HOUSE: Hey.
(GRUNTING)
KUTNER: Don't bother.
He's dead.
You're dead, too.
The fire isn't.
(FIRE CRACKLING)
You might want to get up and start heading for the exit signs.
For all I know,
I already am up.
More interesting question is,
why would I hallucinate an ex-employee
who I last saw with a self-inflicted gunshot wound,
as opposed to someone more busty?
Care to explain why you're here?
The dead guy.
Who is he?
How'd you meet him?
I was in a car accident last month.
I won a swimming trophy in high school. Your turn.
I ran out of pain medication.
I got an orbital fracture. It's just taking ages to heal.
Take off your shirt.
MY 'file's up here.
Orbital fracture means your face went into the windshield.
Which means your chest went into the steering wheel.
Painkillers can suppress heart rate,
so unless you want me to kill you,
take off your shirt, let me do a heart exam.
I also wanted to see the ring of burns around your collarbone.
- How did you know? - The "codeine allergy"
you told the nurse about,
that's shorthand for "give me the strong stuff,"
which matches your seen-better-days -because-my-life-fell-apart suit.
The two old burns on your fingers
mean you tend to nod off with a cigarette
in your hand. No reason you shouldn't do that with one in your mouth.
May all your doctors be stupid.
Hold on a second.
That bruising around your belly button.
You might get some fun drugs out of this after all.
HOUSE: Cullen's sign,
but the ultrasound showed air as well as blood. Now,
I know what you're thinking. Hemorrhagic pancreatitis.
But I also know what I'm thinking.
Doesn't explain the pneumoperitoneum.
You took a new case?
You ran tests yourself?
I saw the chance to help someone in need, and I instinctively...
No, wait, that was someone else's instincts.
Wilson's dying, your parole officer
is probably on his way here right now.
How are you possibly in a good mood?
Did you never see Dead Poets Society? Carpe diam.
Air in his abdomen could mean blah, blah, blah.
But blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Blah, blah, blah.
Nobody cares about the medicine.
Perforated ulcer.
Laparotomy to find the hole in his tummy and close it up.
You didn't answer the team's question.
Which is weird 'cause normally when I talk to my own employees,
I'm under oath and hooked up to a lie detector.
You were looking at six months of prison
instead of five months of Wilson.
Why happy?
Obviously I had a plan.
Obviously, obviously you had a plan.
The more interesting question is,
why you didn't tell the team.
I think it's because part of you knew from the start
that the plan wouldn't work.
HOUSE: I need a meeting.
I'm busy. Call my office.
Yes.
Because wobbly tables don't just un-wobble themselves. (DIALING)
(PHONE RINGING)
I need a meeting.
Thanks for fitting me in.
My team has eight urgent, life-or-death cases
that they've been waiting for me to accept or reject.
When is that not true?
Well, right now for one.
But tell my parole board that I'm taking all eight.
That no one else can crack them,
that you need me here for the next five months
or eight people will die.
You're asking me to perjure myself.
Just a tiny white lie. No offence.
Especially since from what I hear nothing black is tiny.
Except your penis, I guess.
You really think I wanted to cave in that ceiling?
It was a prank that went wrong.
Dock my pay, sue me...
Felony vandalism should've added
another year or two to your sentence.
It's a miracle the parole board agreed to six months.
I will go to jail. Eventually.
I will pay the price. I'd just rather that Wilson didn't.
Come on. Be a friend.
Okay. (ELEVATOR DINGS)
But whatever cases you have, you have to take them all.
"Be a friend"?
How many fingers am I holding up?
Of course, you know it's three
because you know everything I know,
everything my smack-addled brain can remember.
Including that I actually said, "Be a friend."
My point wasn't that you said it.
My point was, once again, why?
I think it's because part of you knew
you were going to need a friend.
Part of you knew the plan, even when it was working, wouldn't work.
And right now, I'm curious about why you're sitting on the ground
instead of heading for the door.
Guess we've figured out why you're seeing me,
your suicidal friend.
He'll call you twice a day. Then his wife will call you twice a day
to make sure she understands what he told her you told him.
Which she won't, because he didn't.
Maybe you want to give this one to Connors.
(LAUGHS) (DOOR OPENS)
Where's House?
Don't know, don't care, working.
Excuse me.
No one has seen or heard from him since two nights ago.
I'm sure he's enjoying himself.
Last time he went to prison
he maxed out his credit cards.
Last time he went to prison, he thought he had you waiting for him.
You think he could have done something stupid?
I think stupid is our best-case scenario.
Why do you want to kill yourself?
Here's a reason. I can't even get stoned without some annoying jerk
deciding I need to be deeply analyzed.
Isn't this just an incredibly simple calculation?
I'm going to jail, losing my job, losing my best friend.
Do I need more?
You think that's the sum total of who you are?
A doctor, a friend to Wilson?
I'm also a tremendous baritone.
Now go away.
Even with your subconscious, you're evasive.
Death's not interesting.
You exist for what's interesting.
Puzzles, ideas, analysis.
Death is the opposite of a cool puzzle.
It's eternal nothingness.
But you don't find life interesting anymore.
AMBER: Stop being an idiot.
Can I have Kutner back, please?
How much pathetic wallowing do I have to sit through?
How are things in hell?
Is the humidity the big issue?
What happened next with the guy's medical case?
Why? Exactly.
Why am I, meaning you,
still obsessing about this case?
Obviously, we think it's relevant
to why we're still sitting on the floor of a burning building.
There was a code.
(MONITOR BEEPING RAPIDLY)
Gotta be a clot in his lungs. We need to get him to an OR.
CHI: No time, his O2 sats are falling.
We have to suck it out here,
bedside embolectomy. Float a catheter through his heart
and his oxygenation'll get even worse.
He'll die before we can finish the procedure.
House, we need a call here.
What are you doing?
What did you give him?
Five,
four,
three, two...
(YELLING)
Naloxone.
We should have got suspicious
when his visiting cousin signed in as Mr. Tar H. Horse.
The heroin caused the respiratory distress,
the naloxone turned off the receptors, causing your distress.
I'm not going to stop doing drugs!
It's reality that sucks!
(AMBER LAUGHING)
You're saying I'm lying? To my subconscious?
People do it all the time. And like it or not, you are a person.
He said every one of those...
But not then. And not like that.
This guy was going nuts from the naloxone.
He couldn't be rational if you wanted him to be.
Which you did. Why?
I compressed the story a little to...
Context matters.
You never talk to patients for non-diagnostic reasons.
But this guy...
Feeling better?
I'm not going to stop doing drugs.
You were a stockbroker, son of a stockbroker,
married, children...
And I was miserable.
You say you were miserable
because you need to rationalize screwing it up.
Except I didn't.
I mean, I did,
but I'm not miserable.
Not anymore.
I had a ski injury
and painkillers weren't enough
and a friend of mine gave me some heroin.
The second it entered my veins, it was like
God had taken over my body.
It was like there was no more pain
or unhappiness in my life or anybody else's.
But then you lost everything.
Everything wasn't enough.
Because it's reality that sucks.
Are you arguing that he's a good role model?
He's haPPY-
He's dead.
You heard what you wanted to hear.
The more interesting question,
always, is why you wanted to hear it.
(PEOPLE TALKING ON TV)
(INHALING DEEPLY) (DOOR SLIDES OPEN)
You're stealing this guy's oxygen?
There's oxygen everywhere.
You passed on all your cases,
reassigned them to other doctors.
They weren't interesting.
They were my reason for getting your sentence delayed.
Yeah, I guess you'll have to tell
the parole board something else.
Maybe that I was in the OR the entire day the ceiling collapsed,
so I couldn't have caused the plumbing problem.
You set me up. Not really.
You were going to basically perjure yourself
so that I could delay jail time.
Doesn't it make more sense to actually perjure yourself
so I can actually avoid jail time?
Why are you doing this?
Why are you risking destroying yourself?
There is no risk. I know you.
You'll do the honest thing.
You'll lie.
No.
(DOOR OPENS)
(DOOR CLOSES)
He's haPPY-
He's dead.
You weren't worried.
Of course I was worried. My plan fell through.
The plan didn't matter. Your plan to replace that plan didn't matter.
Wilson didn't matter, jail didn't matter,
the only thing that mattered,
the only thing that ever mattered, was the puzzle.
I noticed a slight twitch in his thenar eminence.
Which meant...
You're dying.
Because my thumb is a little shaky?
Plus the thinning of the muscle.
Plus that speech you gave at Yankee Stadium
saying you were the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
Add them up, it means ALS.
Lou Gehrig's disease?
You're trapped in your body. You can't move or speak
while you just die?
If it makes you feel any better,
at this rate, it'll be fast.
You're not symmetrical.
AMBER: Wait.
Now you're standing at the door.
What happened in the meantime?
And lo, there was a miraculous wonder. I walked across the room...
No, you just skipped over a chunk of conversation.
He swore that he'd live a better, more selfless life
in his remaining time, blah, blah, blah.
After two blahs, I'd heard enough and I moved to the door.
No. You're avoiding it.
Do you smell smoke?
Fair enough.
You're not symmetrical.
The veins on your right side are distended.
What does that mean?
There's a bulge in your supraclavicular notch.
There's something in there.
What?
I'm not that good a doctor.
Good news.
Your case is fascinating.
And good news for you,
you're gonna live.
You've inhaled a small branch,
probably while you were realizing that it's all worth it
while you were passed out on a park bench.
Anyone else would have coughed it up, but 'cause you're a junkie,
your cough reflex is suppressed.
OLIVER: And it grew?
HOUSE: Not unless you also inhaled a chunk of the sun
and a drip-irrigation system, you idiot.
It set off an autoimmune reaction which, and I can't help saying this,
was the root of all your problems.
AMBER: You're smiling.
I was, and now I'm not.
Because a moment's fun a few days ago
does not trump a friend dying.
Yeah, it does, you idiot.
Because after he's dead you cry for a while
and then you go back to doing what you love.
Every patient I've had,
in 70 years from now, they'll all be as dead as Wilson.
Everybody dies. It's meaningless.
When you solve a puzzle,
the world makes sense and everything feels right.
And you'll always have another one,
because people will always get sick.
It's shallow and it's insignificant,
but if you don't give a damn if idiots live,
why would you possibly give a damn about shallowness?
It makes you happy.
And why would you need more than that?
Go home.
Foreman.
House would never leave food out here rotting for days.
His suitcases are in his closet.
If we had handled this differently...
We did the right thing.
(CELL PHONE RINGING)
Hello?
I'll let his accountant know.
House no-showed on a hooker two nights ago.
Outgoing calls.
Hooker.
Me. I didn't pick up.
The Chinese place...
Wait, wait, wait. Who's that?
He called four times.
I don't know.
(SNAPPING)
(CREAKING)
(TAPPING)
(GRUNTING)
(GROANS)
It's a total disaster. Do you have any idea how hard it is
to schedule a cable appointment with the hours that I work?
House has been missing for two days, we know he talked to you.
WILSON: Anything you can tell us about his mental state,
or where he was headed, anything at all...
Would be a breach of confidentiality and a violation of the law.
Not if he's a danger to himself or someone else.
Is this coming out of our 50 minutes?
Is this your douchebag group?
Excuse me.
What makes you think he's a danger to himself?
He hasn't been home, but he didn't take anything with him,
not even his cell.
You're not saying anything,
which means he didn't specifically mention suicide.
But you came out here to talk to us,
so he must've said something that worries you.
There are other ways of reaching oblivion.
Vicodin? He always has his Vicodin,
there's no reason to call a shrink...
His last patient was a heroin addict.
So I guess we're all done here.
The guy's address has gotta be in the file.
STACY: What about God?
You were leaving, and then you stopped.
Why?
Your theory is I'm not leaving because I believe in God?
What? He's calling me home?
Maybe falling through that floor was a sign.
Maybe that the universe hates you. Something.
You really don't believe?
Really, not in some deep crack of some remote recess
of some dark corner of your mind?
No.
Except that some deep crack of some remote recess
of some dark corner is here telling me...
That's enough.
In a burning building, facing imminent death, that's more than enough.
Pascal's wager is facile.
Saying it's facile is facile.
Why is it wrong?
Don't be logical. Be desperate.
You've gotta have something to hold on to.
But you can't live your life based on something you don't believe.
But you could end your life based on something you don't believe?
What about love?
I lived with you for years. I know you believe in love.
Foreman wouldn't help me.
Which means I need you to take the fall.
You do remember I'm dying, right?
Which is why you'll never spend a day in jail.
Fresh-faced, cancer-ridden.
It's tough to do both, but you pull it off.
Your fingerprints are all over those hockey tickets.
I never admitted to flushing anything.
My prints make sense if I gave those tickets to you,
as an incentive to stay alive.
And I was so angry that you didn't respect my dying wishes,
I took thousands of dollars of season tickets
and flushed them down toilets?
All you have to do is create reasonable doubt.
Great. What if I do more than that?
What if I end up in jail?
Or spending my final months in endless hearings?
That's a risk you're willing to take.
I have a reputation, I have a legacy that could...
Wilson.
I don't want to lose this time with you.
Okay-
Thanks.
I knew I could count on you.
Wait! Wait!
You want the fries back?
I'm not gonna take the fall.
Don't do this to me, Wilson.
- It's our only option. - Exactly.
Because you overplayed your hand with Foreman.
Because you knew you had me as a backstop.
Even with me dying, you just assumed
I'd be here to bail you out.
Since you are here, and you are bailing me out,
seems like a pretty safe assumption.
Hey!
I won't be here soon.
If I do this, I'm teaching you
that your bad behavior will always be rewarded.
You need to learn...
How to act when you're gone?
If that's the lesson, we've a really great opportunity coming up.
You'll just try to find someone else, and it won't work,
and it shouldn't work.
So that's the great wisdom you're imparting?
That I'll always be alone?
There's only one person you can count on.
I thought there were two.
I need to do this.
For you.
Wilson's right.
He's always right. He's always been your good side.
I always wondered why I photographed so poorly.
And because he's always played that role,
you've never had to develop a conscience of your own.
People don't change. Consciences don't spontaneously develop.
You're wrong, Greg.
Which is why you'll be better off without him.
You've been looking to him to find what you've gotta find within yourself.
Something you can find.
Hold your child.
This is a reason to die.
This is what my life could have been, not what it can be.
If it could have been,
you're capable of it now.
You're married, Cuddy's gone.
We aren't the only two people who could love you.
Why settle so easily?
These are just idiotic fantasies.
Greg, don't.
At odds with every logical bone in my body.
Get up.
You do not have to die in here!
Is this hell?
An eternity of people trying to convince me to live?
Who says I'm here to convince you to live?
You're the last one I thought would hate me.
I don't hate you.
I love you.
And yet you think I deserve to die.
But not as a punishment.
As a reward.
I think
you've suffered enough.
You've given enough.
I think you deserve a chance to just
give up.
Like Wilson did?
Like Wilson did.
You accepted his choice that ending the pain is better than the pain.
Why can't you give yourself that gift?
This is the address House's patient gave?
Everybody lies.
Do you smell smoke?
(SIREN WAILING IN DISTANCE)
Just let go.
Just go to sleep.
I had a chance to avoid this.
You had many chances, and you blew them all up.
No, this was different.
They're all different. But the reasons are all the same.
You're arrogant. You're self-destructive.
You only care about yourself.
That moment with the patient.
That chunk of conversation I skipped over.
I told him he was dying.
If it makes you feel any better,
at this rate, it'll be fast.
Let me take the fall.
Foryou. For that prank.
You don't owe me anything.
You tried to save me.
I failed. Motives don't matter. Only actions.
Trying is an action.
Why are you trying to talk me out of this?
You just fake the records, you say I came into the clinic last week.
I'll tell the cops you treated me like crap.
So I stole your tickets and flushed them.
Thank you.
And you're doing this because you're dying?
I'm doing this because I have nothing left to lose.
So when you were living, you did nothing for anyone and didn't care.
Now that you're dying, you're willing to help a virtual stranger.
Which means you're a better person dying than you ever were living.
And the world's a better place because I didn't save you.
Which makes me wonder why I'm about to tell you,
you're not symmetrical.
What's your point?
That you cared about him more than you cared about yourself?
You cared about the puzzle more than you cared about yourself.
If I kept it to myself, then it would just be a puzzle.
But I opened my mouth because I thought it was more.
You know it's the same or you wouldn't be bickering with me
while the flames lick at your feet.
You're afraid of this decision,
and you are trying to argue until fate takes it out of your hands.
You're taking the cowardly way out.
And worse,
you're too cowardly to even admit you're taking the cowardly way out.
You're right.
But I can change.
(SIREN WAILING)
JESSICA: He could have gotten out.
CHI: People are found sometimes.
Even in collapsed...
I think they're pulling a body out.
The coroner confirms it's him.
House hired me when no one else would.
He got me fired.
He gave me the guts to get fired.
He gave me the courage to quit. (CHUCKLES)
MRS. HOUSE: Gregory was...
He was a good son.
STACY: He was a trying boyfriend, but I
never stopped loving him.
DOMINIKA: He was my husband for real.
(CHUCKLES)
I couldn't help but love him.
FOREMAN: He was my boss
and my employee.
At both times,
I learned from him.
TAUB: He made me a better parent,
whether he meant to or not.
THIRTEEN: He was willing to kill me.
And I'll always be grateful.
He wasn't always easy to deal with...
CAMERON: ...but somewhere in there,
he knew how to love.
He was my friend.
The thing you have to remember,
the thing you can't forget,
is that Gregory House saved lives.
He was a healer, and in the end...
House was an ass.
He mocked anyone.
Patients, co-workers, his dwindling friends,
anyone who didn't measure up to his insane ideals of integrity.
He claimed to be on some heroic quest for truth.
But the truth is he was a bitter jerk
who liked making people miserable.
And he proved that by dying selfishly,
numbed by narcotics, without a thought of anyone.
A betrayal of everyone who cared about him. CELL PHONE CHIMING)
Phone.
(CHIMING STOPS)
(ALL MURMURING)
A million times he needed me
and the one time that I needed... (CELL PHONE CHIMING)
Oh, come on! This is a funeral.
Just get it.
(CHIMING CONTINUES)
(LAUGHS)
This is embarrassing.
I'd sworn I'd turned this off.
This isn't my phone.
Hi.
How...
I got out of the back of the building.
The body...
Just switched the dental records.
You're destroying your entire life.
You can't go back from this.
You'll go to jail for years.
You can never be a doctor again.
I'm dead, Wilson.
How do you want to spend your last five months?
(CHUCKLES)
(COUNTRY ROCK SONG PLAYING)
(INAUDIBLE)
When the cancer starts getting really bad...
Cancer's boring.
(UPBEAT SONG PLAYING)
(MOTORBIKES STARTING)