Hey! I know it's been a while since I started up a serious fic, but here it is!! Starting with the next chapter this fic might start to get a little confusing, so tell me please if you get lost! Thanks! I feel a little rusty on my serious writing because I just haven't had time for it. So I'd love to know what everyone things!

Love to all!

Chapter One
Run

You allow your feet to glide across the pavement with caution, like a child taking their first hesitant steps on ice skates. You make no real effort to lift them because you find strange comfort in the rustle of your shoes against the fallen leaves. They cling to the frayed edges of your jeans and hang on like small hands. They claw their way up the fabric and try to weigh down your legs. Your awkward "three-legged gait" makes you almost stumble and fall on the uneven terrain. But, as you cross beyond the yellowing leaves into the dying grass, the sudden feeling of weightlessness creeps over you.

The wind bites petulantly at the back of your neck, which is unprotected by the leather of your jacket, which has worn soft over time. The sweet thickness of the air fills your lungs like water. You're afraid to drown. You try futilely not to expel the last gasp of stale air from the sheltered indoors. But when you're forced to inhale you don't sink below the tide of nature

All of nature seems so cold as thought it were slowly decaying—like the heat seeping away from a corpse. But a warm, fiery ache is growing in your body, like a hunger—persistent, profound. It gnaws at your consciousness, demanding that you fulfill its request. It is as if longing is the only thing that keeps you from freezing in this ice-cold place. The world was dying like a bleak Syberia.

But fear has its hands in a throttle hold around desire's neck—battling desire the way it always does. Unsatisfyable longing is, after all, more tolerable than pain.

Wind sings in your ears calling you to rip the chain from pain's hands and then to follow it into flight; to finally throw off the shackles pain had forged and be free. It wants you to satisfy the hunger.

Run…run…run…run…run…

An intoxicating lullaby is whispered in your ear. Any insistence on your part that the voice is unreal does nothing to diminish the power that it holds over you.

Run…run…run…run…

Like the sultry murmur of a skilled whore it enchants you, weakening your resolve until you sway on your feet with the sweet promise of ecstasy. Your mind becomes completely filled with the thoughts of such succulent pleasure and every inch of your body quivers in anticipation.

Run…run…run…

The whisper pulses, not unlike the beating of your racing heart, crescendoing in ardent passion, it ignites in you a memory too long swallowed up by a drug-induced stupor.

That memory is freedom. Freedom, the fundamental human desire to be servant to nothing and no one. It is hard wired into every human being and we're willing to throw our lives away for it. You want a freedom that goes beyond the simple—that transcends the common understanding. You want freedom from everything that binds you here. Freedom to be everything you were and freedom from everything that you dream of being once again. Freedom from past, present, and future. And you're terrified that it is a freedom that you will never achieve.

Your hand opens and closes around the smooth wood of your cane. The motion pulses in time to the unsteady rhythm of your heart. (Everything in this place seems to be controlled by its beating—the time signature to which the music of this world was written.) Until finally, your hand opens and it doesn't close again.

The cane topples silently into the brown grass, lying like an asp poised to strike your ankle and reduce you to nothing more than a cripple again.

Careful to not even allow the slightest moan of expectation to emerge from your lips, you rock back and forth until you are forced to take your first, halting step just to keep from falling after your cane.

You know you won't be able to stop now, not once you've tasted it. The taste of pleasure on your tongue is far too thick to ignore. It sweeps warmly through you, like expensive liquor, filling you whole body with inexplicable warmth.

Run…run…

You want to obey the command. It's like some sort of addiction and you are craving the high. You know quite a lot about addictions, but you haven't received a "high" from one of yours in quite some time. All you can get is a "norm". You can ward off the pain (or on bad days just barely manage to take the edge off of it) but you can never receive pleasure.

You're trembling.

Every thought is so centered on the pleasure that would consume every molecule of your being if you would simply follow the order.

Run…

It's so simple. One motion, nothing more, that's all it would take for you to begin. After that it's beyond your control and all you'll feel is contentment. Your fear will be washed aside in waves of pleasure…sweet….sweet pleasure. It's so simple…Your fear will be washed aside in waves of pleasure.

But fear is a potent opiate. What if you're wrong? If that one motion would throw you not into ecstasy but the abyss of pain?

You're there, poised on the brink, with one foot thrust out in front of you—almost like the awkward angle of a puppet on strings. It would only take one step to throw yourself over the edge. But you know that, like falling off a cliff, the moments in the air were perfect wonder and incomparable to any sensation in the world, but it was when you finally hit the ground that it killed you.

But the hunger will not be satisfied by logic nor quelled by reason and rational.

Run…

Flames slowly wrap around the fear, consuming it until all that remains is soft, gray ash that is quickly swept away by the autumn wind. You finally find that you are afraid no longer.

Run…run…

Your foot lifts and slams forward. The jarring blow should've sent bolts of white hot pain through every nerve in your body.

But there is no pain.

Step…step…step…

Running!

Run…run…run…

Your feet pound the ground and the wind strikes your face in buffeting gusts. You can feel a stitch growing in your side. But for once you welcome the pain—embrace it like your dearest friend. The slam of your tennis shoes on the cold ground, and the blur that passes your eyes. All these are sensations that have been absent for far too long.

Run…run…run…run…

The pleasure that fills your body threatens to explode into the ultimate ecstasy with each passing step. You don't want to fight it any longer. You stretch your legs father as if running faster would bring you to that burst of pleasure.

Run…run…run…run…run…

You are commanded.

And it is all you can do to comply.

Every nerve in his body seemed to be on fire and every muscle ached as if he'd just run the Boston Marathon…three times…in one day.

And from the intensity of the pain in his leg he might as well have.

Part of a dream came back to him, all of these strange sensations were part of that dream, but he couldn't recall what the dream was about. He wished desperately that he could, while he was not unaccustomed to pain, he was unused to pain that came without reason.

A sudden wave of terror swept through him. Where am I?! It was like waking up in the apartment of a one night stand and finding yourself disoriented until your memory returned. But this realization was not nearly as pleasant.

He was in an interrogation room. Not just any interrogation room. An old interrogation room, the paint was peeling and the air was stale and he could detect the damp undertone of mold. Over a dozen bright lights were shinning directly into his face. He couldn't really count them because they were too bright. He closed his eyes against them, but they had been burned on the inside of his eyelids so that he couldn't escape their light.

The walls and the ceiling were an ugly shade of colorless grey. Everything was the same color, even his face, ashen from pain, was the same shade.

"Awake again?" That voice even sounded grey and dispassionate.

House didn't answer. Pain was still swimming too strongly in his brain and he couldn't stop the pain anymore than he could hold back a storm. He was totally defenseless against it.

He barely managed to open his eyes enough to look at the figure of Tritter silhouetted against the lights. (Not like he particularly wanted to look at the man. In fact, he couldn't think of a single thing that he wouldn't rather be looking at.)

Pain, Tritter, they were the same entity now. He was powerless to stop either one of them, they both controlled him, held his chains, and from both of them it seemed there was no escape. He was stuck in this web and the harder that he fought it the more he because entangled in it. Was he doomed to be a slave forever?

Pain finally had a face.

It was somewhat rewarding for House to finally have a tangible image of pain. After all, he'd wanted to stab it in the face so many times that it was pleasant to finally be able to picture committing that action. It was also just as frustrating because there was no way of realizing that fantasy.

"I asked you a question, Dr. House." Tritter was right in his face, the force of his words sending copious amounts of spit into his face. "Did you not understand me?! You have to answer me."

Gregory House remained stoically and determinedly silent.

"Dr. House?"

"Go fuck yourself up the ass with a chainsaw." House snarled through clenched teeth. He rubbed his face against his shoulder to wipe the spit from his face. His hands were chained to the arms of the chair—so he couldn't very well use them to clean his face, or flip Tritter off.

Tritter punched him across the jaw. The blow nearly knocked the chair over.

House welcomed the pain because it turned his focus away from the pain in his leg, if only momentarily. Any reprieve, how ever brief was welcome.

"You won't be so cocky soon." Tritter pulled something from his back pocket, a cigarette carton—camel lights. He tapped one cigarette from the box then in the same careful gesture replaced the carton and withdrew a lighter. He placed the cigarette between his lips and lit it. It was all done like a display, entirely for House's benefit.

"How entirely ironic: the great crusader against addicts is himself an addict. Hypocrite. Too often those guilty of vices are the first to tirade against them. Oh how I just adore your 'holier-than-thou' attitude."

Tritter patiently let him finish, then exhaled smoke directly into House's face. "I never broke any laws for mine."

"Neither did I. So what makes you so worthy to judge me?" House choked as Tritter blew more tobacco smoke into his face.

"And unlike you, I can take 'em—" he paused to take another quick drag off the cigarette, "—or leave 'em." He dropped the cigarette and crushed it under the metal-covered toe of his boot.

House considered making a vague reference to Walker, Texas Ranger and Texas justice but quickly decided that it would make him look foolish and he bit his tongue until the time when a wittier remark was ready to grace it.

"No response? How atypical of you my dear, Greg."

"Don't patronize me. I have a cane, remember. I'm used to people doing just that, up until I stick it up their ass."

"That's what got you here, isn't it? A second class effort, at best, but you are an addict, by definition pathetic."

Hypocrite. House thought, but he didn't want to use the same insult twice. "I am not an addict." Oh, brilliant Greg, let's go straight for denial. His brain kicked his ass for the utter pitiable nature of that comeback. "I'm in pain."

Tritter just laughed; he decided that comment was even worth validating with a biting remark. He took another cigarette from the pack. He didn't light it this time; he smiled and let the cigarette rest between his upturned lips.

House was afraid of that smile. It seemed so out of place on that face. And he wasn't a man to be easily intimidated, maybe the fact that he was a prisoner, in everything but name, had made him a little bit on edge about the entire situation.

A little bit. He almost laughed aloud at the lunacy of the understatement.

Tritter stood and moved toward the door; all the lights were shinning full in House's face again. He blinked and tried to raise a hand to shield his eyes only to remember they were still chained down.

"You will admit everything to me by the time this is over. You are an addict." And he was gone.

House was again left in the silence of the empty room. A silence that itself seemed to condemn him. He felt he would go mad.

Miles away, a brown-haired doctor picked up his phone and dialed a familiar number with the end of his pencil. For the third time that day, no one answered. This time he didn't bother leaving a message. As he placed the receiver back in is cradle he wondered where his best friend could possibly be. A knot of anxiety twisted in his stomach. The half sandwich left on his desk was suddenly very unappetizing.