy. House used to call it a sign of Wilson's hopeless sentimentality and Wilson used to give him an exasperated smile and roll his eyes.

"All right, I'm done," says Wilson and Cuddy quickly pulls herself out of her memories and back to the present. "What can I do for you?"

"You have to talk to House," she says. Wilson's expression hardens.

"I have nothing to tell him and I'm not interested in anything he might have to say."

"He has totalk to you."

"Funny, I remember him telling me to get out of his office and stay away." He leans back and crosses his arms.

"Do you know why he said that?" asks Cuddy.

"Honestly? I don't care, not any more."

Cuddy stand up and puts her hands on Wilson's desk. She looks him right in the eye and hopes Wilson will understand the urgency in her voice. "He's convinced he's worthless. He's not eating properly and he barely sleeps – except for the bare minimum he needs to survive. He believes he doesn't deserve anything better. He pushed you away, because you're the only person who can make him feel better and he doesn't think he deserves it."

Wilson stares at her for a long minute. "And what if I agree with him?"

"Do you also think that he deserves to die?" she almost shouts and Wilson blinks in surprise. "Because this is destroying him, don't you see that he's slowly killing himself?"

She watches Wilson as he searches for an answer. Before he manages to come up with anything, Cuddy pushes herself up and turns towards the door.

"He will do whatever you ask of him, even if it's going home and slitting his wrists. If you really wish he died, go and tell him that. It's a kinder thing to do than watching him die piece by piece every day."

She walks to the door, but out of the corner of her eye she can see the shock on Wilson's face. It's late, so she gathers her things and leaves for home. She almost manages to reach her car before the first tear runs down her cheek.

oooooooo

The next morning Wilson looks pale and tired and Cuddy can tell he didn't sleep well, if he slept at all. He doesn't go to the elevators, but instead heads straight for her office.

"What are you going to do?" she asks, not even waiting for him to close the door and greet her.

"I'm going to talk to him," he says. Close up he looks even more exhausted.

"What are you going to tell him?"

Wilson shakes his head. "I don't know. I want you to be there."

"Why?"

He offers her a small, nervous smile. "The usual. To make sure we behave, to beat some sense into us, to yell at us when we are being idiots. To not let me blow it completely."

She almost sages in relief. "Thank God," she sighs and smiles brightly at Wilson. "Let's go then."

"Now?"

"Of course. The sooner this insanity is over, the better for everyone," says Cuddy and Wilson suddenly looks so embarrassed and panicked that she has to hide her smile.

They go to Wilson's office first, the oncologist trailing few steps behind Cuddy. While he puts away his briefcase and exchanges his jacket for a lab coat, Cuddy watches House through the balcony window. He's staring at his white board, covered with symptoms written out in his messy handwriting. He's sitting down, with his chin resting on his hands. He's too exhausted and in too much pain to be pacing.

Cuddy turns to Wilson and sees him watching House too, over her shoulder.

"I never realized he..." He trails off and takes a deep breath. "God, I'm an idiot."

Cuddy puts her hand on his shoulder. "You're both idiots sometimes. Come one, let's go and fix this," she says and gently pushes him towards the door.

oooooooo

A moment later Wilson knocks on the glass door and House's eyes widen when he sees them. He gestures for them to get inside and stands up. A sharp intake of breath and white-knuckled grip he has on his cane show how much it costs him.

He nods to Cuddy in a way of greeting, but he doesn't look at Wilson. Instead he stares at the floor, his shoulders slumped, his entire posture spelling out defeat.

Wilson clears his throat. "House, I..."

"Please, don't do this," whispers House. The first time ever Cuddy heard him use the word and actually mean it. She wishes she never did, not like this.

"Don't do what?" asks Cuddy, making her voice as gentle as she can.

House's head jerks up and the look of desperation in his eyes shocks her into silence. "Don't fire me, please, don't... I can do this, I can work," he glances at Wilson and his voice wavers. "I can give up the office, if you don't want me around, I'll stay away, you won't even know I'm there."

House. Pleading. Begging even. Dear God, what have we done? thinks Cuddy. She looks at Wilson and in his face she can see the same horror and sadness that breaks her heart.

House sees it too, but apparently he misreads it for something else, because he flinches and lowers his gaze back to his feet. "Please," he whispers brokenly and that is finally too much for Wilson.

Before Cuddy can even blink, he's enveloping House in a fierce hug and apologizing. "My God, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," he says, his voice choked and frantic. "House, why did you... I didn't realize..."

House stands there, his body stiff with shock, eyes wide. "But I..." he starts, shaking his head slightly. Wilson grabs his shoulders and looks him straight in the eye.

"No, you didn't," he says, voice strong and clear.

"I... How can you just... After I..."

Wilson doesn't let him finish. "It's not your fault. Not any more than mine, or... A-amber's, or the bus driver's, or the bartender's, or whoever gave her that flu..."

"Not my fault?" whispers House, sounding like a little boy.

Wilson nods and tries to smile. "Not your fault. I'm sorry, I... I guess I needed someone to blame, besides myself. You were... the easy target, I... I'm so sorry, I didn't realize what this would do to you, I didn't think..."

"You don't hate me? You really don't?" whispers House and Cuddy can feel the tears running down her face. There's so much need, such desperation in his voice. And so little hope.

Wilson gives a small laugh. "God, House. I don't think I could ever really hate you," he says and Cuddy watches House as he struggles to believe it.

"I don't want you to hate me. I can't stand you hating me," he says and Wilson hugs him again.

"I don't. Trust me, I don't."

And this time House believes him and the walls finally break. It's the first time since those horrifying nights after his infarction that she sees him cry, but this time, she thinks, it's a good thing. It's a first step towards healing – something both of them deserve.

She answers Wilson's slightly watery smile over House's shoulder with her own, bright one, and she leaves the office. For the first time in weeks, months even, she doesn't feel the fear of an impending disaster paralysing her, sucking all energy out of her.

At the elevators she runs into House's new Ducklings, looking worn and depressed. They all stop and stare at her for a long moment. Finally Thirteen speaks. "Dr Cuddy? Is everything all right?" she asks.

"Don't go in just yet, give Dr House and Dr Wilson a minute," says Cuddy and laughs at the flash of understanding and then relief on their faces. She steps inside the elevator and presses the button.

"What happened?" asks Thirteen, just before the metal doors close.

"A small miracle, Dr Hadley," says Cuddy and marvels how wonderful it feels – to laugh, to finally have a reason to laugh again.

oooooooo

fin.