Fic- Fighter
Title: Fighter
He’s outside. He’s walking through the parking lot on a beautiful fall morning when, suddenly, the world falls away. Everything goes white. Pure, aching, blinding white.
He swims in the white a moment as it fades. Fades to grey. Fades to black.
And then he hears the loudest noise he’s ever heard.
--
After the bomb, the army comes and takes everyone useful. Then they come back and take everyone that might be vaguely useful. Then they come back for everyone else.
Chase is useful. Foremen is useful.
Wilson is vaguely useful.
The triage director takes one look at House and classifies him as “everyone else.”
House is not pleased.
They do eventually put House to work in the morgue tent because for some reason the army feels the need to make out individual death certificates.
“For who?” House yells occasionally. “Who the hell is going to read them?”
He did actually work for a while, but these days he just writes THE BOMB STUPID! on all of them and knocks off at noon.
Wilson works all day long.
He is so tired he can’t even feel sad anymore.
His day is a horrible rhythm. Gloves on, blood wiped away, vitals taken, wounds cleaned, re-bandaged, gloves off, new gloves on, next patient.
Gloves on. Gloves off. Gloves on.
This drives House crazy too.
They sleep together at night.
It’s dumb, really. Wilson doesn’t know why it started, but four days after the bomb (that’s how they figure time now, he has no idea the month or the day but he knows it’s been 27 days since the bomb) he went to the trailer they gave him and House was asleep in his bed and he was too tired to do anything about it.
It’s nice. They curl their arms around each other and sleep deep and Wilson gets to hide in the dark hollow of House’s shoulder until dawn. Then he gets up, gets dressed and puts his first pair of gloves on.
This night, the 27th night since the bomb, when he slid out of his dirty clothes and into his bed, House is already asleep. A floodlight turns on a few rows away and House’s face, pressed into his pillow, is illuminated.
Wilson looks down at him, something happening in throat that makes him breathe in deep. He reaches out, running his fingers through House’s hair, his touch unusually rough these days. House’s face tightens and Wilson imagines a twinge of pain shooting through him. Wilson gently strokes the clenched jaw and quickly, before his tired brain can shout some protest he presses his lips against House’s temple. He pauses a moment, watching the rise and fall of House’s chest, then buries his face in House’s t-shirt.
Morning comes.
There are tents and tents of patients. Cot after cot after cot stretching on and on until his vision blurs. He starts at the nearest bed, wipes blood, takes vitals, cleans out wounds, re-bandages, gloves off, new gloves, next patient.
He still wears his lab coat, but he threw his dosimeter away (literally threw it over the clumsily erected barbed wire fences and why did the army put them up anyway?) and stopped wearing his tie. House looks the same.
The little things like that bug the shit out of him.
It’s the 28th day after the bomb and the coffee is especially bad and his clothes are especially dirty and the little things are going to eat him alive. It’s too much.
Too much pain. Too much screaming. Too many deaths. Not enough medicine. Not enough supplies. Not enough doctors.
When the little girl in third row (yes, that’s how he thinks about people now, like cars in a parking lot) the one who clutched her blue elephant to her chest, the little fibers sticking to her open wounds, when she finally died the nurse draped a sheet over her tiny body and Wilson took the foot of the cot and together they carried her to the morgue tent. Setting her down with as much delicacy as possible got his lab coat, streaked with blood and dust, caught underneath the metal legs. He stood and the coat ripped along the back seam.
Little things, his coat falling off around his shoulders as he stepped away made him want burst, suddenly, into tears.
“I have to…” He stammers to the nurse as she pushes back a strand of her dirty blond hair. “I’ll…be right…”
He flees from the morgue tent, stumbling through upturned dirt, past the “Everyone Else” tents toward the “Vaguely Useful” trailers. He finds his, (second row, third from the left) pulls open the screen door and launches himself inside.
He almost trips, falling forward onto the bed and into House’s sprawled legs. House sits up, his earphones still blaring MP3s into his ears (and where was he getting that thing recharged?) a shocked sleepy look on his face.
“What happened?” House asks.
“I ripped my coat,” Wilson says, sitting up and rubbing his face with his hands.
“So?”
“So? Nothing. Nothing happened. I ripped my coat.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” Wilson turns to him. “What’s wrong? What the hell do you think is wrong?”
“You ripped your coat?” House says. “Not the end of the world.”
They sit in silence a moment until Wilson starts to shake. He knows there are tears coming down his face, but he can’t tell if the shakes are laughter or sobbing.
House moves toward him, pulling his earphones from his ears and reaching for Wilson’s face, pushing back Wilson’s hair.
“This sucks,” Wilson says.
“Yeah,” House says.
Wilson leans his face into House’s touch, eyes closed. “I’m sorry about this,” Wilson says, “I just…”
“I get it.”
“I don’t.”
Wilson stares at House, breathing a little faster then normal.
He’s just about to move when someone bangs on the trailer door.
“Dr. Wilson?”
“Yeah! I’m coming!” Wilson yells, leaping from the bed and banging out the door.
More patients. More beds. More gloves.
Night comes too slowly.
In the end, he has to quit a little early, while there’s still light in the sky because he’s just exhausted and he can’t think anymore.
Wilson eats off a long table under a low hanging light that burns hot and attracts flies.
Wilson comes through the trailer door without turning on the light (it’s policy, saves energy) and strips off his shirt almost immediately. His clothes are three days old and he can feel the grit.
He walks over to the sink and runs a little water, cupping it in his hands and splashing it on his face and his chest. House is lying on the bed, silent; his face towards Wilson’s designated spot.
“I’m sorry,” Wilson says quietly.
“Why?”
“I’m sorry about Cameron.”
“You didn’t kill her. Come to bed.”
He does so, but not before grabbing House and pressing his tongue into that insolent little mouth.
Things get better.
They adapt.
Stay out of the rain. That’s rule number one. When it rains, run as fast as you can to the nearest dry place and stay there. Don’t walk through puddles, don’t track dust into buildings and shut your windows when the wind blows from the west.
The army gets their supply chains figured out and soon, as long as he wears camo pants and t-shirts, he has clean clothes everyday. They don’t suit him.
His hair gets too long and hard to keep clean so on the 34th day after the bomb drops he gets someone to buzz it all off. House teases Wilson, rubbing hands over Wilson’s scalp and Wilson wonders if House can feel his heartbeat.
The clothes suit him a little better after that.
House still looks exactly the same, even when he relents and starts wearing the army supplied clothes. He doesn’t tuck his shirt in though.
Winter comes.
It gets cold. The supply lines snag. No new meds. House cuts back his work, spending most of the time in the trailer trying to sleep.
The trailer is nice enough, comparatively, and nobody bothers to mention that he’s sharing it with his best friend. It is slowly filling with stolen lunch trays.
“I’m building a shed,” House says.
In fact a lot of people bunk up, though most tend to go along more conventional heterosexual lines. Wilson waits for someone to say something, but doesn’t really care what they think.
The army puts up a shower tent.
Wilson can’t believe the utter bliss of a hot shower after a long days work.
They get a shipment of morphine and House starts working more, splitting his time between the morgue tent and the actual patients. They don’t talk inside the hospital tent, but sometimes Wilson looks up and sees House, giving orders without looking the patients in the eye. They like that; Wilson’s brand of wishy-washy sentimentalism doesn’t blend well with the army. Wilson adopts a more House-ish persona.
Except with the kids.
He can’t seem to shake off the kids.
The kids are coming in waves now. What with the primarily injured all dead or shipped to better working hospitals, the latest patients were the ones dying slowly from radiation poisoning.
Mostly kids.
Smaller bodies. Kids get the sickest.
There’s this one kid, back row, right next to the central heater, Wilson stands there a moment to warm his hands, this kid looks awfully like his younger brother looked when he was young enough to follow him, puppy dog like, to school and back.
This kid in all fairness should be bothering his own big brother and whining about school and doing, oh hell, he doesn’t know what kids do these days, but this kid should be doing that.
They get wounded soldiers too.
The army is fighting up north. Fighting the people who bombed them. Wilson doesn’t know who they are. He doesn’t care. He just wants them dead.
This is unlike him, he knows.
He tries to remember all the things he loved about his life before, but all he can come up with is, House didn’t give a damn about me.
That seems so petty.
“Creepy kid, huh?” House asks one night as they crawl into the bed.
Wilson knows which one they’re talking about automatically, that’s happening a lot with House these days. Back row, next to the central heater.
“Why?”
“He looks like you.” House is doing well today. He speaks softly, as is the habit of everyone these nights with people pulled so close together.
“He does not.”
“Exactly like you. Eyes. Mouth. Cheekbones. Same face, just skinnier.” That's saying a lot these days.
They run out of gloves.
The solution, bowls of alcohol to dip hands in between examinations, works well enough, but leaves Wilson’s hands perpetually chilled and achy and, as it gets colder, red and chapped.
House rubs Wilson’s hands at night.
They live through the winter. They’re lucky, maybe.
Except in the spring, when the supplies start coming in regular again and the days start getting warmer and some of the people actually start getting better, standing up and helping out better, Wilson gets a cough.
It doesn’t go away.
It’s so persistent his body aches when he breathes.
It starts to bring up blood.
Wilson works through it, but it’s still there. He doesn’t get better.
Wilson is sick. Very sick.
At night, House rubs his chest with the flat of one hand, hard, almost to the point of pain, but the heat there feels so good he doesn’t mind.
“This is stupid,” House says on the 164th day after the bomb.
On the 165th day after the bomb, Wilson can’t get out of bed.
He lays there sweating, coughs racking his body. House rubs his chest and his hands and his stiff and sore neck.
At one point, he wakes and his head is in House’s lap. House looks exactly the same, but Wilson gets the idea he’s been crying.
“You’re sick,” House says.
It’s quiet today. No shelling. No screaming.
“Yeah,” Wilson says.
“We’re leaving,” House says.
House gets a motorcycle.
Wilson has no goddamn idea where, but, House gets a motorcycle.
“The middle of the road is safe,” House says, “it’s what they did at Chernobyl.”
It’s a little late for safe, Wilson wants to say, but doesn’t.
Wilson puts on clean camos and rides on the back of House’s motorcycle, away from the “Vaguely Useful” trailer, past the shower tent, past the wire fences, away from the camp.
He rests his fevered cheek against House’s back, still coughing sometimes.
On and on they drive, past rubble and waste. There’s no one.
No one. They don’t see a single person all day. They don’t see a single sign of a single person all day. They don’t see a car or a tent or a campfire.
They see a dog, a little past noon. It has three legs.
They stop occasionally and House forces large quantities of water into him.
“Drink,” he says as he does this, “you’re sweating it all out.”
“Where the hell is everybody?” Wilson asks.
“I don’t know.”
The sun is low in the sky and reflecting into billowing storm clouds.
Rule number one. They find a place to stay out of the rain.
Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital still stands, pretty much, and House rides his bike right into the lobby, like a character in a fifties musical.
There is broken glass everywhere. Noises echo in the silence.
Thunder claps. It starts to rain.
Wilson sits hard on an abandoned office chair. His head lolls back. His world spins. He coughs.
“Let’s get you a place to rest,” House says.
House clears a place on the lobby floor and scavenges blankets and pillows to make a serviceable bed. Wilson lies down and House give him a shot to help him sleep.
“You’re not going to die,” House says. “You’re a fighter.”
House is turning white, bright, brilliant aching white, and fading into the rapidly brightening background.
“Breath deep,” House says and Wilson obeys, breathing as hard as he can with this pressure in his chest. “Now, cough.”
Then everything goes black as it slips away.
--
Wilson wakes to the curious sensation of someone removing a plastic tube from his throat.
“You,” House informs him, “are a stupid son of a bitch.”
“He probably can’t hear you. He’s been under sedation.”
“Oh, he can hear me. Can’t you, you stupid son of a bitch?”
Wilson swallows, but can’t quite tell if the saliva has worked its way down his throat or not.
The hospital. He’s in the hospital and it’s bright and clean and wonderful. Real sheets, clean ones, cover him and House and Cuddy are there.
Jesus, he realizes he never checked to see if Cuddy was okay.
Guilt floods him even as he starts to puzzle pieces together.
“What?” he croaks and this sets off a coughing fit. Cuddy rushes to his side, holding an oxygen mask to his face until he’s under control enough to do it himself.
Wilson breathes deep.
“What happened?” He asks in a raw whispering voice.
“You, you stupid son of a bitch, walked in front of bus.”
“A bus?” Wilson asks.
House is looking down at him, leaning one hand on the wall above his head. “The cross town express to be precise.”
“There was a bomb?” Wilson asks.
“No, a bus.” Cuddy says in as nice a voice as possible.
“I dreamt there was a bomb.” But already the pieces are falling away. (Where did they get hot water or electricity?) “I dreamt everything was gone…”
“Megalomaniac,” House says. “You can’t be conscious so the world must have ended. Of course. You stupid son of a bitch.”
Wilson breathes deep.
“So, it’s not the end?”
House laughs.
“No,” he says, “it’s definitely not the end.”
He’s outside. He’s walking through the parking lot on a beautiful fall morning when, suddenly, the world falls away. Everything goes white. Pure, aching, blinding white.
He swims in the white a moment as it fades. Fades to grey. Fades to black.
And then he hears the loudest noise he’s ever heard.
--
After the bomb, the army comes and takes everyone useful. Then they come back and take everyone that might be vaguely useful. Then they come back for everyone else.
Chase is useful. Foremen is useful.
Wilson is vaguely useful.
The triage director takes one look at House and classifies him as “everyone else.”
House is not pleased.
They do eventually put House to work in the morgue tent because for some reason the army feels the need to make out individual death certificates.
“For who?” House yells occasionally. “Who the hell is going to read them?”
He did actually work for a while, but these days he just writes THE BOMB STUPID! on all of them and knocks off at noon.
Wilson works all day long.
He is so tired he can’t even feel sad anymore.
His day is a horrible rhythm. Gloves on, blood wiped away, vitals taken, wounds cleaned, re-bandaged, gloves off, new gloves on, next patient.
Gloves on. Gloves off. Gloves on.
This drives House crazy too.
They sleep together at night.
It’s dumb, really. Wilson doesn’t know why it started, but four days after the bomb (that’s how they figure time now, he has no idea the month or the day but he knows it’s been 27 days since the bomb) he went to the trailer they gave him and House was asleep in his bed and he was too tired to do anything about it.
It’s nice. They curl their arms around each other and sleep deep and Wilson gets to hide in the dark hollow of House’s shoulder until dawn. Then he gets up, gets dressed and puts his first pair of gloves on.
This night, the 27th night since the bomb, when he slid out of his dirty clothes and into his bed, House is already asleep. A floodlight turns on a few rows away and House’s face, pressed into his pillow, is illuminated.
Wilson looks down at him, something happening in throat that makes him breathe in deep. He reaches out, running his fingers through House’s hair, his touch unusually rough these days. House’s face tightens and Wilson imagines a twinge of pain shooting through him. Wilson gently strokes the clenched jaw and quickly, before his tired brain can shout some protest he presses his lips against House’s temple. He pauses a moment, watching the rise and fall of House’s chest, then buries his face in House’s t-shirt.
Morning comes.
There are tents and tents of patients. Cot after cot after cot stretching on and on until his vision blurs. He starts at the nearest bed, wipes blood, takes vitals, cleans out wounds, re-bandages, gloves off, new gloves, next patient.
He still wears his lab coat, but he threw his dosimeter away (literally threw it over the clumsily erected barbed wire fences and why did the army put them up anyway?) and stopped wearing his tie. House looks the same.
The little things like that bug the shit out of him.
It’s the 28th day after the bomb and the coffee is especially bad and his clothes are especially dirty and the little things are going to eat him alive. It’s too much.
Too much pain. Too much screaming. Too many deaths. Not enough medicine. Not enough supplies. Not enough doctors.
When the little girl in third row (yes, that’s how he thinks about people now, like cars in a parking lot) the one who clutched her blue elephant to her chest, the little fibers sticking to her open wounds, when she finally died the nurse draped a sheet over her tiny body and Wilson took the foot of the cot and together they carried her to the morgue tent. Setting her down with as much delicacy as possible got his lab coat, streaked with blood and dust, caught underneath the metal legs. He stood and the coat ripped along the back seam.
Little things, his coat falling off around his shoulders as he stepped away made him want burst, suddenly, into tears.
“I have to…” He stammers to the nurse as she pushes back a strand of her dirty blond hair. “I’ll…be right…”
He flees from the morgue tent, stumbling through upturned dirt, past the “Everyone Else” tents toward the “Vaguely Useful” trailers. He finds his, (second row, third from the left) pulls open the screen door and launches himself inside.
He almost trips, falling forward onto the bed and into House’s sprawled legs. House sits up, his earphones still blaring MP3s into his ears (and where was he getting that thing recharged?) a shocked sleepy look on his face.
“What happened?” House asks.
“I ripped my coat,” Wilson says, sitting up and rubbing his face with his hands.
“So?”
“So? Nothing. Nothing happened. I ripped my coat.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong?” Wilson turns to him. “What’s wrong? What the hell do you think is wrong?”
“You ripped your coat?” House says. “Not the end of the world.”
They sit in silence a moment until Wilson starts to shake. He knows there are tears coming down his face, but he can’t tell if the shakes are laughter or sobbing.
House moves toward him, pulling his earphones from his ears and reaching for Wilson’s face, pushing back Wilson’s hair.
“This sucks,” Wilson says.
“Yeah,” House says.
Wilson leans his face into House’s touch, eyes closed. “I’m sorry about this,” Wilson says, “I just…”
“I get it.”
“I don’t.”
Wilson stares at House, breathing a little faster then normal.
He’s just about to move when someone bangs on the trailer door.
“Dr. Wilson?”
“Yeah! I’m coming!” Wilson yells, leaping from the bed and banging out the door.
More patients. More beds. More gloves.
Night comes too slowly.
In the end, he has to quit a little early, while there’s still light in the sky because he’s just exhausted and he can’t think anymore.
Wilson eats off a long table under a low hanging light that burns hot and attracts flies.
Wilson comes through the trailer door without turning on the light (it’s policy, saves energy) and strips off his shirt almost immediately. His clothes are three days old and he can feel the grit.
He walks over to the sink and runs a little water, cupping it in his hands and splashing it on his face and his chest. House is lying on the bed, silent; his face towards Wilson’s designated spot.
“I’m sorry,” Wilson says quietly.
“Why?”
“I’m sorry about Cameron.”
“You didn’t kill her. Come to bed.”
He does so, but not before grabbing House and pressing his tongue into that insolent little mouth.
Things get better.
They adapt.
Stay out of the rain. That’s rule number one. When it rains, run as fast as you can to the nearest dry place and stay there. Don’t walk through puddles, don’t track dust into buildings and shut your windows when the wind blows from the west.
The army gets their supply chains figured out and soon, as long as he wears camo pants and t-shirts, he has clean clothes everyday. They don’t suit him.
His hair gets too long and hard to keep clean so on the 34th day after the bomb drops he gets someone to buzz it all off. House teases Wilson, rubbing hands over Wilson’s scalp and Wilson wonders if House can feel his heartbeat.
The clothes suit him a little better after that.
House still looks exactly the same, even when he relents and starts wearing the army supplied clothes. He doesn’t tuck his shirt in though.
Winter comes.
It gets cold. The supply lines snag. No new meds. House cuts back his work, spending most of the time in the trailer trying to sleep.
The trailer is nice enough, comparatively, and nobody bothers to mention that he’s sharing it with his best friend. It is slowly filling with stolen lunch trays.
“I’m building a shed,” House says.
In fact a lot of people bunk up, though most tend to go along more conventional heterosexual lines. Wilson waits for someone to say something, but doesn’t really care what they think.
The army puts up a shower tent.
Wilson can’t believe the utter bliss of a hot shower after a long days work.
They get a shipment of morphine and House starts working more, splitting his time between the morgue tent and the actual patients. They don’t talk inside the hospital tent, but sometimes Wilson looks up and sees House, giving orders without looking the patients in the eye. They like that; Wilson’s brand of wishy-washy sentimentalism doesn’t blend well with the army. Wilson adopts a more House-ish persona.
Except with the kids.
He can’t seem to shake off the kids.
The kids are coming in waves now. What with the primarily injured all dead or shipped to better working hospitals, the latest patients were the ones dying slowly from radiation poisoning.
Mostly kids.
Smaller bodies. Kids get the sickest.
There’s this one kid, back row, right next to the central heater, Wilson stands there a moment to warm his hands, this kid looks awfully like his younger brother looked when he was young enough to follow him, puppy dog like, to school and back.
This kid in all fairness should be bothering his own big brother and whining about school and doing, oh hell, he doesn’t know what kids do these days, but this kid should be doing that.
They get wounded soldiers too.
The army is fighting up north. Fighting the people who bombed them. Wilson doesn’t know who they are. He doesn’t care. He just wants them dead.
This is unlike him, he knows.
He tries to remember all the things he loved about his life before, but all he can come up with is, House didn’t give a damn about me.
That seems so petty.
“Creepy kid, huh?” House asks one night as they crawl into the bed.
Wilson knows which one they’re talking about automatically, that’s happening a lot with House these days. Back row, next to the central heater.
“Why?”
“He looks like you.” House is doing well today. He speaks softly, as is the habit of everyone these nights with people pulled so close together.
“He does not.”
“Exactly like you. Eyes. Mouth. Cheekbones. Same face, just skinnier.” That's saying a lot these days.
They run out of gloves.
The solution, bowls of alcohol to dip hands in between examinations, works well enough, but leaves Wilson’s hands perpetually chilled and achy and, as it gets colder, red and chapped.
House rubs Wilson’s hands at night.
They live through the winter. They’re lucky, maybe.
Except in the spring, when the supplies start coming in regular again and the days start getting warmer and some of the people actually start getting better, standing up and helping out better, Wilson gets a cough.
It doesn’t go away.
It’s so persistent his body aches when he breathes.
It starts to bring up blood.
Wilson works through it, but it’s still there. He doesn’t get better.
Wilson is sick. Very sick.
At night, House rubs his chest with the flat of one hand, hard, almost to the point of pain, but the heat there feels so good he doesn’t mind.
“This is stupid,” House says on the 164th day after the bomb.
On the 165th day after the bomb, Wilson can’t get out of bed.
He lays there sweating, coughs racking his body. House rubs his chest and his hands and his stiff and sore neck.
At one point, he wakes and his head is in House’s lap. House looks exactly the same, but Wilson gets the idea he’s been crying.
“You’re sick,” House says.
It’s quiet today. No shelling. No screaming.
“Yeah,” Wilson says.
“We’re leaving,” House says.
House gets a motorcycle.
Wilson has no goddamn idea where, but, House gets a motorcycle.
“The middle of the road is safe,” House says, “it’s what they did at Chernobyl.”
It’s a little late for safe, Wilson wants to say, but doesn’t.
Wilson puts on clean camos and rides on the back of House’s motorcycle, away from the “Vaguely Useful” trailer, past the shower tent, past the wire fences, away from the camp.
He rests his fevered cheek against House’s back, still coughing sometimes.
On and on they drive, past rubble and waste. There’s no one.
No one. They don’t see a single person all day. They don’t see a single sign of a single person all day. They don’t see a car or a tent or a campfire.
They see a dog, a little past noon. It has three legs.
They stop occasionally and House forces large quantities of water into him.
“Drink,” he says as he does this, “you’re sweating it all out.”
“Where the hell is everybody?” Wilson asks.
“I don’t know.”
The sun is low in the sky and reflecting into billowing storm clouds.
Rule number one. They find a place to stay out of the rain.
Princeton-Plainsboro Hospital still stands, pretty much, and House rides his bike right into the lobby, like a character in a fifties musical.
There is broken glass everywhere. Noises echo in the silence.
Thunder claps. It starts to rain.
Wilson sits hard on an abandoned office chair. His head lolls back. His world spins. He coughs.
“Let’s get you a place to rest,” House says.
House clears a place on the lobby floor and scavenges blankets and pillows to make a serviceable bed. Wilson lies down and House give him a shot to help him sleep.
“You’re not going to die,” House says. “You’re a fighter.”
House is turning white, bright, brilliant aching white, and fading into the rapidly brightening background.
“Breath deep,” House says and Wilson obeys, breathing as hard as he can with this pressure in his chest. “Now, cough.”
Then everything goes black as it slips away.
--
Wilson wakes to the curious sensation of someone removing a plastic tube from his throat.
“You,” House informs him, “are a stupid son of a bitch.”
“He probably can’t hear you. He’s been under sedation.”
“Oh, he can hear me. Can’t you, you stupid son of a bitch?”
Wilson swallows, but can’t quite tell if the saliva has worked its way down his throat or not.
The hospital. He’s in the hospital and it’s bright and clean and wonderful. Real sheets, clean ones, cover him and House and Cuddy are there.
Jesus, he realizes he never checked to see if Cuddy was okay.
Guilt floods him even as he starts to puzzle pieces together.
“What?” he croaks and this sets off a coughing fit. Cuddy rushes to his side, holding an oxygen mask to his face until he’s under control enough to do it himself.
Wilson breathes deep.
“What happened?” He asks in a raw whispering voice.
“You, you stupid son of a bitch, walked in front of bus.”
“A bus?” Wilson asks.
House is looking down at him, leaning one hand on the wall above his head. “The cross town express to be precise.”
“There was a bomb?” Wilson asks.
“No, a bus.” Cuddy says in as nice a voice as possible.
“I dreamt there was a bomb.” But already the pieces are falling away. (Where did they get hot water or electricity?) “I dreamt everything was gone…”
“Megalomaniac,” House says. “You can’t be conscious so the world must have ended. Of course. You stupid son of a bitch.”
Wilson breathes deep.
“So, it’s not the end?”
House laughs.
“No,” he says, “it’s definitely not the end.”