A Cripple's Silhouette
By: Song
Summary: The world goes on without him and all that's left is a silhouette on the floor. Damaged, incapable and defective.
A/U: I was going to make you read an insanely long author's note, but I decided against it. Be grateful and show your thanks by reviewing. My last House MD fic got one review- for three hundred hits. I must be losing my touch. If I ever had one, that is...
The hard floor pressed against his body and a frigid draft caressed his skin. Autumn's chill breath clung to soft cotton that draped battered flesh. A bitter man lies in his apartment unwilling or unable to contact a friend for help.
He is a cripple.
Cripple.
How he despised the word.
It was a word he had known all his life and yet never fully understood it.
Sure he had seen them, limping along, leaning heavily on any means of support and struggle to do daily routines. He even used to pity them. Pity them! Their inability to take care of themselves, their neediness, their... helplessness.
He did now. He wished he didn't. He doesn't even want to think what he would give to be back on the other side. Pain-free. Able to run, play sports, do anything other than gulp down damning pill after pill to simply function. To be normal.
It was a sour fruit. A month, a whole month free from his chains. Free to live like someone who's life hadn't been fucked up by a stupid medical mistake. Like someone who was still alive, instead of some strange semblance of a person, still breathing but not quite all there. A month as something other than a scarecrow who failed at everything, including the job he was created for. A month to jog, run, jump, play lacrosse, golf... live like a real person with everything intact. A month to be happy. And then it was all ripped away. Ripped away like sugar from a child with ADHD.
Happy was an illusion. Drowning himself in hydrocodone and scotch was the closest to happy he ever got.
A bottle of vicodin is inches from his outstretched hand, unreachable to the desperate attempts he makes for it. Untouchable, like normality... like the past. Glacial eyes closed with a sigh. He couldn't even get 'happy'.
To look down on him one would see an addict void of hope and having chosen his own pathetic demise. Even those close to him see a lost cause. The darker side of society that those of us who do not live it pretend does not exist. Proof of our own failures.
Convincing them about the pain was only a waste of time. As was everything else in his life.
Real agony is not a writhing body. Neither is it the feral scream that escapes your lips as you hope and pray that someone, anyone will save you from your personal hell.
True agony is the static silence, the existence of only pain the beating of your own heart reminding you that yes, you are still alive.
You can't move, you can't breath. There is only the searing sensation as millions of white hot daggers drive into your very essence, wreaking havoc throughout your nervous system. Your brain is in overdrive, hyper aware of anything happening under its jurisdiction. Each twitch, each shudder a tectonic plate colliding with another releasing imeasurable amounts of energy leaving you incapable of doing a damn thing about it. Even the briefest flare will make you collapse.
Drugs, both legal and not do little to dull the pain and alcohol only delays the inevitable.
This is the pain he feels every minuet of every day. Some days are better, some are not. Still, it radiates from the thigh damaged long ago as frayed nerve endings react to the ghost of stimuli.
The epicenter of his life.
They didn't see that part of him. Not the patheticbitter cripple on the floor. He wouldn't let them. He was still a smart-assed bastard of an excuse for a doctor. Even if he was a helpless cripple.
They didn't feel real agony. They didn't understand the sheer hopelessness of his situation. They never woke up at four in the morning unable to reach the bliss of sleep due to the unbearable, unbreakable pain.
They didn't even understand the dull ache that kept him up at night before a weather front.
Being a physician, he knew the risks of long term opiate use. But he did not chose to be as he was. Even the relentless bowl problems, wooziness and lack of a sex drive was better than constant suffering. Its not as if he had a sex life anyway.
He couldn't exactly change either. When it came between his liver and his sanity- sanity won.
It may be true that Doctor House used to be just as inconsiderate, rude and generally uncaring as he was before the infarction, but now it was genuine. His words lacked the warmth and teasing tone that they once held, eyes that burned you as sharply as a dagger to the chest had become cold and dull. Frozen, as it were. He didn't pretend to not care anymore. He honestly didn't. He was incapable of human connection. His patients were only puzzles that needed solving, not people. His life was only a book, read and thrown at will. Each day was another page closer to the end, and pain was hand holding the pen. He was the pen spilling its guts to the world, incapable of influencing the outcome of the story.
Maybe he did define himself by his pain. It didn't really matter. Gregory House lost any features that distinguished him as a human years ago. Childhood damage from dear old dad made sure of that.
His leg was not his defection.
Just the physical manifestation of it.
Fin