Good musicians, and those few who've seen him all agree that he is good, don't analyze and dissect the music as they play. The musician lets it flow like something living and the special few see it flow beneath his fingers to heat the worn ivory. The music is alive. And they are wrong.
House is aware of every note, ever pause, every trilling melody. People are just like music, little tiny pieces that fit together and come apart, but that doesn't make then any less alive. No less alive than the music.
And here the analogy comes apart, but he has control over the music. If he stops -and here he pause long enough to disrupt the flow before continuing- then the music stops too. But people keep going. Moving on their own.
It is one of the reason he became a doctor, one of the secret reasons that isn't as obvious as his love for puzzles. Patients get treated. Then they leave. Or die. The music stops.
He gets up from the piano and hobbles back toward the couch, the cane still lying on the other side of the room where he threw it an hour ago.
Most of his personal relationships, a number only slightly larger that that of those who've seen him play, are of people who play the same notes when he pushes them -most of the time. It is that moment when they make a different sound: Cameron standing up for herself, Cuddy crying and Wilson-
-no, he wasn't going there without a drink. His leg hurts, and his drinks cabinet is almost as far away as his cane so he turns on some mind-numbing television instead and takes another vicodin. He pushes the buttons on the remote and they do exactly as he expects them to.
An hour later he turns the volume off, because he can still hear the tinkling of piano music in his head.
He'd been playing for years, pushing and tapping, trilling his fingers over every note in every key he could think of, waiting for Wilson to finally hit a note that House had secretly been expecting for years.
Today he heard the silence.