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This wasn't supposed to happen to him. Why did it have to happen to him? Everything went wrong in his world. He was a doctor, for God's sake, doctors weren't supposed to get sick. Doctors were healers, not patients. And the irony of it all. The boy wonder oncologist, struck down by the very illness he specialised in. Life hated James Evan Wilson, and he knew it.
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The kids loved the dogs. No matter how professional or important a dog is meant to be, they still love attacking children with great, big, furry hugs. Some of the older patients liked them as well, but not as much as the children, with their smiling faces as they chased after the bouncing labradors and feisty terriers. They were there for almost an hour, but the children still awww'ed when they had to leave to do the work they were brought to the hospital to do.
Wilson stood and watched as the canines did there thing, sniffing at people who did and didn't have cancer, and barking at the ones they thought had the illness. Obviously, the people who had cancer already knew they had it and those who didn't already knew they didn't. The hospital didn't want any shock discoveries during the study.
Wilson was quite frankly amazed at the fact that dogs could actually sniff out skin cancer by sniffing a patient's skin, lung and breast cancer by sniffing the person's breath and prostate cancer by sniffing their urine. Animals really were the future of medicine. When the Zombie Apocalypse came, at least they would be able to tell who had cancer and who didn't. Then maybe burn them before they turned into cancerous zombies.
It was all well and good until they left the dogs to roam around with the kids again for a while. Why did he have to be there with a smile on his face as he watched the children play with dogs that were double his size? Why did he happily pet the dog that came over to him? Why did more dogs have to come over to him? Why did he have to bend down on his hunkers to pet them? Why did they have to bark, to draw attention to him, to make a scientist come over, to make a worried expression come over said scientist's face, to make the scientist ask him to talk in private, to make the scientist tell him what he thought? Why did the universe hate him so much as to give him the very thing he was the head of a department of?
He stared into nothingness as the doctor told him what they were going to do. What was the point in telling him? He was the head of the fucking department, he should know what was going happen, he'd said it to dozens, even hundreds of people before, and done it as many times. They were going to do a biopsy, and if that told them what they feared, there would be surgery. He would be on the surgeons table like he'd been before, except this would be for him, not for some supposed 'friend' who turned out to be a complete ass.
And when they did the surgery, House wasn't there this time, because he had not told him he might die. Wilson didn't want the attention, the off-handed statement House would no doubt hit him with. Because he certainly wasn't going to get the 'if you die I'm alone' thing again. Because House wouldn't be alone if he died. He'd have Cuddy. Damn Cuddy, who completely fucked up his chances with House. Damn Cuddy, who took House away from him. Damn Cuddy, who made House happy. He shouldn't have been happy with Cuddy, he should've been happy Wilson, not some whore who couldn't wear some proper fucking clothes if her life depended on it.
So he went through the surgery alone. And when they told him that the cancer had spread to the rest of his body, he listened to it alone. And when they pumped him full of poison, he lay alone under the scratchy hospital sheets. And when they told him that it didn't work, that it had gone terminal, he cried alone. And when House finally tore himself away from Cuddy for a day, and decided to go moan to Wilson about something or other, he stood in Wilson's office, alone. And he listened to the doctors alone. And he lay under his scratchy bedroom sheets alone. And he cried alone. And when the funeral came, he stood with at least a hundred people, but he still felt alone.
Wilson was dead, and he was alone. Just like he had said to him not a year earlier.