First of all, I'm sorry for the delay in the publishing of this chapter. I'll try in the future to return to a more regular posting rythm.

Second, I want thank my new beta writer: Babaloo. She is awesome.

Third, I want to thank my previous beta writer, Amy, for her great work on this story.

X

"Hope is for sissies." The man had believed in this. He still did. But when he had left Mayfield, ready to continue his inner change and to reach happiness, the man had understood that one dose of hope was needed. After all, happiness would not come suddenly. He knew that and he was ready for it. He had to make an effort if he wanted to succeed and it would take time. And meanwhile he needed to believe that he would reach his goal. Hope was the base of everything he had wanted to build: a new life, a better life.

The first thing the man had done after Mayfield was to seek out Cuddy. He had wanted to continue what had been interrupted one year before. He was in love with Cuddy and now he thought that he had something to offer her, something more than the hurt and inaccessible man he once had been. But things had changed while the man had been in Mayfield. Cuddy now was with another. When the man had found out he had felt hurt, deeply. But, even so, the will to change remained in his heart. This little set back with Cuddy hadn't seemed enough to shake that will.

Another change had happened that year. The man started to live with Wilson, in an apartment that his friend had bought for them.

It had been strange to return to the same places, after being in Mayfield. To return to the hospital, to see his team again, to practice medicine again. He had been away for almost a year, locked in a remote place, living with the same people day and night, following the same routines. Now he was back to familiar surroundings. However, there was something different about them. And that difference was more in him than in the places. The man had felt it.

He had tried to follow Nolan's advice. He had tried to be more attentive to others, not only for curiosity's sake like before, but with a genuine care. Or so the man had thought.

One day the hospital had been in lockdown due to an incident of some sort, and the man had found himself stuck in a room with a patient. A patient that had tried, in the past, to present his case to him but whose file the man had ignored. And now the patient was dying.

Looking at the patient, the man had seen himself in him. He had seen how his own last hours would be and a rage had grown inside of him. A rage against the patient but above all else a rage against himself. He could even end his days alone, but never in that way, cowardly, pathetically agonizing on an hospital bed, in the dark, forgotten by everyone. That was not in his plans. That would not do. He was Gregory House. He would not let that happen to him.

But with the passing of time and the more he listened to the patient's story, the rage started to give way to a sort of empathy towards the sick man. Here they were, two complete strangers talking about daughters, lost loves, regrets, changes, life and death. Through their conversation the man had seen the humanity that was in that patient and he had understood the solemnity of that moment. A man was dying, a life was ending. He was witnessing this man's last hours, he was listening to his last words. The mistakes the patient had made in his life didn't matter; the hearts he had broken, the disappointments he had caused. Something bigger than both men was present in that room, the man had sensed it even if he couldn't say in words what that something was. At this realization a sadness had come upon him as always was the case whenever he had come across the brevity and frailty of human life.

That night, in that hospital, in that room, there had been a bond uniting patient and doctor. One was the future of the other. The patient was dying. Soon his existence would only be a memory or less than a memory. The same thing would happen, one day, to the doctor. There was a mystery in all of this, a mystery to which there could never be an answer. There were things in this world beyond human understanding, unfathomable things, things that dealt with matters of life and death, things that couldn't be put into words, things that could only be felt. There was a truth in the whole situation. The only thing the man could do was to be there, keeping that stranger company. A stranger who was not that much of a stranger, after all. He was more a companion, a fellow traveller, on the long voyage that we call life.

And when the right moment came, the man had upped the patient's morphine dose and had remained with him, in silence, until the end.

The man would like to have said that this experience and others he had lived during the course of that year had given him another view of human nature, a view less cynic, more compassionate than the one he had always had. He would like to have said that what he had learnt in Mayfield still applied. That he had learnt to admire the diversity of human life and that the others interested him immensely. But neither of that would have been true.

The truth was that if there was any diversity in this world that diversity seemed to stem only from stupidity. He would look at the others and he could only see idiots. A pretty woman would walk towards him in a bar arousing his interest, but then she would make the fatal mistake… she would start talking.

Banality and imbecility bored him to death, and they seemed to be everywhere he looked. The world was a mountain of idiots apparently created with the sole purpose of smothering him. Death by stupidity. Nice image.

Impatience had started to grow in the heart of the man. An impatience born from the fact that what seemed to be changing was other people's lives, not his. Wilson had rekindled his relationship with his first wife, and they had starting living together. The man had returned to his old apartment. Things between Cuddy and Lucas seemed to be getting serious and further developments were to be expected.

Everything around him was changing for the better, or simply changing. Everything but him. He was not one jot happier than when he had left Mayfield. Worse; every small change that had happened in the man's life during that year was, little by little, reverting to its original state, as if these changes were loose puzzle pieces that someone had returned to their proper places. As if the life that he had led before Mayfield was necessarily the life that he was condemned to live until the end of his days. As if he needed to fulfil a certain role in the grand scheme of things and any deviation from that role could, temporarily, be accepted but would be doomed from the start and in the end everything would go back to the way it was. He had found out that it was not that easy to get out of the hole after all. What a beautiful trap you made for yourself. It is quite remarkable.

After Mayfield he had tried to stay away from the hospital but his own recklessness had brought him back to PPTH. Soon he had regained his medical license, and then, his position as head of the Diagnostics Department. The man had left his home to live with Wilson just to return in the end to the familiar 221 B. Everything as before.

He had found out that in order to be happy an inner decision and a change in behaviour wasn't enough. It was also necessary for some substantial change to occur in the reality around him.

But that hadn't happened and the edifice that the man had erected, made of hope and resolution, was running the risk of crumbling. By the end of the year, there were already some cracks in the walls and its foundations were shaky.

The pain in his leg had started to bother him again, it became almost unbearable; he was drinking more and frustration was growing inside of him. Despite his efforts in trying to believe otherwise everything seemed to him without meaning. He had begun to doubt if that strange and elusive thing called happiness was ever meant for him.

The man had stopped believing in Nolan and he was questioning if he had not been deluded all along, if what he was hoping to achieve was nothing more than an illusion, a lie. If, in a world filled with idiots, he wasn't the biggest idiot of them all.

He had lost the woman he loved (or was running the risk of losing her) and that loss, which, at the beginning, he had come to accept with a certain resignation, had revealed itself to be the rift that was threatening to tumble all his desires, all his hopes. Mayfield was very far away.

Then something had happened. Something that had changed everything. Even now, despite of what would come to pass, the man could not help but think about that moment as some kind of a miracle. A luminous moment that had happened to him.

It had been during a crisis. Another one. The man had lost a patient, Hannah – he still remembered her name, a rare thing –, in tragic circumstances. The way Hannah died had been another proof to him of the randomness of life.

He remembered being seated on his bathroom floor, with some Vicodin lying in the palm of his open hand. He was looking at the pills. He had been staring at them for the longest of times, debating whether he should take them or not. Since detoxing at Mayfield he never again had taken Vicodin. If he took one now that would mean defeat, it would be admitting to himself that his purpose after Mayfield had turned into nothing. He had failed. He had felt he had failed with Hannah too, even if her death had not been his fault. He had tried to save her but it hadn't been possible. Life had no meaning. He used to believe in that before Mayfield but afterwards he had harboured the possibility of that belief not being true. Not the possibility, the illusion. He had thought that perhaps there was a meaning. It was only a question of finding it and to know where to look for it. And he had tried and he hadn't found any and now… now… The reason behind the change had stayed way back there, completely forgotten, and the change itself… why had he wanted to change again? And for whom? He had lost everything: Hannah… Cuddy… He only had himself.

The man had looked hard at the palm of his hand, at the pills that lay there. What did it matter if he took them or not? Was there any reason not to? The man couldn't find one. The pain was reaching its highest peak. The pain in his leg and the pain in his soul.

He had been immersed in thought when he sensed a presence. He had looked up and there was Cuddy.

He was stunned. Cuddy was the last person he was expecting to see. That day they had had a terrible fight. They had said hurtful things to each other. What he had heard from her still resounded in his heart. Words that had hurt him deeply but that, at the same time, had made him think and had given him an opportunity to show Cuddy that he was more than what she thought he was. And the man had seized that opportunity. He had showed her that he was a man, not a jerk, not a thing, not a son of a bitch without feelings. No. A man. A man who had suffered and had been changed by life. A man who knew what he had lost with that change, who knew what he had become. A man. A man deserving of respect. A man who had had the strength of character to lay down all masks, the strength of heart to reveal to Cuddy the core of his being, all his fears, all his weaknesses. Under the wreckage from the accident he had presented his bare soul to her because he had wanted her to know. He had wanted her to know what she was losing. A man.

After that confession his attention had been fully directed towards helping Hannah and he had left the rest for another time. Cuddy and Lucas were getting married, it didn't matter anymore what the man had to say or do. It was too late. He had been too late.

And afterwards Hannah had died in the ambulance and from there nothing else was important.

And now Cuddy was in his bathroom, looking at him. The man couldn't understand the reason why she had come. And then she said: "I love you. I wish I didn't but I can't help it."

And then she had helped him stand up and he had kissed her and hope had been rekindled in the man's heart.