FIC: The Body Found, 5/8

[fourteencandles]

Day 6

He waits until late at night, after visiting hours have ended and the Wilsons are back, safe and sound, at their hotel. They're staying at the Drake, which isn't far from the hospital. It's the place House recommended, when he'd talked to them on the first day they'd arrived. He has put their room on his own tab, figuring it's the least he can do. He plans to bill Wilson for it all later.

Wilson is asleep when House lets himself into the room. This is how it's been every night. He glances at Wilson's chart, even though he knows exactly what he'll find there. Cameron wasn't his only daytime spy. He makes a note that someone should try and get him out of bed, soon, and then hooks the chart into its rack again.

The tiny click of the metal chart against the bed makes Wilson stir. His eyes blink open, and his hands clench at the edge of the blankets. He looks frightened and vulnerable, probably because he is. It makes House's chest feel a little tight.

He clears his throat. "Wilson," he says, trying to keep his voice low.

Wilson blinks again and tips his head, just slightly, so that he's looking down toward House. "Oh," he says.

This is almost the worst part. He clearly recognizes House. House can see the fear melting away, he can see Wilson's instinct kicking in, telling him this is someone safe, this is someone who's not going to hurt him. But that's as far as he can seem to get, so far.

"Just checking in." House keeps his hands on the metal rail at the end of the bed. "You learning some good knitting tricks from Mom?"

"House." House looks up; it's the first time Wilson has used his name since he's been back at Princeton, the first time since that very first night in the E.R. His voice is still weak, and it has no expression, no useful tone to it, but it's enough, God, it's really enough right now to see him making that connection.

"Yeah," he says. "That's me."

"Keep leaving," Wilson says. He rests his head against the pillow again, looking away from House. "Dreaming."

"It's not a dream," House murmurs, but Wilson's eyes have closed again.

There's danger in having Wilson close. House has a brilliant imagination to go with his brilliant medical mind, and every time he walks into Wilson's room the medicine and the creative swirl together into a dark, sickening storm of ideas about what, exactly, might have happened to Wilson while he was gone. He wants to know the truth almost as much as he doesn't want to know; until he hears exactly what did happen, it can be both the worst thing he can imagine and the least worst. There's no best-case scenario. This is what Cameron doesn't understand, and it's what he can't explain.

House takes a seat next to the bed. He can smell Mrs. Wilson's floral perfume off of the chair. Maybe that's what Wilson smells, when he comes in and out of consciousness. Maybe it's comforting to him.

What's comforting to House are the numbers on Wilson's chart. He's dangerously underweight, but there seems to be no damage to his heart muscle. His MRI and most recent CT - House did a second one at Princeton-Plainsboro, for good measure - still say there's nothing wrong with his brain. House has regulated his nutrition intake and has his temperature stabilized, has him on exactly the right course of antibiotics, has already called for a physical therapy consult on how to best fight the atrophy of Wilson's muscle tone. Everything can be fine and, diagnostically, everything is figured out. Even this lingering confusion is normal, for someone who's still essentially starving and, on top of it all, probably an excellent candidate for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It's the perfect storm for a little disorientation. It is all completely normal.

House doesn't want it to be normal, though. He wants to hand Wilson a pill or give him a shot or notice a spot on an X-ray and say, "Ah-ha!" and then have Wilson, good old Wilson, back with him. Instead, there's this shivering, cowering, half-lucid, rarely conscious stick figure huddled under the hospital blankets. He has saved up months of inside jokes and private stories and he still, even now, has no one to tell them to.

All of the notes, though, all of the machines and the tests and everything House can think of, it all points to the fact that Wilson will come back. And, staring at Wilson's snow-pale face, House decides he's going to be there when it happens. They have a lot of catching up to do.

Day 6

When the fog lifts, Wilson remembers almost everything that happened to him: Getting out of the car at the Chinese restaurant, walking over to make sure that the man slumped over by the light pole was OK, the swift and painful hit on his head, the chaos of being stuffed into another car, thinking, Oh God, no, and offering them his wallet, his cash, his car, and then another hit to the head. He remembers waking up as he was being dragged down a flight of concrete stairs, and then the hard cold impact of a cement floor as he was thrown into his cell. Even then, there was no explanation, just the hard closure of the door and then silence. Frigid, horrifying silence and near-darkness, except for the indirect light from the window.

It had taken a long time - weeks, maybe more - before he'd had an explanation. That had been the worst of it. He'd been sitting in the dark and cold for no reason until the day they'd opened the door and piled in, four of them, and he'd seen their faces and thought, well, there's my answer. He had recognized them from the trial, because they all looked like their brother, Patrick Halloran. Halloran had been a doctor in New York who'd been accused of diluting patients' medicines in order to sell the surpluses. Wilson, fresh out of a prestigious cancer research fellowship, had been hired to testify on behalf of the prosecution as to the precise effect that this had had on Halloran's cancer patients. He'd done a few civil malpractice cases before, but he'd never done a criminal case until the Halloran ordeal. It had garnered a lot of press attention, which had helped Wilson's career.

He'd looked up at those familiar faces, all of Halloran's brothers, and knew he wasn't going to get out alive. Not without a miracle.

He'd treated the man they'd brought in, anyway. The guy had gotten into a knife fight and needed some stitches but couldn't go to the hospital because of some other recent crime. His girlfriend had walked in at one point, and Wilson had tried to explain to her - because the men clearly weren't listening - that he wasn't supposed to be there. For that, he'd gotten a blistering hit across his jaw and a few more blows to his stomach, and when they'd thrown him back against the wall he'd blacked out. He feels lucky, even now, that he survived, because when he'd woken up, he'd had vomit on his shirt; he could have choked.

After that, there was no one for a very long time. His food was shoved in every few days through a hole in the bottom of the door that was otherwise bolted shut. Solitary confinement, they'd called it; a taste of the medicine Patrick had wound up with in prison. Wilson had tried prying at every crevice in the place; he'd tried making noise with the empty cans from his meals; he'd tried reaching for the hand that pushed the food inside. Nothing.

He had a tiny sink and a grimy toilet. Every few weeks, a smooth hand would push through a bar of soap in addition to the meal. He had a rusty razor that he used to keep his hair trimmed and his beard to a minimum. The smooth hand, he'd decided, belonged to the kinder of his two caretakers. He was convinced that it was this person who had finally called House, after all of Wilson's pleas.

And he had pled. He'd yelled, particularly in the first few weeks, for help, for attention, for someone, anyone, to tell him what was going on.

At some point, he'd lost his voice. He'd woken up and realized he'd gone days without using it, without even trying to make contact. Instead, he'd sunk farther into his own head, into the brilliant and comfortable memories he had stored there. He tried to make himself remember things: the protocol treatment for Stage 1 Lymphoma. All of the facial bones, in alphabetical order. As the days went by, he was tired more of the time. He slept a lot. Without anyone to check him, his mental games became simpler. He tried to remember all of the addresses at which he'd ever lived, and failed; then, one day, he tried to remember his last address and couldn't come up with it, either.

House, though, had remained an indelible memory, even when Wilson had reached a point where he couldn't put it into sophisticated terms. He'd quote House's name and phone number over and over and over again, to himself and to the door. He knew that, of everyone in the world who might be looking for him, House would be the most tireless. It would be a puzzle to him. He would never stop trying to put things together.

Toward the end, he'd developed a cough that had echoed against the walls. He'd enjoyed the noise, a little, sometimes, forgetting that it was something bad. He'd coughed at the door and underneath it, coughed onto the smooth hands when they'd offered him soap, and he hadn't been able to catch his breath.

"Hey, you all right?" the smooth hands had asked.

And he'd said House's phone number, when he could speak, because it was the only thing that had made sense.

Day 7

Chase sees the women crying: Three interns in the first floor doctor's lounge on the first full day that Wilson is back in the hospital; two more during his clinic duty the next afternoon. He goes in early on Tuesday morning, says hello to a woman he's pretty sure works at the front desk in radiology, nowhere near oncology, and is greeted by watery eyes and a red nose.

"I'm calling it Wilson's Sickness," Chase says, taking a seat at the conference table.

Foreman looks up from his newspaper. "Thyroid problem?"

"That's Wilson's Syndrome. And Wilson's Disease was already taken, so I've settled on sickness."

Foreman raises an eyebrow. "Symptoms?" Chase mimes the slide from sniffling into outright sobbing, and Foreman snorts. "You figure out the treatment, let me know."

Chase looks up, sees two of the oncology interns walking by, talking excitedly and clutching each others' arms and, oh yes, crying. When he glances over, Foreman is watching them, too. "Should just aerosolize the antidote and send it out in the heat vents," Chase says, and Foreman nods.

Foreman is, really, the only one with whom Chase can talk about this. Cameron is emotionally invested - Chase thinks she'd be an excellent test subject for the Wilson's Sickness treatment - and never one to enjoy making light of a tense situation, anyway. House, well, Chase values his personal safety a little too highly to go anywhere near him with comments about Wilson.

House, of course, hasn't really been in the office much of late. After a few days off, he's now set up shop in Wilson's room and the lobby just beyond it. Chase finds him once or twice a day to make sure that there's nothing new he absolutely needs to be doing.

"Actually," House says, when Chase checks in that afternoon, "I have something for you."

"Yeah?" Chase is ready for a patient. He is almost ready to volunteer for extra clinic hours. Wilson is a good guy, but he can't imagine why the entire hospital seems to have stopped working to hold vigil at his bedside. "It's not more television, is it?"

"Need you to hang out with Wilson this afternoon."

"What?" Chase shakes his head. "House, he can be alone for a while, he's just sleeping. The nurses -"

"He's going to be awake," House says, snapping shut his tiny video game player. "And he's going to be talking to the F.B.I. I want you to go and listen in."

Chase leans back in his chair. "Why do I need to hear that?"

"One of his doctors should," House says. "There's probably loads of medically relevant material in that story."

Well, Chase can't really dispute that. As far as he knows, no one's heard exactly what happened to Wilson. They've been making guesses based on his symptoms. "So, then, if this is so important," he says, narrowing his eyes, "why aren't you going?"

"I'm working on my delegation skills," House says. "Plus you blend in so nicely with the décor."

He follows House's glance to his tie, which is, perhaps, a bit bland with its blue-and-tan pattern, but that's beside the point. "How do you even know Wilson's going to be able to tell them anything?" The last time Chase had seen him, which was on Sunday afternoon, Wilson had barely been cognizant. He'd still been slipping in and out of believing that everything around him was a fantasy.

House stands up. "Because he started trying to tell me about it this morning. Three o'clock."

He walks off and Chase curses, startling a woman walking past. He can't spare her an apology. Fucking House, he thinks, and then, Fucking Cameron. She's drawn some kind of line in the sand with House, and now House is all weird about Wilson and Cameron is, as always, weird about House, and Chase is stuck in the middle and fucking fuck. Just bloody great.

At just before three, he goes to Wilson's room in the ICU. Wilson is sitting up in a chair by the window, with a small table in front of him, a glass of juice on the table. It should be good to see him out of bed, but he somehow looks more like a patient, like this, because it's such a big deal that he's in a chair. He's wearing a sweatshirt that appears to be three sizes too big, but it might have fit him last year. He still looks better than Sunday. Agent Bettes is sitting in the chair next to his, another uncomfortable hospital armchair, and he looks up suspiciously when Chase enters.

"Hullo, Dr. Wilson," Chase says, putting on his usual for-patients smile. "House says you're feeling some better."

Wilson nods and murmurs something that might be a yes. He has a blanket pulled up over his legs, and his hands are bunched together under the little table, on top of the blanket. Chase nods to Bettes. "Don't mind me, I'm just observing for Dr. House."

Bettes frowns and looks at Wilson, who nods, after a moment. "All right," Bettes says. "So, let's keep going, then. What do you remember next?"

Wilson shrugs. Chase leans against the wall by the door. This is going to be a very long interview, he thinks, if Wilson's not going to talk. He can see Wilson's hands shaking just a little on top of the blanket, and he wonders if he should have thought to bring along some Ativan.

"OK. Let's talk more about what happened after."

Wilson nods. He's not looking at Bettes or at Chase; he seems to be staring at the juice. "We went to the, ah, basement," he says. His voice is high and hard to hear. "It was - like prison. They told me that."

Chase leans forward, a little, and he listens to Wilson's halting, breathy voice as Bettes slowly urges the story and the details out of him. And after thirty minutes, a nurse comes in and says it's time she helped Wilson back to bed. Bettes says his thanks, and Wilson's head falls back against the chair and his eyes close, and Chase walks out into the hall and right past House and into the men's room and he throws up. He flushes the toilet and washes his hands, grips the sink, and nearly throws up again as he thinks of what Wilson has just said.

House pushes in while Chase is still standing there. He leans against the wall next to the sink. "That bad."

Chase nods. The whole time Wilson was gone, Chase had figured him for dead. He had figured robbery gone wrong, maybe even just wrong place, wrong time, and he'd decided Wilson had died. And he'd grieved in his own quiet way and mostly felt bad for himself and everyone around House.

Now he has a different picture of it. He spent fourteen months thinking Wilson was dead, and Wilson spent fourteen months living in a tiny cement room in the basement of a someplace that should have been condemned, a duplicated prison cell put together by the brothers of a man he'd helped send to prison ten years ago for malpractice. He'd had almost no heat and very little food, mostly cold things out of cans; he'd been allowed to leave his room once, a year ago, when one of the men had been injured and had needed a doctor. And then, for his services, they'd beat him up before throwing him back in his cell. The only way he'd had to track time was through a 4-inch tall window at the very edge of the ceiling that looked out into an airshaft. He'd said it was the only sunlight he'd seen the whole time. When they found him, he hadn't seen a friendly face -- or any face -- or heard a kind word in over a year.

"They didn't talk to him," Chase says, keeping his head down. "For a year, no one said a single word to him."

He cups his hands under the faucet and lets them fill with water, then rubs it over his face. House's hand is clenched into a fist against the wall. "So what made them call?"

"His cough, maybe," Chase says. "They tried to move him, the day before the F.B.I. found him."

House nods. For a moment, they just stand there, and Chase can't think of anything to say that might comfort House or even himself. House clears his throat. "Anything we should know - medically?"

Chase shrugs. Everything he's learned, they already knew, that Wilson hadn't had enough to eat and that he'd been too cold. Knowing the causes - the starvation rations and his unheated cell - hasn't made a difference. "Probably shouldn't try to feed him any Spaghetti O's," he says.

"OK." House steps away from the wall. "You coming?"

"In a minute."

It takes Chase another five minutes to leave the bathroom, because he waits until his eyes aren't red. He runs into Cameron, of course, first thing out. "Are you OK?"

He shrugs. "Fine. Fine enough."

"I heard you sat in on the F.B.I. meeting," she says. "How was that? How is Wilson?"

Broken, Chase thinks. "Fine," he murmurs, because he can't get into it, doesn't want to, doesn't even think it's right. "He'll be fine."

One Week Back

House finds Wilson awake when he walks in just after eight o'clock. He's been back for a week.

"Do you go home?" Wilson asks.

He looks better, and he is, actually, better. He hasn't had any episodes of confusion for the last twenty four hours, and he's starting to sound like himself. That's still intermittent, though, so House is slightly taken aback at the question.

"Every night," he says, though that hasn't been completely true lately.

Wilson's brow furrows. "But you're here every night."

"Short straw," House says. "Plus, I thought you might like to take a trip."

"To where?"

"Sightseeing," House says, and he opens the door and pulls a wheelchair inside. "As your doctor, I think it's time for a little fresh air."

It takes a second, but Wilson nods, and House lowers the rails on his bed. Wilson is wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt, not the typical hospital gown, because they're still trying to make sure he stays warm. Beyond that, being a doctor still affords him some higher status, and no one is willing to argue with anything that makes Wilson more comfortable.

Wilson's arm, when House takes it to help him into the chair, is like holding a paper-covered twig. They've managed to bring up his weight, slightly, but he's still bird-thin and frighteningly pale. They'll need to keep checking his hemoglobin.

"Where are we going?" Wilson asks once he's settled in the chair.

"My office," House says.

"Are there - people?" Wilson's hands grip the arms of the chair tightly, and House can see that he's shivering. He finds a blanket in the closet and tosses it into Wilson's lap, watches him carefully unfold it and close it around himself.

"No," he assures him, holding open the door. "No people."

They scoot out of the ICU without raising any eyebrows and then over to the staff elevator. The hospital is pretty quiet, and House knows all the abandoned corridors, so they make it to his office without seeing anyone. He parks the wheelchair in the conference room and offers Wilson his arm to get up.

He can walk, and has been walking, a little, over the last few days. This is good, because he has to be ambulatory before he can be moved out of the ICU, and he has to be out of there before House can take him home. His grip on House's arm is sharp and needy, though, and House realizes Wilson still has quite a ways to go before he's perfectly steady on his feet.

Still, they make it across the office and out to the balcony just fine, and House settles Wilson in one of the two plastic chairs he's put out there. House has a few cartons of orange juice - Wilson needs the vitamins - and a bowl of oatmeal made up just like House's mother used to fix it, with a dash of maple sugar and real cream. He has a bag of jalapeno potato chips for himself. "Dining al fresco," he says, and Wilson smiles and picks up one of the juice boxes.

It takes him two tries, but he gets the straw in and takes a drink. "This is good," he says, and he sounds surprised.

House takes a seat next to him. "I was going to get you beer, but your doctor wouldn't go for it. That guy's a dick."

Wilson picks up his bowl of oatmeal and takes a bite, then closes his eyes. "I dreamt about beer," he says. "While I was - gone."

House wants to tell him, suddenly, about how he kept the Hefeweisen for months, how his eye caught on the sale flyer every week, how he looked for it on tap in every bar. But he also doesn't want to tell him, because he doesn't want to talk about all of that gone time. He just wants to be here, with Wilson, right now. "I wonder what that means," he says. "They say all dreams about flying are dreams about sex."

Wilson takes another sip of his juice. "I dreamt about sex, too," he says. "And you."

House glances over. "Same dream?"

Wilson waves his spoon. "After a while, it's all the same dream."

"Cryptic, I like it." He sips his own juice. "How are you feeling, by the way?"

"Right now or in general?" House shrugs. Either one is interesting. "Tired," Wilson says. "Cold, and tired. That's the start and finish of it."

House nods. It's to be expected, with the anemia and the respiratory infection and everything else. Wilson must know that, though, so he doesn't bother to say it, or that it will get better. Instead, he watches Wilson take a bite of the oatmeal and feels a tremble of something painful, like sadness, inside his chest.

"I dreamt about this," House says after a minute. He doesn't look over, but he can tell that Wilson's looking at him. After a moment, Wilson's cold fingers land on House's forearm, just a friendly touch. House nods.

"It doesn't feel real," Wilson murmurs. "None of it - not this, not the past year, none of it. I keep waking up and thinking I'll be -" he stops, and House looks over because he needs to know if this is the confusion returning or if it's something else. Wilson draws his hand back and rubs it over his face. "I'm tired," he whispers. "I'm just pretty tired."

"We can go back whenever you want," House says, and Wilson's hand drops back to the arm of his own chair.

"Not yet," he says, his head settling back. "OK?"

"Sure," House says.

Two Weeks Back

Foreman finds a patient on Saturday, almost two weeks after Wilson has been brought back to the hospital.

"Seventeen-year-old female," he says, trailing House as he walks in from the parking lot. House pauses at the coffee cart, and Foreman waits, thinking House will order and then listen again. It takes him a moment to realize that he has House's full attention.

"Seizures," he says, "but no response to Dilantin."

"Huh," House says. He holds out his hand for the chart and glances at the top sheet. "OK. Get a better history."

Foreman shakes his head. "Just like that?" he says. Usually, it takes a huge sales job to get House interested in a case, and Foreman's been figuring on having to argue particularly hard because of Wilson. Instead, as he follows House to the elevator, House is actually studying the chart.

"Interesting," House says as they ride up.

"I'm sorry," Foreman says, "but really?"

House stops just outside the conference room door. "Either you think it's a good case or not," he says, with a touch of the usual House impatience.

"It's just that you usually make me dance through all of the details and then you insult me a few times before you take something on," Foreman says as they walk into the conference room.

"Well, for once you seem to have led with the interesting stuff," House says, handing the chart to Chase. "And your tie speaks for itself."

They spend the morning actually doing medical work. Foreman and Cameron run the patient down for an MRI while Chase spends time in the lab. When they regroup at lunch, the results are puzzling and Foreman feels a little rush of something like relief at how normal it all feels. House yells at them, accuses the lab of incompetence, and then orders another procedure for the afternoon.

"Weird, isn't it," Chase says as they prepare for the PET scan, "but I'm kind of enjoying this."

"Right there with you," Foreman says.

He feels bad about it, too, but most of what he feels all day is relief. Since Wilson has been back, everything has been difficult and dark and heavy all day. It's worse than the first few months after he'd gone missing, because now there's an ending to that story, and it isn't happy. Even with Wilson back, it's not happy, yet, because the Wilson that's downstairs is a Wilson that no one is confident can be fixed. House doesn't deal well with frustration, particularly medical frustration. He's had Foreman review both CT scans twice, looking for something, anything, any sign that there's some intracranial pressure, some physical abnormality, that they can fix. Foreman is a good doctor and a great neurologist and he knows there's nothing visibly wrong with Wilson's mind, except that Wilson has been through incredible trauma. He's been hurt in ways for which there are no cures. It's what he's been hitting his head against all week with House. There's nothing that can fix Wilson, right now, but time.

Radiology is backed up, so the results of the scan won't be back until morning, which turns out OK since their patient is bad but not getting worse. Foreman and Chase go to the bar after work and have a beer apiece.

"To a whole day without Wilson," Foreman says, lifting his glass, and Chase offers a cheers in return.

The next morning, House greets them with the results of the scan and then holds Foreman back when Chase and Cameron go to tell the patient.

"You and I are going to talk to Wilson's parents," House says.

Foreman starts. "Do you have me confused for Cameron?"

"Nope. Wilson's parents love me. I need someone to play bad cop." He shakes his head. "You have no idea how weird it is for me to say that."

Foreman leans back against the wall. "I don't know whether to feel honored or appalled that you've chosen me."

"Feel both," House says.

He explains their mission: Wilson is about to be moved out of the ICU, and it's time for his parents to go home. This is, House explains, partly because their continued presence constitutes, somehow, a challenge to House's influence over Wilson.

Foreman grimaces. It's never good to let House consolidate his power. "So - wait, you want me to help you talk them into leaving so you can do what, exactly?"

House shakes his head. "Nothing specifically. But if anything would come up-"

"Huh-uh," Foreman says. He knows House too well. House isn't a forward thinker, unless he wants something. "What are you planning to do?"

House rolls his eyes. "I have no nefarious plots. I'm not going to cut him up for science, I'm not waiting for them to leave so I can steal his brain or his pristine liver, I swear. I just think -" He stops and shakes his head. When he speaks again, his voice is lower, and he doesn't look Foreman in the eye. "They may try and convince him to go back to Chicago," he says.

Well, then, Foreman thinks. There's the ulterior motive, at least. "And you think that's a bad idea."

"Duh."

Foreman crosses his arms. "Are you sure? I mean, here - it's like he's the new exhibit in the zoo. I've had to chase two different oncology interns off the floor already this morning. Maybe getting away from all of this -"

"He's been away from all of this," House says, his voice sharp. "He was away for more than a year, or did you sleep through that?" House rubs both hands over his face. "He should be around familiar things."

It's not an unreasonable argument, but it's not what convinces Foreman to go along - that comes from House's look, from the desperation in his voice, from the fear in his eyes. Wilson will recover slowly and painfully wherever he goes, and staying at Princeton may make things harder both on him and on the rest of the staff, but House, to get back to normal, will need Wilson nearby.

Three Weeks Back

Wilson is moved from the ICU to a general population in his third week, once he's finally off of all of the IVs and able to eat real food again. His parents go home; Cameron hears House tell them there's not really anything else they can do and that he'll call them, of course, of course, if anything happens. Then she watches as he gives Wilson a mild sedative before he makes her wheel him down to his new room.

She's not at all sure that Wilson's ready to be out of the relative calm of the ICU; things are serious, there, but they're also well-contained. On the general floor, people are in and out; the nurses are constantly rotating around; and, for the first time, the rest of the hospital's staff will have unfettered access to Wilson. House can bluster and bully all he wants; Cameron knows that there's already a Welcome Back party being planned by the Oncology staff.

On the second day after Wilson's big move, Cameron is in the lab when she gets a page from Wilson's room. She stops her work and goes over directly, only to find House pacing beside the bed. He looks a little pale. "Wilson's missing," he says.

Cameron flinches. "What?"

"The morons that pass for nurses up here came by an hour ago and noticed he wasn't around." House is gritting his teeth. "It took them another thirty minutes to page me."

"Maybe he's just -" she starts, but House cuts her off.

"I've checked every room on the floor, including the bathrooms and the lounges. He's not up here. And security is guarding the exits."

Cameron nods. House looks ready to explode. She can't even feel fear about Wilson, yet; she's too immediately worried about calming House down before he starts throwing furniture. Foreman walks in behind her, and Cameron grabs his arm. "We'll check the building," she says, but House stops them.

"He can't have gone very far," he says. "Foreman, take a look in the ICU. Cameron, check with Dr. Chen and Oncology, see if he's gone back there."

Chase wanders in just as Foreman and Cameron are walking out. His eyes are wide. "What?" he asks as Cameron drags him toward the elevators.

"Think like Wilson," she says, pushing him onto an open elevator. "Try the roof."

She goes downstairs, to Dr. Chen's office. The door is locked and there's no light from beneath it, which isn't surprising. Dr. Chen spends a lot of time out on the floor. Cameron cuts through the conference room, thinking a check of the balcony might be reasonable. There's an abandoned wheelchair sitting next to House's armchair. She stops with her hand on the light switch, then decides against flipping it on. Once she's spotted Wilson, sitting quietly in the corner, she steps out of the office and picks up her phone. "He's in your office," she says quietly to House. "Give me a minute, though, OK?"

"One," he says, and hangs up.

Cameron goes back into the office. "Dr. Wilson?" she says, keeping her voice soft. She pushes the wheelchair out of the way and peers around the armchair.

Wilson looks up. "Hi, Cameron." She takes a few steps closer. Wilson doesn't seem to be hurt; he doesn't seem to be anything, really. His face is calm, his voice is steady. Cameron crouches down. "This looks bad, huh?"

"What are you doing here?"

He takes a deep breath, and it sounds only a little shaky. "I was just going to go to my office, but then I realized - I don't have an office any more, do I?"

Cameron sighs. "No," she says. "I'm sorry."

He shrugs. "I don't know - I don't know what I was going to do there," he says. "I just wanted someplace - away." He closes his eyes.

"It's all right," Cameron says. "We just didn't know where to find you. We were worried."

This time, when he speaks, his voice is small. He has faded back into the Wilson she's getting used to, the Wilson who is timid and scared and cold all the time. "Are you mad?"

"No," she says, right as House pushes through the office door.

"Jesus Christ, Wilson!" he says.

Cameron turns, stands, ready to spring on him, to fly to Wilson's defense, but she sees the raw fear and worry on House's face. He's not angry; he's terrified. "He's OK," she says.

"He's insane!"

"House," she says, sharply, and House nods and rubs his hands over his face.

He puts his hands on the wheelchair's handles and bows his head. When he looks up, he's looking past Cameron. "Wilson," he says, and his voice is low and frightened.

"I'm sorry," Wilson says. His voice is still small. "There were so many people."

House sighs, a huge, near-sob of a sigh, and he takes a few steps and slides down the wall next to Wilson. "You are a crappy patient," he says, and Wilson smiles, just slightly, and Cameron watches his eyes slide closed. "I should totally get overtime for you."

"We should get him back upstairs," she says, concentrating on the slight tremor in Wilson's hands. "House -"

"In a minute," House says. He looks up, and Cameron understands that she's being excused. She goes to the conference room and calls Foreman and Chase, tells them to stand down. When she looks back into the office, Wilson has House's jacket draped over him like a blanket, and he seems to be asleep, his head turned against the wall. House is staring ahead, his expression absolutely blank and terrifying. Cameron doesn't go back inside, but she stays near the door, in case either of them needs her.

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