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  Two Solitudes 
 by Mer  

 In the end, Tritter had the last word. He let himself into the cellblock
after Wilson left, the geniality he had displayed in the courtroom gone.
"Everybody keeps telling me you're a genius," he said, staring at House
from the other side of the bars. "But I think you're the stupidest
son-of-a-bitch I've ever met. A smart man appreciates his friends."

"Leave Wilson out of this," House snapped. Tritter wasn't allowed to talk
about Wilson. He had nearly broken everything.

Tritter watched him impassively, chewing his nicotine gum slowly. "He came
to me before Christmas. Said he wouldn't testify. I told him he'd go to
jail for obstructing justice. You know what he said?" He waited until
House glared at him defiantly. "He said better him than you. He didn't
tell you that, did he?"

House looked away.

"He would give his life up for you. I'm not the first person who's hurt
Dr. Wilson to get to you. Maybe the next one won't stop at taking away his
livelihood. Think about that."

House did. He thought about it that long night in jail and then he forgot
in the relief of temporary freedom the next morning.

 Some time later

"Which one of you is House?"

House and Wilson were enjoying a lazy lunch hour in an empty exam room,
watching soaps on House's portable television. The man's words sparked a
shiver of deja vu down House's spine.

Wilson glanced at him and stood up, angling his body slightly in front of
House. "Who wants to know?" he asked, his voice pleasant, but wary.

"A friend of a friend."

Wilson glanced between House and the intruder. "I'm House. What can I do
for you?"

The man reached into his coat and House froze. He wanted to push Wilson
out of the way or cower under the table or both. But Wilson just stepped
in front of House, his spine ramrod straight. When the man pulled out a
book and handed it to Wilson, House sagged back into his chair, heart
pounding.

"Dylan Crandall asked me to give this to you," the man said. "He heard I
was going to be in Princeton and thought he'd save the postage." He smiled
and the tension in the room dissipated like fine mist.

"Tell Crandall I hope he and Leona are doing well," Wilson said and shook
the man's hand. He glanced at the book and smiled. "I look forward to
reading this."

House waited until the man left and then stood up, shaking with adrenaline
and anger. "What the hell were you doing?"

Wilson raised an eyebrow, looking deceptively innocent. "Sparing that man
your abrasive personality."

"You were protecting me," House snapped. "What would you have done if he'd
had a gun? Stood there and taken the bullet?"

Wilson shrugged. "Better me than you."

House remembered Tritter's words. Suddenly he couldn't take a full breath.
A hand grabbed him by the arm and guided him into a chair. He leaned
forward, gasping.

The hand moved up and down his arm. "Take it easy, House," Wilson
murmured. "It's all right. It's just a memory. You're safe. You're all
right."

House caught his breath and straightened up. "You think I'm having a
flashback?" he demanded, shaking his head. "You're an idiot."

Wilson stepped back, grinning ruefully. "So you keep telling me."

"No, I mean it." He took a deep breath and waited for the last of the
panic to fade away. He pulled his pager from his pocket and pretended to
look at it. "I've got to go. Patient needs me."

Wilson planted his hands on his hips. "I didn't hear a page."

"It's set on vibrate. Cameron pages me every fifteen minutes to give me a
thrill. But this one was from Chase. He's such a tease." He stood up
cautiously and moved unsteadily towards the door. 

"You don't have a patient," Wilson protested.

"I do now." His first stop would be Cuddy's office. She always had someone
she wanted him to treat. Even a ridiculously easy case would give him time
to think. "Leave the TV in my office when you're done."

"House..." 

House glanced back. Wilson looked bewildered and faintly hurt. Walking
away from that look was one of the hardest things he'd ever done.

 When he was upset, Wilson locked himself in his office and brooded.
Nothing House said or did would budge him until he worried away at
whatever was bothering him and came to some kind of understanding.

When House was upset, he found a distraction. Usually Wilson could provide
that distraction for him, but when he was upset with Wilson, he had to
find other means.

The case Cuddy gave him was boring. He was already 99% certain he knew the
diagnosis, but waiting for the juniors to catch up would kill some time.
He wrote the symptoms on the whiteboard, the remnants of unease still
filtering through his mind. He called for a differential diagnosis and
barely listened as Tom, Dick and Harriet nattered at each other. 

"Which one of you is House?"

House glanced over at the stranger who had walked into the conference
room. "Skinny brunette," House replied dismissively, but when he looked
across the room, Wilson was sitting in Cameron's chair.

"No, that's Dr. Wilson. But he'll do." The man pulled out a gun.

"No!" House shouted. "I'm House. I'm the one you want." He blinked and
Moriarty disappeared. He heard a low laugh behind him. 

"Better him than you," Tritter said, pointing his gun at Wilson's head. He
pulled the trigger.

"House?" 

A hand on his shoulder broke him from the trance. Foreman pulled his hand
away, but stayed close. Chase and Cameron were staring at him, wide-eyed
with alarm. He looked around the room, wondering why the floor seemed to
be tilting.

Foreman lowered him into the nearest chair. "Take it easy, House. You're
hyperventilating."

House tried to slow his breathing, but he couldn't seem to get any air in
his lungs. He lowered his head and stared at the bloodstain on the carpet.
"Wilson," he gasped. "Where's Wilson?"

"In his office, I think," Cameron said. "I'll go get him."

House watched her white coat flash out of sight and counted off the
seconds it took to walk from Diagnostics to Wilson's office. A pair of
expensive leather shoes appeared sooner than he'd expected. They must have
run.

"What happened?"

House gasped with relief at the sound of Wilson's voice, but kept his head
down, afraid that Wilson was just another figment of his imagination.

"We were going through the differential and he started to hyperventilate,"
Foreman replied. "I thought he was going to pass out, so we got him
sitting and tried to calm him down, but he just asked for you."

Wilson crouched down in front of him. House kept his eyes trained on the
ground, not wanting to see Wilson with his face blown away by Tritter's
gun. A blue and silver tie dangled in his field of vision. Wilson's tie.
House reached out and grabbed it, letting the silk slide through his
fingers.

"House. Look at me."

He shook his head and wrapped the tie around his hand, pulling Wilson
closer. He reached up, blindly passing his hand over Wilson's face.
Satisfied that Wilson was both real and unharmed, he finally raised his
head and stared into Wilson's eyes. Wilson. Safe. He took a deep breath
and released it slowly.

Wilson smiled. "That's it. You okay?"

House nodded and let go of the tie. "Yeah," he whispered, his voice raw.
He leaned back in the chair, acutely aware of his three fellows watching
him with concern.

Wilson stood up and pulled a chair over to sit in front of House. "Leave
us alone for a bit, would you?" he requested, smiling reassuringly at the
fellows. "It's all right. We had a scare earlier today. It's just a
delayed reaction." He nodded at the whiteboard. "Why don't you get a full
history from your patient. And you might want to run a tox screen while
you're at it."

House waited until he heard the door click closed, then he shook his head.
"How is it you figured that out in less than a minute and they're still
arguing about it?"

"Because you've trained them to look for the obscure. Some of us have to
settle for seeing the obvious." 

The words were a slap in the face. "Stop it," House snarled.

"Okay," Wilson replied agreeably. "What am I stopping?"

"Nothing," he muttered. He remembered how Wilson stepped in front of him
without a second thought. Better him than you. "No," he protested,
startling himself. "Not better you than me."

Wilson blinked, surprised. "Is that what this is about?" He shook his head
dismissively. "Not everyone you meet is planning on killing you. Certainly
no more than 10-15%."

"Don't try and distract me with numbers," House retorted. "If you'd been
here, you would have done something stupid." 

"From what the others said, there wouldn't have been time to do anything,"
Wilson evaded.

But House remembered the moment between the two shots, when the gun had
been trained on his fellows to stop them from intervening. He saw Wilson
move forward, saw the gun discharge, saw Wilson fall backwards. "What the
hell kind of biological imperative would make you risk your life for me?"

Wilson looked away. "Statistically speaking..."

"Fuck the statistics!"

"You save lives no-one else can. You're more important to the survival of
the community than I am."

"Would you stop with the evolutionary arguments?" House took a deep
breath. "How many patients do you have right now?"

Wilson shrugged. "Twenty, twenty-five. I've got a light load."

House knew why. Not all of Wilson's patients had returned after he'd been
forced to suspend his practice. "Your light load is as many as I treat in
a year."

"Any other oncologist can do what I do," Wilson said and House was glad to
hear a note of bitterness in his voice. "Besides, I thought you got credit
for every life that Sebastian Charles saves."

"If we're going to play butterfly effect, you've got a hell of a lot more
butterflies flying around than I do." House had recovered enough to stand
up and pace. "You think you're expendable?"

"Compared to you? Yes."

"Now you're just being ridiculous."

"Am I?" Wilson asked, his composure shredding. "Ask anyone. Ask Cuddy."

"What's that supposed to mean?" House asked suspiciously.

Wilson sighed. "Nothing. Look, if you're all right, I've got to get back
to my office. I've got a patient arriving any minute."

House waited for him to round the corner and then headed for the
elevators. For the second time that day, he entered the dragon's lair
willingly. "Why does Wilson think he's expendable?" he demanded, as a
startled intern fled the office.

"Why do you insist on barging into my office unannounced?" Cuddy
countered.

House planted his cane and leaned forward. "I asked first."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Cuddy answered, crossing her
arms over her chest.

House barely noticed the loss of view. "Really? Because when I told him he
was being ridiculous, he said to ask you. Why is Wilson expendable?
Compared to me?" he added, realising that he'd left out that detail.

Cuddy stood up, ready to herd him out of her office, but suddenly froze.
"Oh, no," she whispered.

"You told him he was expendable?" House demanded. "I know you're a
hard-ass, but that's harsh even for you."

"I didn't tell him he was expendable," Cuddy protested. "But he might have
interpreted it that way." She sighed. "When Tritter froze his accounts,
impounded his car, suspended his DEA license, all I was concerned about
was making sure he wasn't going to testify against you."

House stared at her. "You backed him up on the deal, but you didn't
support him. Nobody did." He took a deep breath. "You didn't do a thing
when he was forced to shut down his practice, just made him work in the
goddamn clinic. You didn't fight Vogler when he forced Wilson to resign."

"Both events that wouldn't have happened if you weren't such an
unrelenting asshole," Cuddy snapped back. "You want somebody to blame?
Blame yourself."

Blame was a slippery slope House couldn't afford to start travelling down.
"I'm an addict. I hurt the people who care about me. What's your excuse?"
He didn't wait for her to respond. He already had the answer he needed.

For once he waited until Wilson's patient left before barging into his
office. "You're not expendable," he said without preamble. "Not to me. And
who else matters?"

Wilson leaned back in his chair. "There really are no limits to your sense
of self-importance," he mused.

"Are you just figuring that out now?" House retorted. "I want you to
promise that you'll never stand between me and a homicidal maniac again."

"No can do," Wilson replied. "Particularly since they're dismayingly hard
to identify where you're concerned. At least until they've pulled the gun,
and then it's generally too late."

"Don't be so...so rational about this," House said, frustrated. He
couldn't refute Wilson's every argument with mind-twisting leaps of logic
if there were no flaws in Wilson's argument to refute.

Wilson grinned. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or
the one."

"Ah see, that's where you've gone wrong. I'm the massive intellect. You're
the chunky womanizer."

Wilson rolled his eyes. "Maybe I should try the House diet - Vicodin,
Maker's Mark and cigarettes. I'll be nice and trim when I die before my
time."

"Maybe you should move out of the hotel and into a place where you can
make your own meals," House countered. He wanted to remind Wilson that his
apartment had a perfectly good kitchen, but Wilson had already refused to
move back in once. House didn't ask twice.

Instead he glared at Wilson, who glared back, though not very
convincingly. House wondered if he would be subjected to another of
Wilson's patented lectures, but Wilson had stepped off his soapbox since
House's brief sojourn in jail. House didn't miss the platitudes, but
occasionally he wondered if Wilson had simply given up on him. Then he
remembered what started this whole conversation and that both reassured
and frightened him.

"I don't need you to protect me," he said, trusting Wilson to retrace the
conversation.

Wilson followed with his usual ease. "Past history would indicate
otherwise."

"What would it take to get you to stop?" Finding him passed out on his
floor next to a puddle of vomit had been enough to make Wilson walk away,
but House knew that even then Wilson had helped him in the only way left.

Wilson shrugged. "You could start by not pissing off patients with guns."

"Not going to happen." He would try, for Wilson's sake, but certain things
in the universe were immutable, including Gregory House's essential
character. He could no more stop pissing people off than he could stop
needing to be right.

Wilson didn't look surprised. He didn't even look disappointed, which was
infinitely worse. "Then I guess we'll both have to live with it," he said.

House hoped they would.  
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