He sat at the piano, his fingers wandering over the keys, playing a tuneless disorder of notes. He paused for a moment to pick up the glass of whiskey next to him, emptying the last of it into his mouth and swishing it around before swallowing. And then, wincing as pain shot up his right leg, he limped over to the couch and slumped into it, popping another small white pill into his mouth. He shook the bottle and listened to the rattle it made. What had been full an hour ago was now almost empty.
He had one thing. He had his job. His passion. And that was all. That was all he needed. All he wanted. But now he had nothing. They had taken it away from him. He was nothing but a miserable cripple now. He swallowed another pill. Not long now, he thought.
House remembered every patient he ever had. Not their names, but that wasn't the important part anyway. Their symptoms, diagnoses, whether they had lived or died, and sometimes even what they had said to him. He thought back to one patient. Unexplained paralysis. The man was a musician. The guy wanted to die because he couldn't play anymore. The way he had explained it to House, music was his one thing. Without his music he was nothing. House knew what he meant more than ever now. He had cured the musician. The man went back to his music, and House to his medicine. This time there was no cure. He had lost his one thing for good. He emptied two more pills from the bottle into his palm, and swallowed them.
That was life. It was in the very nature of life that everything changes. Death, he thought, would be much better. He swallowed the rest of the pills in the bottle. He wouldn't miss a thing.