It seems, though, he's been stuck at the first stage, forever.

Miles of wasteland stretch under his itching skin, with dusty Keep Out signs posted at every juncture. At night he sleeps under a blanket of hydrocodone.

It's why people can't be around him. Why she can't.

You were the one. You always will be. But I can't be with you.

Ah, but Stacy always knew where to hit to hurt the most. He still feels the sting of her lips on his skin, her words lashing the inside of his skull.

(Cameron, blinking back tears, telling him something or another about love, about him, her, but he wasn't really listening.)

He rubs his palm against his forehead, trying to scrape images of the two from his brain.

Both of them, talking. Always talking. And he's sick of listening. To nuns, and jazz musicians and pre-school teachers, to everyone who thinks they know. Sick of being dissected. No one ever says it, but they all look; they don't point, but they might as well; and they think it's all about the leg. The leg and the Vicodin.

It's what everyone sees when they see Dr. Gregory House. What he sees every morning in the mirror. In the reflections of his patients, the staff, and ghosts of himself in glass-lined hallways of Princeton Plainsboro's Teaching Hospital.

The years have failed to mellow out his disposition. In fact, it's made him crankier, even more unpleasant.

("In an attic somewhere," Wilson once surmised, "there's a portrait of you that's getting increasingly nicer.")

Which, he supposes, fits in a way. After all, there's an art to being an asshole.

Pain is his only constant. It's reliable. Familiar; the deep, unyielding burn of his fucked-up leg. A few chalky pills and he doesn't feel more than a muted twinge there, doesn't have to contemplate the churning ulcers in his stomach or the havoc the combination of acetaminophen and liquor are causing in his liver.

People lie, but in pain we trust.

In cane we...

He tosses it, an underhand throw, into the leather-upholstered arms of his couch. Turns and stands with his weight carefully distributed between his legs. A deep breath and he focuses. Everything. All his energy on that spot in front of him, on the things normal, whole people take for granted. Like walking. One step. Be normal. Promise to be...well...tolerable. Yeah. Tolerable. Be tolerable, not nice, he'll never be nice (not like her chump of a husband). But. Maybe she'll see. Maybe she'll come back. Maybe. One step.

Forgive her.

His leg collapses, pressure on the raw sciatic nerve sending a bolt of bright fire straight into his hip and groin, and he stumbles into the armchair, wheezing like he's been kicked in the balls.

Wrong! His thigh screams as he pushes himself to the piano bench, and he wants nothing more at the moment than to curl into a ball and yack his insides up until he dies. Wrong! Cameron's wrong. She's always been wrong. Nothing changes, nothing gets fixed. Not him. Not ever.

(Oh, it would have been easy to let himself fall into her; to slip inside, take everything, wear her skin, drain her dry, and she'd thank him all along the way.)

Instead, he plugs the empty spaces Stacy left behind with scotch and pills. Every year, muscles shrink, his leg grows more concave. Every year, the holes get bigger.

(And then he reminds himself that he doesn't like people and people don't like him; it's a mutual not-liking thing.)

The prescription bottle rattles in his hand. His thumb uncaps the lid; a quick flick of the wrist, to toss it into the air. (object in motion) The pill tumbles like a satellite falling from orbit, spinning end over end before it drops down the hatch. (object at rest)

The endless pattern. The way it is. The way it's always been. He's been staring at the same walls for five years, sliding further into decay.

Planets revolve, stars burn out; the world moves on. Everything moves on. It's the law of inertia; objects in motion, stay in motion.

Objects at rest, stay at rest.

Shmuck.

Figuring he's had his fill of self-torture for the day, he instead chooses to linger at the pharmacy, waiting for Jose or Albert or whatever his name is to hook up his refill.

The clinic is, as always, crowded, sick and sterile smells mixing in the recirculated air. There's a kid who looks like he has strep throat coughing on everyone within lung range. Charming. Another with a pinkie jammed and wiggling furiously in his ear. Wax buildup. Three colicky babies and their anxious mothers. All boring, boring and boring.

Fingers drum impatiently on the counter.

(How long does it take to count out thirty-six damn pills anyway?)

Invariably, his attention wanders back to the clinic patients and he reconsiders finger-in-ear-kid who's digging away like there's no tomorrow. (Jesus. Early settlers didn't mine this hard for gold) He begins wondering if the kid's had any kind of discharge from the ear canal, any partial hearing loss. Otoscopy to reveal if there's any pus in there, plus a TB test, just in case it's tuberculosis of the middle ear. Biopsy might also be necessary to find out if—

The wiggling stops. The kids pulls out a large, yellow flake, inspecting it like a brand new life form cultured from his brain.

—Wax buildup. Always go with your first instinct.

A fully-stocked pill case rattles on the counter, and he snatches it up, thanking the Vicodin gods. His peripheral vision catches the flicker of a white coat floating through the sea of coughing bodies.

Dr. Cameron looks up at the same time he does and freezes, her right hand in a stranglehold on the handle of her valise. There's familiar hesitation there, the kind of awkwardness that follows embarassing confessions, and it's fighting a war with ingrained good manners. In the end, he does what he always does, watches silently as she nods politely and, with head bowed, slips through the doors.

(It's at that moment with her head twitching slightly up and down, that he recalls something about Stephen Hawking and a shattering tea cup.)

She'd done that when he first hired her, that nodding. Too new, too timid to do anything else, especially when she didn't know how to respond to him. It had taken nearly month before she'd worked up enough courage to murmur, "Good night, Dr. House. I'll see you tomorrow." Funny, how he never really noticed until today.

(The universe and time constantly expanding, imploding. Entropy. Time recalibrating, running backwards. The teacup reassembling itself.)

The universe fumbling in reverse.

He pops another two Vicodin and decides to not dwell on it any further.

Even with opiates bubbling merrily in his bloodstream, there are still too many neurological processes puttering around inside his brain. He's still thinking too much.

(Too much time alone, he thinks, and you end up in whispered conversations with inanimate objects; you talk to the air, to the walls, yourself. You find yourself waiting for an answer.)

Which is how he finds himself at some bar too cheap to have real name in some shitty part of town. Get drunk, get lost. Disappear and drown. Sounds good.

He'd been here once, five years ago.

The first thing he notices is how things haven't changed since his last visit. Stale smoke in the air, probably the same smoke from 2000. Misfits on the jukebox. His shoes lift from the floor with a sticky, slurping noise. Yep. As always. Filled to the gills with losers, alkies, hicks and whores. Perfect.

He surrenders his keys to the bartender, anticipating an evening of mindless inebriation, betting on his consciousness to give out before his wallet does. For a while, it looks like he might succeed; downing shot after shot, each successively following another, and another, until he's forgotten how many he's put down and his vision's dimmed to a suitably narrow window.

Something roughly jars his arm, dumping half the contents of his shotglass onto the bar top, and he turns to see a large mass of flesh roughing up a hooker.

Ordinarily, he'd ignore it. Not his business. Doesn't care.

However, his contempt for bullies outweighs his instinct for self-preservaton (or at least to not get the shit kicked out of him), and this one, vaguely hominid, probably Australopithecus ramidus, is of the typically big, loud and angry type. Shades of Vogler, only without the window dressing of Armani and a bajillion bucks.

Maybe it's the alcohol. Maybe it's the Vicodin. Either way, it's made him brave tonight.

And it's infuriatingly easy to distract the belligerent, ball-scratching ape, goad the hulking pile of bones and meat into taking a swing. Misdirection's what he's best at. Focus frustrations on another object. Give him another target. Trucker-boy doesn't have enough brain cells to rub together to know when he's being redirected.

The world around him shakes as he feels the impact in his midsection. It's solid. Sharp. The snap of something breaking. And it hurts. Oh, yes, yes it does. He grunts, taking a tottering step back before doubling over. But it fades all too soon. It's not enough.

He chuckles, gasping. His diaphragm protests as he exhales. Stands up again and taunts some more. Conan, the trucker, delivers. A big, beefy hand connecting knuckles to jaw.

Yes! Sharp, heady, the bright, painful sting. He knows that intimately. It feels glorious and wretched, the nausea and bile, split lip and loosening teeth. Blood fills his mouth and tastes like gasoline.

(Monster trucks dance before his eyes, steel and fiberglass and rubber and flames. Grave Digger, crushing all pretenders to the throne in a shower of fire and twisted metal.)

But it all too quickly it dissipates again. Disappointing.

Another fist connects with his temple and sets the world spinning.

(The Musical Express revolving to the never-ending tune of a Color Me Badd song. Some loud, gaudy carnival with expensive junk food and cheap rides. Stacy dragging him into an insta-photo booth, pressing great big smooch on the side of his face as he squinted and made a face at the camera.)

His fingers tingle, just a little bit. Respiratory depression, his mind automatically informs. Brain still clicking on overtime, processing muffled warning klaxons from the rest of his body.

He needs another. One more. Each hit brings him closer. He thinks he's shouting, but he can't hear. One more. Just one more.

There's a blanketed crunch as his nose breaks. Breathing slows, becomes heavier. Words slur, tripping over a leaden tongue.

More.

Can't feel. It. Anything. (How does that Pink Floyd song go?) All whittled down to a dull little roar, a pinpoint in his head. Keep going, he's not done yet. One. More.

And then

The world goes still.

It's a little bit like dying again.