12½ Hours

(Part Four: 7:34 AM-9:47 AM)

By taste of violets

Disclaimer: I don't own House. It belongs to FOX, David Shore, et al. In addition, the dialogue at 8:03 AM and 9:47 AM was not written by me; it was drawn from the original episode, written by Russell Friend and Garrett Lerner.

Editor's Note: Many thanks to callmejude of LiveJournal's lying_ink, who beta-read this story after inspiring it with her own lovely fic "The Hardest Part of This."

This fic takes place parallel to the events of the episode "97 Seconds" (episode 4x3). Please don't read it if you haven't seen the episode, because not only will the fic not make much sense, but I'd hate to spoil a good episode for you.

This is part four of four.

::

[7:34 AM.]

You hear the door slide open behind you, and you turn around expecting the nameless nurse again. You're very wrong.

"What a surprise," says Dr. Cuddy dryly, her dark curls bouncing as she walks into the room. "Good morning, Dr. Wilson."

"Good morning, Cuddy," you say weakly.

She studies your face with interest. "Actually, I am surprised. You look like you might have been home in the past twelve hours."

The two of you exchange poker faces. You aren't telling her anything. "Dr. Cuddy, is there something I can—"

She cuts you off by slapping a thick manila folder into your hands. "This is the file on House's cancer patient," she says. "Who, according to the latest test, is probably not a cancer patient after all." She allows herself a small sigh.

"I see."

"Somebody has to diagnose him. I need you to go meet House's team by eight o'clock and lead them in coming up with something new."

Her eyes follow your gaze. It leads to House's face.

"Yes, Wilson," she says flatly, "I am telling you to leave him. Possibly for as long as an entire hour."

"Are you going to stay with him?"

"As a matter of fact, I was actually planning on spending my morning running a hospital." She raises her eyebrows. "Eight o'clock." She turns, ready to leave.

"Wait."

She glances back at you. You swallow before speaking. "Do you know anything about House's…other patient? The one with the knife?"

Her face softens as she looks at you. "The last I heard," she says, "he was still alive."

You say nothing.

"They aren't the same, you know."

"I know."

A moment passes. Then Cuddy says abruptly, "His team is counting on you. They won't do anything without you."

"Eight o'clock," you tell her, "I'll be there."

"Yes," she says, "I know you will." Her high heels click against the floor as she leaves.

[8:02 AM.]

From outside in the hall you can hear House's band of fellowship hopefuls exchanging theories about their boss, speculating on what happened and why. The conversation sounds like a condensed version of the thoughts that have been chasing each other through your head nonstop ever since the call from Cuddy last night. You open the door just as the blonde fellowship candidate, Amber, is saying, "I assume because he—"

"Don't assume anything," you interrupt her as you walk in. It's all you have to offer; it's the best advice you've come up with in all the years you've known House. "Don't fall into that trap."

Another doctor asks, "Is he okay?"

It takes you a moment to think of something you can say. "Burned his hand pretty good." What can you tell them? "His heart stopped for nearly a minute. Your…cohort managed to restart it." You don't know what you're saying. You're on doctor autopilot. "But…he…has not regained consciousness."

They stare up at you from their desks, like schoolchildren looking trustingly at their teacher. This is not where you're supposed to be. Can't they tell by looking at your face?

Just keep talking. "So—since I have you all here, we should probably talk about your actual patient." Cuddy would be proud of you. "Clear fluid from the lungs indicates that it's probably not cancer, so it would be nice if we could come up with new idea."

Nobody says anything. You wait for someone to break the silence, but not one doctor speaks as they stare uneasily around the room at each other.

Can they see how lost you are?

Can they see how much you need him?

[8:41 AM.]

In the end, the diagnosis is eosinophilic pneumonia. It's not ideal, but it's the best anyone on the team could come up with. You started the patient on cyclophosphamide, because it was what House would do. What you want now is a cup of coffee.

But you look into his room before you get it, just in case he's awake.

He isn't.

[8:59 AM.]

You're halfway through your coffee when the door opens. This time, it's the nurse from this morning. "Hello again, Dr. Wilson," she says with a little smile, sliding the door shut.

There's something you don't like about the amused, almost patronizing way she says it. It's as if she finds it funny that you're still here, three hours after the first time you saw each other.

You were sitting when she first opened the door, but the tone of her voice drives you to stand up and face her. "Hello."

"Has he been conscious, as far as you know, since—?"

"No," you reply succinctly.

"All right." She makes a tiny note on her clipboard, and then looks back up at you. "Dr. Wilson? There's…something else."

"Yes?"

"It's Dr. House's other patient, the one who was in the car accident." Just like before, she lowers her voice to a solicitous whisper: "He's dead."

Involuntarily, your muscles acting independently of any thought process, you turn around and look at House.

As you watch him, you see his throat move as he breathes. You see the first few hints of color in his face.

He no longer looks like the corpse he resembled at five o'clock this morning.

He looks, you realize for the first time, like he's going to be okay.

You turn back to the nurse, whose name you don't know and don't want to know, who can take her damn clipboard and her concerned little whisper and go fuck herself for all you care, and you pin her to the spot with a look that even Cuddy couldn't imitate.

"Get out of here," you tell the nurse. "I'm taking care of this."

The nurse actually takes a step backward. She's far too new to know how to handle open insurrection. "Are…are you sure?"

You walk across the room and slide the door open for her. "Positive."

She stares at you. You nod curtly at the open door.

"Well, all right," she says finally. "I—okay. Thank you, Dr. Wilson."

"You're welcome."

As she leaves, you shut the door behind her. Then you turn back to House, hands on your hips.

"House, the time is currently," —you check your watch— "9:02 AM. I am going to stand here," you inform him, "until you wake up. I am not going to leave. I'm not even going to sit down. I'm not going to do anything but stand here and wait until your eyes open." You take a sip of coffee. "So get going."

[9:13 AM.]

You finish your coffee. You wish you had another cup, but you aren't going to leave, not now.

[9:21 AM.]

You think his face is starting to look a little less ashen than before.

You don't sit down.

[9:33 AM.]

His breathing begins to sound deeper and easier.

You don't sit down.

[9:45 AM.]

His left hand twitches; then after a moment, it twitches again.

You don't realize until several seconds afterward that you were holding your breath between twitches.

[9:46 AM.]

His head moves.

You don't.

[9:47 AM.]

Slowly, House opens his eyes.

And suddenly there they are, in your mind, the two things you could say to him. The easy one and the hard one. And you won't know which one you're going to say until you say it.

He's looking at the ceiling. You open your mouth.

"You're an idiot," you say. "You nearly killed yourself."

His gaze drops from the ceiling down onto your face. He looks exactly as unsurprised as you expected.

His voice is a hoarse croak, a dreadful parody of his usual sardonic growl, as he rasps, "That was the whole idea."

"You wanted to kill yourself?"

Before the awful possibility can even begin to sink in, he corrects you: "I wanted to nearly kill myself." He takes a slow breath, like he's still not sure how to do it and needs to practice. Then he asks, "Is he…better?"

And that's it. Because he's House, that's all you'll get out of him. You can ask him why he did it; you can ask him what he saw—it doesn't matter; he won't answer. You can interrogate him, threaten him, even attempt to reason with him—and you do, you try again and again—and he won't answer. "House, you gotta talk about this," you tell him, but he ignores you and talks about the patient instead. Obsessing over his puzzles, like any other day, like the past twelve and a half hours didn't even happen.

And now you know chose wrong when you said the easy thing instead of the hard one. Maybe if you'd said the other thing, the thing that's still hanging silently in the air between you and him, still waiting for you to say it—as it's been waiting for twelve and a half hours, and before that, for twelve and a half years—maybe if you'd said that, you could have surprised him. And maybe he would have listened, and he would have answered.

But you took the easy way out, and now it's too late.

So at last you give up. "Just looking at you hurts," you tell him, because it's true, and you turn away from him and busy yourself with his chart, like doctors do. "I'm going to order up some extra pain meds."

"I love you," he says.

And all of a sudden you feel unspeakably tired, maybe more tired than you've ever felt in your life, and you wonder how you could possibly be surprised. You wonder how you didn't see it coming that he would take that thing that's waited so long, that thing that you've wanted to say and tried to say and couldn't say even when you needed to most—that thing that is the reason not just for the past dozen hours but for the past dozen years of your life—and he would pull it out of the air and throw it away. Toss it out with no more effort than any of his other quips, just another joke about himself and his pain, with no room in between for you. You can't think of anything more predictably House-like than that.

Except—

Everybody lies. That's one of House's rules that he likes to apply to everyone but himself. With House, what's remarkable isn't the fact that he lies.

It's that every once in a while, he tells the truth.

So you give half a shrug so he'll know you heard him, and you scribble on his chart so he won't see your face. And then, just for a second, you glance up at him.

He's looking back at you.

Watching and waiting. Like you waited for him.

Your eyes meet, and his tell you absolutely nothing. You'll never be sure, you realize. He isn't going to say anything more than he has, and there's no point in arguing. You simply have to accept that there are things you cannot know.

But you can hope.

And so you take the memory of what he said and fold it away, hide it in a corner in the back of your mind where no one will know about it but you. Nobody else could understand, but nobody else has to.

When you put down House's chart and look at him again, his eyes are closed. His breathing sounds deep and regular: he's fallen asleep.

You reach out your right hand slowly, cautiously. And then, very gently, you cover his burned, scarred hand with yours.

He doesn't pull away.

You stay that way for a long time.

::

::

[note: Thanks to all who followed this story and left comments and encouragement in their reviews. I was especially flattered by a request for a sequel! But since my aim in writing this fic was to retell a specific episode from Wilson's perspective, the end of the episode means the end of the fic. I'll remember your encouragement the next time I set out to write for House, though. Thanks again to everyone for reading—please leave a review if you have time—and I hope you enjoyed it.]