sickwilson_fest: Blue and Red
Title: Blue and Red
Author: tinyredpencil
Prompt: 22. Wilson is injured while saving House's life.
Pairing: House/Wilson established
Category: angst, hurt/comfort
Rating/Warnings: R for GORE and brief mentions of sex
Words: ~4700
Summary: Wilson ignores a concussion in favor of saving House.
Disclaimer: I don't have the rights to this stuff. Fox, David Shore, etc... they do. In this universe, House owns a Jag, not a Vette.
It was finally the holiday season and the most hectic time of year at the hospital, and it was the fifth time that week that Wilson had had to cover for House and save his ass from Cuddy’s wrath. It was a new record, he was pretty sure.
Three violations of medical ethics, two prescriptions stolen from the pharmacy, one threat of sexual harassment charges from the night nurse in pediatrics. And a partridge in a pear tree.
“Merry Christmas to me,” Wilson grumbled, just loud enough for House to hear, as he stared out the Jaguar’s passenger side window at the slushy roadside whisking by.
“Jew!” House reminded him, his eyes darting around at traffic before he floored the accelerator and gunned it down the turnpike. And so what? Wilson liked Christmas. It was warm and cozy and smelled like roasted chicken and pine needles. Also, even though he never admitted to it any other day of the year, House turned into an agreeable puppy dog every Christmas Eve since they had moved in together. He always cuddled up to Wilson after dinner with hot chocolate and a blanket on the couch, insisting they watch A Christmas Story on TBS over and over until he finally allowed Wilson to lead him to bed on the air mattress in front of the fire. They always fell asleep near the tree decorated with twinkling lights and ornaments crudely modeled after all manner of sexual organs, drifted off sex-sated and in love and yeah, Wilson liked Christmas a whole lot.
And now, it was the fifteenth of the month, and House was on suspension. “It’s your own fault anyway,” House was saying, dropping one hand from the steering wheel to rub at his leg through faded denim. “I told you to tell her the Interceptor was for you, not for my patient.”
“House, how was I supposed to justify my need for canine heartworm medication? Cuddy might not be at your level of mad genius, but she isn’t stupid.”
“No look, I meant for Hector. Are you a moron now too?” He turned his eyes away from the road to glare at Wilson with more than a hint of disgust. “You tell her it’s for Hector, and I stole it because I’m me, and because you’re you, you apologize for me and she never finds out it’s for my patient. You thought I meant to tell her it was for you to take?”
Wilson felt his face go red with a mixture of annoyance and embarrassment, and he quickly averted his eyes. He saw in his peripheral vision that House did not do the same. “If it was reasonable for you to use on your patient, I figured you wanted me to make it seem reasonable for me to take somehow. Your text wasn’t that specific.” His voice grew quieter as he realized he had missed something fairly obvious.
“Christ, Wilson. You know I do recall a time when you were quick enough to keep up with me.” The comment should have stung, but Wilson found himself watching the car’s progress as House carelessly allowed them to drift closer to the guardrail.
“House, eyes on the road.”
He’d heard that from Wilson more than enough times apparently, because he continued, “Don’t go blaming this last one on me, because believe me-”
“House!” Wilson gripped the arm of his seat and the handhold above his head as an awful grating noise overwhelmed all other sources of sound, and then he was falling and House was swearing to his left, and up became down or left or he couldn’t tell, and his stomach rose into his throat.
And he loved this car, too…
At some point in the previous endless second Wilson had closed his eyes, and what he heard next was more terrifying than the earlier sound of the guardrail crumbling. There was a crunch, and the world threw Wilson violently forward, then to the right, and then House was screaming.
House was screaming, and then there was nothing.
------
Wilson woke up to agony. He bit his lip and stifled a whimper as the pain grew in waves, riding piggyback on each progressive level of consciousness. His right wrist throbbed in a way that made him sure he would be emptying his stomach all over the car’s interior very soon. Although he figured the state of the carpet hardly mattered at that point.
When he forced his eyes open they watered instantly, orange airbag dust clumping in his tear-wet eyelashes. He opened his mouth and gasped as the dust that hadn’t yet settled rushed down his throat. He coughed and spluttered and then failed to suppress a miserable whine as this caused what felt like little explosions to burst all throughout his cranium.
Head wound, maybe a concussion, he thought distantly as he brought his left hand up to find a horizontal laceration just above his hairline. He moved his hand close to his face and was just registering the blood on his fingers when a drop of it rolled down the side of his nose and dripped onto his work pants. And a fracture of a wrist bone on the right side. Wilson thought about examining his wrist, checking which bone and how serious it was, but he had close to zero motivation to add to the pain he was already dealing with. Someone in the ER could look at it. He hoped Cameron was working.
“House,” Wilson rasped into the relative silence, still blinking furiously to clear his vision. “What’d we hit?”
He peered as best he could through the haze and out into the range of the one remaining headlight. His stomach lurched southward at what he saw, and panic set in with the force of a sledgehammer to his gut. The first impact, the one that had absorbed most of their speed, had been to the front of the car on the diver’s side. A single tree, wide and thick, probably an oak. The second impact, Wilson figured, had been the small concrete structure to his right, and though it was probably what had broken his wrist, he could not possibly care less about it.
Because that tree had crushed House. There was no doubt in his mind about that. He should have noticed the other man’s silence earlier. It was simple physics, the tree had caved in the interior on the driver’s side and that was that. And yet Wilson found himself frozen, unable to turn his head, stubbornly holding onto the insane hope that in doing so he wouldn’t find his best friend in multiple pieces.
In the end, he looked. He held out for a good twenty seconds, he guessed, but then he looked. House was slumped forward over the side-skewed steering wheel mount, and blood fell in a slow trickle down the back of his head, forming rivulets down the side of his throat. Wilson reached a shaking hand out and pressed two fingers to the skin over House’s carotid, stubble rough and familiar under his touch.
A pulse. And then another. It was a slow, definitely, but there, and each beat was strong, not thready like Wilson had feared. He hadn’t lost too much blood.
Wilson leaned back into his seat and vomited into the space between his knees. It splashed over his shoes and he coughed once, quickly toeing them off, and tore his seatbelt out of its holster so he could have better access to House. He pulled his feet off the floor and tucked them under himself, turning toward the driver’s seat in the process. His bad wrist hung limply at his side but he lifted his shoulder enough to wipe his mouth off on his shirt.
Leaning forward into the space directly above the steering wheel and peering downward, Wilson could see how the crushed engine block had caved in the cavity around House’s lower body, but the relative darkness obscured the extent of the damage. He was getting ready to fish through the glove compartment for the flashlight that probably wasn’t there when in an instant the world was bathed in an undulating wave of blue and red light. The interior of the car exploded with brightness, and the wailing of the ambulance siren reached Wilson’s ears only as an afterthought in his sluggish mind.
House’s leg was mangled far beyond recognition or the hope of recovery. He was bleeding profusely from around the place where the vinyl and metal had cracked and bent his tibia back on itself and pinned the leg between the floor and the radio console.
It was his right leg. The bad one. So bad for House, bad for both of them, and Wilson felt the tiniest, briefest burst of vindication, as if the limb were a thwarted enemy and not the abused flesh of a friend and lover.
He pushed the feeling down, unreasonable as it was. The amputation that was so obviously necessary at this point, necessary in the next few minutes in fact, would not save House from the neuropathic pain that tortured him on a weekly, daily, and hourly basis.
Wilson leaned back over into his seat and was sick again. He trembled with the realization that this would mean even greater suffering, and he honestly didn’t know how much more of it House could take.
A loud tapping noise amplified the pain in his skull, so it took a moment to register that one of the EMTs was rapping his knuckles against the passenger window behind him. Wilson’s head throbbed where it rested in his hands, but his doctor instincts kicked in, fueled further by his fear for House’s safety. He sat up straight and craned his neck around in time to see the rear window glass shatter inward, fragments glittering on and off in time with the ambulance lights as they sailed through the air.
“Hey buddy, you awake in there?”
“I’m fine,” Wilson choked out, trying to channel the authoritative presence of an accomplished doctor. “Driver needs a tourniquet on his right leg, and then we need to pry the dashboard off of him.”
The EMT paused in his effort to reach Wilson and stared at him in incredulous surprise, one dark eyebrow slightly raised. The expression was painfully reminiscent of House’s smirk.
“Oh for-” Wilson dug his wallet out and thrust it into the back seat. “I’m a doctor at Princeton-Plainsboro.”
“Smith, we got a problem over here!” The EMT on the driver’s side was shouting to the one attending Wilson. “Engine’s leaking pretty good. Fire hazard, thing could blow any minute.”
Oh, shit shit shit. Bile rose in Wilson’s throat again and tears sprung to his eyes at the thought of getting torn to pieces, but he forced himself to swallow it all down. If they didn’t get House out of there, he knew he would end up wishing he had gone with him anyway.
“Okay, doctor,” the first EMT was saying as he handed Wilson a heavy tourniquet for House’s leg. “We gotta pull you out through the back so we can get to your friend, all right?”
Wilson had finished tying the tourniquet just above House’s knee and something in him snapped. The image of House trapped in a flaming heap of metal while Wilson himself stood by getting his wrist splinted and his head looked at rose completely unbidden into his mind, and that painful bubble in his chest just broke.
“No.” Wilson knew paramedics were trained in the valued art of convincing people to leave the side of a loved one, and he cut the first EMT off before he could start. “I’m not going to argue with you here, just give me that.”
He was pointing at the kit of disinfectant, scissors, and other supplies that the second EMT had brought around to the back window.
“What’s going on?”
“Guy’s a doctor. He won’t leave his friend.” The first medic gave a frantic, quick exhale of resignation. “Just give it to him, we don’t have time for this.”
There was a moment of hesitation on the part of the second EMT, but then the kit was in Wilson’s hands and he was cutting through House’s jeans down the side of one leg. He untied the tourniquet in order to tighten it, right wrist screaming at him to please stop. And Wilson did stop, but not because of his wrist. He sat there for what felt like minutes but could only have been a few seconds, tourniquet bloodied and hanging from his clenched fist.
“What are you doing?!” He couldn’t tell which medic was yelling at him, but the words hardly registered anyway. “You gotta tie that off or he’ll die in the next two minutes! Are you sure he’s a doctor?”
“Doctor Wilson, his badge is right here.”
Later on, Wilson would spend hours just speculating what exactly was going through his head that caused him to do what he did then, but in that moment there was nothing. No thoughts at all, no considerations of risk, just anger, pain, sadness, love.
He wrapped the tourniquet around House’s thigh, just above the pitted scar, and tied it tight with one violent tug of the knot.
“Hey, you don’t have consent for that- hey!” The first EMT made a grab for Wilson’s shoulder, but he jerked out of reach and spun to address the two men.
“I’m doing this, and if you don’t let me, we’re all going to die just talking about it.” He turned back to House, adrenaline spiking in random bursts of mounting hysteria. He pried open the kit with his good hand and found the disinfectant. “Bring me the saw,” he shouted over his shoulder without bothering to check if either obeyed.
Wilson used the antiseptic to wipe blood and airbag powder off House’s skin in a full circle around the limb. Hissing in pain, he wedged his broken arm under the leg near the knee, so it was propped up off of the seat.
His good hand was shaking, a great reason if there ever was one to not be holding a hypodermic needle, but as long as it went in around the right place…
Though if the lidocaine didn’t work and House woke up… Wilson glanced up nervously, but the other man remained limp and motionless. Taking a deep breath, he injected the anesthetic just below the tourniquet and let the used needle drop from his grip. He replaced it with a scalpel and then he was fingers-deep in fat and muscle and blood as he got to work discerning and separating damned flesh from cherished friend.
He leaned back at one point to add some bile to the puddle of vomit below him, but dove in again right away, his movements growing more frenzied as the proverbial ticking clock pressed him into an anxious corner. He watched a lump of bloody flesh fall to the carpet and choked back a sob at the thought that he might have screwed this up beyond the hope of reparation.
“Saw,” he croaked, and when he turned the second EMT was holding it out for him, his expression fearful, both doubting and hoping that Wilson would succeed.
The machine roared to life. Raw power so easily misdirected that one centimeter’s worth of error margin could destroy everything important to him in a matter of seconds.
There wasn’t even time to think about being careful. Dizzy and nauseous and seizing with fear, Wilson brought the oscillating blade to House’s femur and held it as steady as he could. Bits of fat and bone marrow spattered his face and he screamed in terror and frustration.
He was going to die, but he couldn’t leave. House was trapped and so Wilson was too, and the blade just wouldn’t work fast enough. Wilson screamed again, pressing down hard even as his fractured wrist continued to crack and grind under the strain.
In the same moment one of the medics shined a flashlight over the passenger seat and Wilson made it through the last of the bone. He saw in complete clarity the instant the heap of denim-covered tissue fell away and was no longer a part of House.
It’s done, Wilson thought. The last image he remembered seeing was the thick coat of blood on his hands before darkness pulled him under and he was blissfully dead to the world.
------
He was screaming. He knew he was screaming before he knew why. When his rational mind finally caught up to his nervous system, Wilson found there was no logical explanation for the severity of the pain he was in. The fiery bolts of agony raced around the exterior of his scull and lanced his retinas whenever he tried to open his eyes.
Raising his right hand to his head, he felt heavy bandages that wrapped all the way around. It took him another second to notice there was someone talking to him.
“Doctor Wilson. Doctor Wilson, I need you to try and answer me, all right?”
It was Chase, he’d recognize that accent anywhere. And that meant ICU. Wilson tried to open his mouth and ask why he had been admitted, but all he managed were some rasping noises that only vaguely resembled words. A cup of water was touched to his lips, and he drank gratefully.
Chase paged Foreman, and they spent the next fifteen minutes asking Wilson all kinds of questions, from the year he was born to the color of Chase’s maroon tie. He managed to open his eyes and crack a joke about Australian fashion sense. Chase scowled, but Foreman smirked and whipped out his penlight to check Wilson’s pupil dilation.
“You’re looking pretty good, but someone will have to check on your concussion every hour,” Foreman told him. He pulled up a chair to Wilson’s bedside and adopted the stance doctors tend to use when breaking bad news. Elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped in front of him, he continued, “Doctor Wilson, you’ve been in a coma for over thirty-six hours. We were confident you’d pull through, but House-”
Wilson sat bolt upright, his head complaining loudly at the sudden movement. “Where is House? Did I…” Memories caught up with him, rapid-fire images of blood and fear. “Oh god. I killed him, didn’t I?” He glanced searchingly between Chase and Foreman, but neither man would quite meet his eyes.
It was Chase who answered. “He isn’t dead. He’s doing really well, considering. It’s just…” He glanced at Foreman, who held up his hands as if insisting they keep him out of it. Chase finally looked at Wilson. “Well, you know House. He might not want to see you… for a while.”
“Or ever,” Foreman muttered, but a sharp glare from Chase silenced him.
“We’ll tell him you’re awake.” And then they left him alone to wonder for the next hour how he could have taken yet another decision away from House, just like Cuddy always did, and just like Stacy had.
------
“Why did you do it?”
Wilson jerked awake with a start, his head still throbbing and his eyes watering from the sting of the fluorescent lights. House was sitting off to his right, staring at Wilson with a blank expression. Someone had brought in a large armchair for House to recline in, and his lower body was swaddled in a thick duvet. It wasn’t hospital brand; Cuddy must have brought it from their apartment.
“Why did you do it?” he repeated when Wilson failed to provide a response.
In searching House’s eyes, Wilson sought desperately for some trace of understanding. Instead he found only coldness and flashes of what could be anger, complemented by lips pressed to a stubbornly thin line. His gaze migrated down to where one leg poked out from under the blanket, and then to where the other should have been.
Wilson’s lower lip started to tremble of its own volition, and then in waves, sob after sob wrenched through his chest and he grit his teeth and wiped furiously at the tear-tracks on his cheeks. “I’m… God House, I’m so sorry,” he bit out the apology, jaw still clenched against the mortification of what he had done. “I’m such a- god, that was such a shit thing to do to you, I can’t just-” He took a gasping breath and buried his face in the hand that wasn’t sporting a hard cast. “Please tell me you’re okay,” he begged, his words coming muffled through his fingers.
“I’m fine, Wilson.”
“…What?” He sniffled, dropping his hand to his lap and looking up to find House studying the window dressings, eyes shifting to the linoleum, the catheter bag, his fingernails, anything but the evidence of Wilson’s remorse.
Finally, he sighed and threw the blanket off of himself, revealing the bandage-wrapped stump where his right leg used to be. Grabbing a pair of crutches off the floor next to his chair, House propelled himself over to the bed with agility he had never possessed with his cane. He allowed the crutches to clatter to the floor while hopping off his remaining leg and landing on the bed next to Wilson.
“House, I didn’t think. I just acted. I know I’ve done exactly what Stacy did, and I can’t handle-“
“Wait, wait, hold on a sec.” House rotated his body so he could stare Wilson down properly. “You have to know that’s total bullshit.”
Wilson gave a shaky sight, staring morosely at the blue cast on his right arm. “I… I don’t understand. Why aren’t you angry?”
“I am angry,” House insisted, but there was a note of amusement in his voice.
Wilson turned wide, teary, puppy-dog eyes on him and sniffled again. “Okay… um, I’m confused.”
“Idiot. I was asking you why you stayed and performed the amputation yourself instead of letting the EMT look at you.” House’s words had turned cold again. “You had a serious skull fracture. There was too much intracranial pressure. You went into a coma right there in the ambulance after they hauled you out of the car.” Gentle hands grabbed Wilson’s face and forced him to make eye contact. “Why are you such a moron?” The blue eyes held a fondness that didn’t match the words of their owner.
Wilson frowned around the fingers pressing into his cheeks. “The car was going to explode. I couldn’t leave you there.”
“Yeah, well, nothing ended up exploding. Fire department got there in time.” He chuckled a little. “Would’ve been kind of cool though.”
“House!”
“Well, the thing was totaled anyway.”
“We could have died! I just…” He pulled his face out of House’s grip, missing the contact instantly. “I don’t understand why you aren’t angry that I… you know…”
“Unnecessarily hacked off a portion of my leg that’s been nothing but a hindrance to me for the past eight years?”
“I didn’t give you the choice.” Wilson was back to looking at his hands.
“Wilson, you better listen to me right now, because I’m not rehashing this more than once. What Stacy did and what you did were completely different. She took a choice out of my hands, you had one dropped into yours. And you made the right choice, Wilson, look at me.” Reluctantly, Wilson met House’s earnest expression. “Her choice left me with a useless lump of painful flesh and yours took it away. I’m not going to thank you, because ignoring a concussion shouldn’t be rewarded with gratitude of any kind, but I’m not pissed at you for that.”
“You’re an ass,” Wilson sighed.
“I know. Why am I an ass this time?”
“You crashed the car because you couldn’t pass up an opportunity to make me feel stupid.”
House adopted a thoughtful expression, leaning his head back into Wilson’s pillow. “Yeah, there’s that.”
After a pause, Wilson had to ask, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Dammit Wilson- Did you hear me when I said I was only going over it once?” Wilson just quirked an eyebrow at him, and he sighed. “Sometimes it feels like it’s still there, and that sucks for the minute or two that it lasts… but it’s better than… before.”
Wilson got settled back into the mattress, trying to be subtle in his efforts to cuddle up to House.
“Are you thinking about a prosthetic then?”
House reached an arm behind Wilson’s neck and stroked his fingers through his hair and over the white bandage. “Peterson is ordering out for one next week. I gotta get measured and everything first.”
“That’s good.” Wilson tried and failed to stifle a yawn. “So does that mean we’re going home between now and then?”
“Um… no. Technically I’m still admitted. And you’re not getting out for another week at least. Mom’s being a total bitch.”
“Cuddy just cares about you…” Wilson tried to keep up with the conversation, but another yawn silenced him and the continuous movement of House’s slender fingers through his hair was lulling him to sleep.
“Sure she does.”
Wilson felt the slight pressure of warm lips pressed chastely to his temple, but his eyes were already fluttering closed again, a content smile on his face as he fell under.
------
They ended up keeping the Christmas tree up until New Year’s Eve. They had had to spend Christmas in the hospital, despite the ‘let my people go’ campaign House waged against Cuddy on Wilson’s behalf.
House bitched that he couldn’t care less about breaking in the new year and insisted they celebrate Christmas Eve instead. So Wilson left up the tree, which looked still looked fantastic, if slightly droopy. House hopped around on his crutches and strung blue lights on the tree along with the red and green and white. “For the Jew in you,” he explained.
When Wilson showed up after his neurologist appointment with a rented copy of A Christmas Story on DVD, House couldn’t keep the grin from spreading over his face. He quickly replaced it with a scowl, warning Wilson that it better not be bootlegged and demanding he go make them hot chocolate.
After one and a half viewings of the decidedly legit DVD, House turned to watch Wilson munching peanut brittle on the couch next to him. It was the part of the movie when the kid gets his tongue stuck to a frozen flagpole, and he could tell Wilson was trying not to cringe.
“Cuddy’s giving me three weeks off in next month.” Wilson dragged his eyes away from the TV to look at him, expression betraying his confusion. “For drug rehab…” he continued, staring at a sticky piece of brittle that had glued itself to Wilson’s upper lip.
Wilson’s eyes widened in surprise, his lips parting in a happy smile. The distance between then closed pretty fast after that. Wilson’s hands were everywhere, communicating his pride and love with frantic touches of fingers and lips, House keeping up as best he could.
“Air mattress?” House asked breathlessly.
Halfway to the hall closet already, Wilson shouted over his shoulder, “You start the fire!”
Stoking the flames with a poker and listening to Wilson struggle heroically with the air mattress, House rubbed at the stump of his leg. He hadn’t felt any phantom sensation in over a week, and with his prosthetic arriving sometime in January, House knew he had only Wilson to thank for the upturn his life had so suddenly taken.
“Merry Christmas, Wilson.”
“Did you say something?” Wilson called down the hall. “House?”
“No, why are you hearing things all of the sudden? Just hurry up with the mattress or I’ll have sex with something else.” He listened to Wilson’s grumbling at that and smiled fondly.
While the ball dropped somewhere in the world, House and Wilson brought in the New Year with an air mattress, a Christmas tree, and a new fighting chance for a brighter future.
Author: tinyredpencil
Prompt: 22. Wilson is injured while saving House's life.
Pairing: House/Wilson established
Category: angst, hurt/comfort
Rating/Warnings: R for GORE and brief mentions of sex
Words: ~4700
Summary: Wilson ignores a concussion in favor of saving House.
Disclaimer: I don't have the rights to this stuff. Fox, David Shore, etc... they do. In this universe, House owns a Jag, not a Vette.
It was finally the holiday season and the most hectic time of year at the hospital, and it was the fifth time that week that Wilson had had to cover for House and save his ass from Cuddy’s wrath. It was a new record, he was pretty sure.
Three violations of medical ethics, two prescriptions stolen from the pharmacy, one threat of sexual harassment charges from the night nurse in pediatrics. And a partridge in a pear tree.
“Merry Christmas to me,” Wilson grumbled, just loud enough for House to hear, as he stared out the Jaguar’s passenger side window at the slushy roadside whisking by.
“Jew!” House reminded him, his eyes darting around at traffic before he floored the accelerator and gunned it down the turnpike. And so what? Wilson liked Christmas. It was warm and cozy and smelled like roasted chicken and pine needles. Also, even though he never admitted to it any other day of the year, House turned into an agreeable puppy dog every Christmas Eve since they had moved in together. He always cuddled up to Wilson after dinner with hot chocolate and a blanket on the couch, insisting they watch A Christmas Story on TBS over and over until he finally allowed Wilson to lead him to bed on the air mattress in front of the fire. They always fell asleep near the tree decorated with twinkling lights and ornaments crudely modeled after all manner of sexual organs, drifted off sex-sated and in love and yeah, Wilson liked Christmas a whole lot.
And now, it was the fifteenth of the month, and House was on suspension. “It’s your own fault anyway,” House was saying, dropping one hand from the steering wheel to rub at his leg through faded denim. “I told you to tell her the Interceptor was for you, not for my patient.”
“House, how was I supposed to justify my need for canine heartworm medication? Cuddy might not be at your level of mad genius, but she isn’t stupid.”
“No look, I meant for Hector. Are you a moron now too?” He turned his eyes away from the road to glare at Wilson with more than a hint of disgust. “You tell her it’s for Hector, and I stole it because I’m me, and because you’re you, you apologize for me and she never finds out it’s for my patient. You thought I meant to tell her it was for you to take?”
Wilson felt his face go red with a mixture of annoyance and embarrassment, and he quickly averted his eyes. He saw in his peripheral vision that House did not do the same. “If it was reasonable for you to use on your patient, I figured you wanted me to make it seem reasonable for me to take somehow. Your text wasn’t that specific.” His voice grew quieter as he realized he had missed something fairly obvious.
“Christ, Wilson. You know I do recall a time when you were quick enough to keep up with me.” The comment should have stung, but Wilson found himself watching the car’s progress as House carelessly allowed them to drift closer to the guardrail.
“House, eyes on the road.”
He’d heard that from Wilson more than enough times apparently, because he continued, “Don’t go blaming this last one on me, because believe me-”
“House!” Wilson gripped the arm of his seat and the handhold above his head as an awful grating noise overwhelmed all other sources of sound, and then he was falling and House was swearing to his left, and up became down or left or he couldn’t tell, and his stomach rose into his throat.
And he loved this car, too…
At some point in the previous endless second Wilson had closed his eyes, and what he heard next was more terrifying than the earlier sound of the guardrail crumbling. There was a crunch, and the world threw Wilson violently forward, then to the right, and then House was screaming.
House was screaming, and then there was nothing.
------
Wilson woke up to agony. He bit his lip and stifled a whimper as the pain grew in waves, riding piggyback on each progressive level of consciousness. His right wrist throbbed in a way that made him sure he would be emptying his stomach all over the car’s interior very soon. Although he figured the state of the carpet hardly mattered at that point.
When he forced his eyes open they watered instantly, orange airbag dust clumping in his tear-wet eyelashes. He opened his mouth and gasped as the dust that hadn’t yet settled rushed down his throat. He coughed and spluttered and then failed to suppress a miserable whine as this caused what felt like little explosions to burst all throughout his cranium.
Head wound, maybe a concussion, he thought distantly as he brought his left hand up to find a horizontal laceration just above his hairline. He moved his hand close to his face and was just registering the blood on his fingers when a drop of it rolled down the side of his nose and dripped onto his work pants. And a fracture of a wrist bone on the right side. Wilson thought about examining his wrist, checking which bone and how serious it was, but he had close to zero motivation to add to the pain he was already dealing with. Someone in the ER could look at it. He hoped Cameron was working.
“House,” Wilson rasped into the relative silence, still blinking furiously to clear his vision. “What’d we hit?”
He peered as best he could through the haze and out into the range of the one remaining headlight. His stomach lurched southward at what he saw, and panic set in with the force of a sledgehammer to his gut. The first impact, the one that had absorbed most of their speed, had been to the front of the car on the diver’s side. A single tree, wide and thick, probably an oak. The second impact, Wilson figured, had been the small concrete structure to his right, and though it was probably what had broken his wrist, he could not possibly care less about it.
Because that tree had crushed House. There was no doubt in his mind about that. He should have noticed the other man’s silence earlier. It was simple physics, the tree had caved in the interior on the driver’s side and that was that. And yet Wilson found himself frozen, unable to turn his head, stubbornly holding onto the insane hope that in doing so he wouldn’t find his best friend in multiple pieces.
In the end, he looked. He held out for a good twenty seconds, he guessed, but then he looked. House was slumped forward over the side-skewed steering wheel mount, and blood fell in a slow trickle down the back of his head, forming rivulets down the side of his throat. Wilson reached a shaking hand out and pressed two fingers to the skin over House’s carotid, stubble rough and familiar under his touch.
A pulse. And then another. It was a slow, definitely, but there, and each beat was strong, not thready like Wilson had feared. He hadn’t lost too much blood.
Wilson leaned back into his seat and vomited into the space between his knees. It splashed over his shoes and he coughed once, quickly toeing them off, and tore his seatbelt out of its holster so he could have better access to House. He pulled his feet off the floor and tucked them under himself, turning toward the driver’s seat in the process. His bad wrist hung limply at his side but he lifted his shoulder enough to wipe his mouth off on his shirt.
Leaning forward into the space directly above the steering wheel and peering downward, Wilson could see how the crushed engine block had caved in the cavity around House’s lower body, but the relative darkness obscured the extent of the damage. He was getting ready to fish through the glove compartment for the flashlight that probably wasn’t there when in an instant the world was bathed in an undulating wave of blue and red light. The interior of the car exploded with brightness, and the wailing of the ambulance siren reached Wilson’s ears only as an afterthought in his sluggish mind.
House’s leg was mangled far beyond recognition or the hope of recovery. He was bleeding profusely from around the place where the vinyl and metal had cracked and bent his tibia back on itself and pinned the leg between the floor and the radio console.
It was his right leg. The bad one. So bad for House, bad for both of them, and Wilson felt the tiniest, briefest burst of vindication, as if the limb were a thwarted enemy and not the abused flesh of a friend and lover.
He pushed the feeling down, unreasonable as it was. The amputation that was so obviously necessary at this point, necessary in the next few minutes in fact, would not save House from the neuropathic pain that tortured him on a weekly, daily, and hourly basis.
Wilson leaned back over into his seat and was sick again. He trembled with the realization that this would mean even greater suffering, and he honestly didn’t know how much more of it House could take.
A loud tapping noise amplified the pain in his skull, so it took a moment to register that one of the EMTs was rapping his knuckles against the passenger window behind him. Wilson’s head throbbed where it rested in his hands, but his doctor instincts kicked in, fueled further by his fear for House’s safety. He sat up straight and craned his neck around in time to see the rear window glass shatter inward, fragments glittering on and off in time with the ambulance lights as they sailed through the air.
“Hey buddy, you awake in there?”
“I’m fine,” Wilson choked out, trying to channel the authoritative presence of an accomplished doctor. “Driver needs a tourniquet on his right leg, and then we need to pry the dashboard off of him.”
The EMT paused in his effort to reach Wilson and stared at him in incredulous surprise, one dark eyebrow slightly raised. The expression was painfully reminiscent of House’s smirk.
“Oh for-” Wilson dug his wallet out and thrust it into the back seat. “I’m a doctor at Princeton-Plainsboro.”
“Smith, we got a problem over here!” The EMT on the driver’s side was shouting to the one attending Wilson. “Engine’s leaking pretty good. Fire hazard, thing could blow any minute.”
Oh, shit shit shit. Bile rose in Wilson’s throat again and tears sprung to his eyes at the thought of getting torn to pieces, but he forced himself to swallow it all down. If they didn’t get House out of there, he knew he would end up wishing he had gone with him anyway.
“Okay, doctor,” the first EMT was saying as he handed Wilson a heavy tourniquet for House’s leg. “We gotta pull you out through the back so we can get to your friend, all right?”
Wilson had finished tying the tourniquet just above House’s knee and something in him snapped. The image of House trapped in a flaming heap of metal while Wilson himself stood by getting his wrist splinted and his head looked at rose completely unbidden into his mind, and that painful bubble in his chest just broke.
“No.” Wilson knew paramedics were trained in the valued art of convincing people to leave the side of a loved one, and he cut the first EMT off before he could start. “I’m not going to argue with you here, just give me that.”
He was pointing at the kit of disinfectant, scissors, and other supplies that the second EMT had brought around to the back window.
“What’s going on?”
“Guy’s a doctor. He won’t leave his friend.” The first medic gave a frantic, quick exhale of resignation. “Just give it to him, we don’t have time for this.”
There was a moment of hesitation on the part of the second EMT, but then the kit was in Wilson’s hands and he was cutting through House’s jeans down the side of one leg. He untied the tourniquet in order to tighten it, right wrist screaming at him to please stop. And Wilson did stop, but not because of his wrist. He sat there for what felt like minutes but could only have been a few seconds, tourniquet bloodied and hanging from his clenched fist.
“What are you doing?!” He couldn’t tell which medic was yelling at him, but the words hardly registered anyway. “You gotta tie that off or he’ll die in the next two minutes! Are you sure he’s a doctor?”
“Doctor Wilson, his badge is right here.”
Later on, Wilson would spend hours just speculating what exactly was going through his head that caused him to do what he did then, but in that moment there was nothing. No thoughts at all, no considerations of risk, just anger, pain, sadness, love.
He wrapped the tourniquet around House’s thigh, just above the pitted scar, and tied it tight with one violent tug of the knot.
“Hey, you don’t have consent for that- hey!” The first EMT made a grab for Wilson’s shoulder, but he jerked out of reach and spun to address the two men.
“I’m doing this, and if you don’t let me, we’re all going to die just talking about it.” He turned back to House, adrenaline spiking in random bursts of mounting hysteria. He pried open the kit with his good hand and found the disinfectant. “Bring me the saw,” he shouted over his shoulder without bothering to check if either obeyed.
Wilson used the antiseptic to wipe blood and airbag powder off House’s skin in a full circle around the limb. Hissing in pain, he wedged his broken arm under the leg near the knee, so it was propped up off of the seat.
His good hand was shaking, a great reason if there ever was one to not be holding a hypodermic needle, but as long as it went in around the right place…
Though if the lidocaine didn’t work and House woke up… Wilson glanced up nervously, but the other man remained limp and motionless. Taking a deep breath, he injected the anesthetic just below the tourniquet and let the used needle drop from his grip. He replaced it with a scalpel and then he was fingers-deep in fat and muscle and blood as he got to work discerning and separating damned flesh from cherished friend.
He leaned back at one point to add some bile to the puddle of vomit below him, but dove in again right away, his movements growing more frenzied as the proverbial ticking clock pressed him into an anxious corner. He watched a lump of bloody flesh fall to the carpet and choked back a sob at the thought that he might have screwed this up beyond the hope of reparation.
“Saw,” he croaked, and when he turned the second EMT was holding it out for him, his expression fearful, both doubting and hoping that Wilson would succeed.
The machine roared to life. Raw power so easily misdirected that one centimeter’s worth of error margin could destroy everything important to him in a matter of seconds.
There wasn’t even time to think about being careful. Dizzy and nauseous and seizing with fear, Wilson brought the oscillating blade to House’s femur and held it as steady as he could. Bits of fat and bone marrow spattered his face and he screamed in terror and frustration.
He was going to die, but he couldn’t leave. House was trapped and so Wilson was too, and the blade just wouldn’t work fast enough. Wilson screamed again, pressing down hard even as his fractured wrist continued to crack and grind under the strain.
In the same moment one of the medics shined a flashlight over the passenger seat and Wilson made it through the last of the bone. He saw in complete clarity the instant the heap of denim-covered tissue fell away and was no longer a part of House.
It’s done, Wilson thought. The last image he remembered seeing was the thick coat of blood on his hands before darkness pulled him under and he was blissfully dead to the world.
------
He was screaming. He knew he was screaming before he knew why. When his rational mind finally caught up to his nervous system, Wilson found there was no logical explanation for the severity of the pain he was in. The fiery bolts of agony raced around the exterior of his scull and lanced his retinas whenever he tried to open his eyes.
Raising his right hand to his head, he felt heavy bandages that wrapped all the way around. It took him another second to notice there was someone talking to him.
“Doctor Wilson. Doctor Wilson, I need you to try and answer me, all right?”
It was Chase, he’d recognize that accent anywhere. And that meant ICU. Wilson tried to open his mouth and ask why he had been admitted, but all he managed were some rasping noises that only vaguely resembled words. A cup of water was touched to his lips, and he drank gratefully.
Chase paged Foreman, and they spent the next fifteen minutes asking Wilson all kinds of questions, from the year he was born to the color of Chase’s maroon tie. He managed to open his eyes and crack a joke about Australian fashion sense. Chase scowled, but Foreman smirked and whipped out his penlight to check Wilson’s pupil dilation.
“You’re looking pretty good, but someone will have to check on your concussion every hour,” Foreman told him. He pulled up a chair to Wilson’s bedside and adopted the stance doctors tend to use when breaking bad news. Elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped in front of him, he continued, “Doctor Wilson, you’ve been in a coma for over thirty-six hours. We were confident you’d pull through, but House-”
Wilson sat bolt upright, his head complaining loudly at the sudden movement. “Where is House? Did I…” Memories caught up with him, rapid-fire images of blood and fear. “Oh god. I killed him, didn’t I?” He glanced searchingly between Chase and Foreman, but neither man would quite meet his eyes.
It was Chase who answered. “He isn’t dead. He’s doing really well, considering. It’s just…” He glanced at Foreman, who held up his hands as if insisting they keep him out of it. Chase finally looked at Wilson. “Well, you know House. He might not want to see you… for a while.”
“Or ever,” Foreman muttered, but a sharp glare from Chase silenced him.
“We’ll tell him you’re awake.” And then they left him alone to wonder for the next hour how he could have taken yet another decision away from House, just like Cuddy always did, and just like Stacy had.
------
“Why did you do it?”
Wilson jerked awake with a start, his head still throbbing and his eyes watering from the sting of the fluorescent lights. House was sitting off to his right, staring at Wilson with a blank expression. Someone had brought in a large armchair for House to recline in, and his lower body was swaddled in a thick duvet. It wasn’t hospital brand; Cuddy must have brought it from their apartment.
“Why did you do it?” he repeated when Wilson failed to provide a response.
In searching House’s eyes, Wilson sought desperately for some trace of understanding. Instead he found only coldness and flashes of what could be anger, complemented by lips pressed to a stubbornly thin line. His gaze migrated down to where one leg poked out from under the blanket, and then to where the other should have been.
Wilson’s lower lip started to tremble of its own volition, and then in waves, sob after sob wrenched through his chest and he grit his teeth and wiped furiously at the tear-tracks on his cheeks. “I’m… God House, I’m so sorry,” he bit out the apology, jaw still clenched against the mortification of what he had done. “I’m such a- god, that was such a shit thing to do to you, I can’t just-” He took a gasping breath and buried his face in the hand that wasn’t sporting a hard cast. “Please tell me you’re okay,” he begged, his words coming muffled through his fingers.
“I’m fine, Wilson.”
“…What?” He sniffled, dropping his hand to his lap and looking up to find House studying the window dressings, eyes shifting to the linoleum, the catheter bag, his fingernails, anything but the evidence of Wilson’s remorse.
Finally, he sighed and threw the blanket off of himself, revealing the bandage-wrapped stump where his right leg used to be. Grabbing a pair of crutches off the floor next to his chair, House propelled himself over to the bed with agility he had never possessed with his cane. He allowed the crutches to clatter to the floor while hopping off his remaining leg and landing on the bed next to Wilson.
“House, I didn’t think. I just acted. I know I’ve done exactly what Stacy did, and I can’t handle-“
“Wait, wait, hold on a sec.” House rotated his body so he could stare Wilson down properly. “You have to know that’s total bullshit.”
Wilson gave a shaky sight, staring morosely at the blue cast on his right arm. “I… I don’t understand. Why aren’t you angry?”
“I am angry,” House insisted, but there was a note of amusement in his voice.
Wilson turned wide, teary, puppy-dog eyes on him and sniffled again. “Okay… um, I’m confused.”
“Idiot. I was asking you why you stayed and performed the amputation yourself instead of letting the EMT look at you.” House’s words had turned cold again. “You had a serious skull fracture. There was too much intracranial pressure. You went into a coma right there in the ambulance after they hauled you out of the car.” Gentle hands grabbed Wilson’s face and forced him to make eye contact. “Why are you such a moron?” The blue eyes held a fondness that didn’t match the words of their owner.
Wilson frowned around the fingers pressing into his cheeks. “The car was going to explode. I couldn’t leave you there.”
“Yeah, well, nothing ended up exploding. Fire department got there in time.” He chuckled a little. “Would’ve been kind of cool though.”
“House!”
“Well, the thing was totaled anyway.”
“We could have died! I just…” He pulled his face out of House’s grip, missing the contact instantly. “I don’t understand why you aren’t angry that I… you know…”
“Unnecessarily hacked off a portion of my leg that’s been nothing but a hindrance to me for the past eight years?”
“I didn’t give you the choice.” Wilson was back to looking at his hands.
“Wilson, you better listen to me right now, because I’m not rehashing this more than once. What Stacy did and what you did were completely different. She took a choice out of my hands, you had one dropped into yours. And you made the right choice, Wilson, look at me.” Reluctantly, Wilson met House’s earnest expression. “Her choice left me with a useless lump of painful flesh and yours took it away. I’m not going to thank you, because ignoring a concussion shouldn’t be rewarded with gratitude of any kind, but I’m not pissed at you for that.”
“You’re an ass,” Wilson sighed.
“I know. Why am I an ass this time?”
“You crashed the car because you couldn’t pass up an opportunity to make me feel stupid.”
House adopted a thoughtful expression, leaning his head back into Wilson’s pillow. “Yeah, there’s that.”
After a pause, Wilson had to ask, “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Dammit Wilson- Did you hear me when I said I was only going over it once?” Wilson just quirked an eyebrow at him, and he sighed. “Sometimes it feels like it’s still there, and that sucks for the minute or two that it lasts… but it’s better than… before.”
Wilson got settled back into the mattress, trying to be subtle in his efforts to cuddle up to House.
“Are you thinking about a prosthetic then?”
House reached an arm behind Wilson’s neck and stroked his fingers through his hair and over the white bandage. “Peterson is ordering out for one next week. I gotta get measured and everything first.”
“That’s good.” Wilson tried and failed to stifle a yawn. “So does that mean we’re going home between now and then?”
“Um… no. Technically I’m still admitted. And you’re not getting out for another week at least. Mom’s being a total bitch.”
“Cuddy just cares about you…” Wilson tried to keep up with the conversation, but another yawn silenced him and the continuous movement of House’s slender fingers through his hair was lulling him to sleep.
“Sure she does.”
Wilson felt the slight pressure of warm lips pressed chastely to his temple, but his eyes were already fluttering closed again, a content smile on his face as he fell under.
------
They ended up keeping the Christmas tree up until New Year’s Eve. They had had to spend Christmas in the hospital, despite the ‘let my people go’ campaign House waged against Cuddy on Wilson’s behalf.
House bitched that he couldn’t care less about breaking in the new year and insisted they celebrate Christmas Eve instead. So Wilson left up the tree, which looked still looked fantastic, if slightly droopy. House hopped around on his crutches and strung blue lights on the tree along with the red and green and white. “For the Jew in you,” he explained.
When Wilson showed up after his neurologist appointment with a rented copy of A Christmas Story on DVD, House couldn’t keep the grin from spreading over his face. He quickly replaced it with a scowl, warning Wilson that it better not be bootlegged and demanding he go make them hot chocolate.
After one and a half viewings of the decidedly legit DVD, House turned to watch Wilson munching peanut brittle on the couch next to him. It was the part of the movie when the kid gets his tongue stuck to a frozen flagpole, and he could tell Wilson was trying not to cringe.
“Cuddy’s giving me three weeks off in next month.” Wilson dragged his eyes away from the TV to look at him, expression betraying his confusion. “For drug rehab…” he continued, staring at a sticky piece of brittle that had glued itself to Wilson’s upper lip.
Wilson’s eyes widened in surprise, his lips parting in a happy smile. The distance between then closed pretty fast after that. Wilson’s hands were everywhere, communicating his pride and love with frantic touches of fingers and lips, House keeping up as best he could.
“Air mattress?” House asked breathlessly.
Halfway to the hall closet already, Wilson shouted over his shoulder, “You start the fire!”
Stoking the flames with a poker and listening to Wilson struggle heroically with the air mattress, House rubbed at the stump of his leg. He hadn’t felt any phantom sensation in over a week, and with his prosthetic arriving sometime in January, House knew he had only Wilson to thank for the upturn his life had so suddenly taken.
“Merry Christmas, Wilson.”
“Did you say something?” Wilson called down the hall. “House?”
“No, why are you hearing things all of the sudden? Just hurry up with the mattress or I’ll have sex with something else.” He listened to Wilson’s grumbling at that and smiled fondly.
While the ball dropped somewhere in the world, House and Wilson brought in the New Year with an air mattress, a Christmas tree, and a new fighting chance for a brighter future.