Ok so the latest chapter and this one, let's face it not much happens. It's just that I'm interested with House's psychology and the way he interacts with the people around him more than anything else.

Oh, and Huddy should be on it's way soon. Yay!

9-

He found his flat as he had left it. Wilson had suggested having the cleaner come once a week just to make sure the flat would be nice and clean when he came back, but House had wanted the place to remain unchanged, and clean and tidy it himself once he got back. It would be a therapy of some sort.

And the place did need a lot of tidying. He looked around at what had been his home for many years now and although it felt very familiar it also felt like the day he had last been in these rooms was a very long time ago. He shut a few painful memories he didn't want to remember and, running his finger through the layer of dust coating the piano, and eyeing a cobweb in a corner of the ceiling, he decided he would settle upon tidying the place straight away. He opened all the windows to let the light and the fresh air in. He had a look in the fridge, to see if he might be able to find something to appease his growling stomach. No surprise there: his fridge was empty, apart from a few beers. He decided he would order something to eat once he had cleaned the flat. It would serve as an incentive, but the truth is he didn't feel like sitting down to eat on his own in such a gloomy flat.

In the living room, he gathered the empty glasses and the occasional empty beer bottles he found on the coffee table, the bookshelves and by the piano, and took them to the kitchen. He came face to face with a gross empty carton of Chinese food under the couch and threw it away. Under a pillow on his couch he unearthed a t-shirt. He swiped the coffee table and the piano clean, gathered the mail on the floor and stacked it in a neat pile on the chest of drawers by the door. He placed the stray books in the bookcase and made another pile of the few medical journals and newspapers scattered about the room. He went to his bedroom and opened the windows, then stripped the bed of its covers. He put them in the washing machine, along with the few discarded items of clothing he had found. He got the vacuum cleaner and ran it in all the rooms. He put clean sheets on his bed and started the washing machine.

It wasn't much and it hadn't taken him more than an hour and a half, but he felt drained when he sat down on his couch. He called his cleaning lady to arrange for her to come the next day to clean the floors, the windows and dust everything thoroughly. And then, the pain in his leg slowly seeping back, he realized that if the detox had been a delusion, the whole flat must still be peppered with Vicodin containers. Sure enough, he found an orange box full of the little white pills in the small wooden box by the couch. He got a small plastic bag from the kitchen and went through all his Vicodin hide-outs. He found 12 orange containers and felt feverish until he had gone out and thrown the now bulging plastic bag in the nearest public bin. The morphine he decided to keep. He would hand it to Wilson to have him give it to him in the eventuality of the pain really getting out of control. Finally he sat back down on his couch, with something like relief at having found the strength to throw away his entire stack of pills, and called to have a fish taco delivered. With 15 minutes to wait until his lunch got there, he limped to the bathroom to take a shower that would hopefully clear the last fogs hovering in his brain.

Standing naked in front of the first full mirror he had seen in weeks –there weren't any in Mayfield, he figured out of consideration for patients with eating disorders– he realized for the first time what a toll his body had taken lately. He had lost a lot of weight. The small pot belly that had started appearing in the last year was now completely gone, but so was quite a lot of his muscle. He was still in really good shape and firm in all the right places but his arms were definitely thinner, making his shoulders seem even broader. The stoop in his standing seemed to have accentuated and with his very short and now fully grey hair he realized how much older he looked. He stared at himself for a full minute, finding it hard to believe this person in the mirror was truly him. Fortunately he was now better equipped for facing such a painful discovery as that of being a man in his fifties –and truly looking the part. He stepped into the shower, promising himself this was the first day of the rest of his life. Corny, but it did the trick.

Pretty soon he was sighing contently, about to take a huge bite of a well-deserved fish taco.