Title: Swallow
Author: Maguena
Disclaimer: I do not own "House" in any way, shape, or form, and no infringement is intended by this story.
Warning: Spoiler for Season 2
Swallow
Gregory House used to be proud of his ability to handle almost anything. He used to include pain in the "anything." He still misses that, as the throb in his leg reaches the pitch at which he reaches for his bottle of pills. It's a familiar race for the cure – cool plastic resisting his efforts to open it, small tablets trying to slip out of his grasp, and his throat working to swallow the pill. He wins, naturally. Muscles braced against pain unbrace themselves, and he has to guard against going limp. The stuffed chairs are too far away to sink into, and there's no time.
He's not a coward. He's taken any number of reckless chances on the courage of his convictions. He once lived through incredible amounts of pain in order not to lose his leg; not without a price. He can no longer go without relief from pain. He cannot bear the way pain makes him "want to die" – how it reduces his world to the clichés that he abhors. It makes him dependent on someone else's approval. It makes him wait for someone else's decision that his pain is bad enough to be given relief – and they conveniently forget how wrong that decision can go.
He tries to ease open the cabinet drawers, but they're locked, so he crouches down, one part of his mind always tracking the twinges in his leg, waiting for them to crescendo.
He does this because there is another kind of relief that he needs; another kind of pain that he can't stand. As with the physical, he thought he could stand it – until she left and he had to live through it. So he needs something to reassure him that he won't have to live through it again, and they don't write prescriptions for that. So there he is, a grown man who has never cared much what others thought of him, picking the lock on a cabinet in order to get access to Stacy's psych file. There is a part of him, a small part, that is ashamed to be reduced to this, but he can swallow shame more easily than the pain, if not as easily as a pill. It's in some ways a relief – to prove to himself that he can still handle almost anything.