Blythe, John, Wilson, Cuddy, Cameron, Foreman and Chase were sitting at the table sipping their beverage of choice and House was prowling round the room with a mug of coffee in his hand.
"Sit down son," John House said. "You are making me nervous with your pacing."
"Sorry, no can do," House answered without stopping or looking at his father. "My leg is acting up. I need to walk off the cramps in it."
"Doesn't that bother any of you?" John asked the rest of the people at the table.
"No," Cameron said. "We're used to it, and at least when he does it in one room we don't need to follow him."
"My little ducklings!" House threw in with a false sweet voice.
"You follow him?" John was puzzled.
"If we have a case and we need to talk about it, then obviously yes," Chase explained.
"So any of you guys dating each other?" was the next question from John.
"Dad!" House protested before his mother (who had already put her hand on John's) could say anything. "If you are going to get details of their personal lives out of them, could you wait till I'm out of the room? I don't want to know their answers."
"Really?" Wilson wondered. "I thought you were the most curious man I knew."
"First, you have now met my father, so no I am not," House pointed out. "Second, I'm not curious about things that don't matter. Whatever is currently going on in the private lives of my fellows does not affect their work; ergo, I don't care if they are having threesomes at the end of every day!"
"I would have thought you'd be very interested if we were having threesomes," Chase muttered.
"Sorry Chase," House once again proved that there was nothing wrong with his hearing. "You have great hair, but you are not my type."
"I think this conversation has gone quite far enough," Blythe intervened. "Can we change the subject?"
"Thank you, Mother," House said. "Indeed we can. Didn't you have a meeting with the therapist this morning? How did it go?"
"I think it went well," Blythe was happy to answer. "But it really seems its back to school with this illness. There are so many things to learn! It almost seems that the management of this MG is more fatiguing than the illness itself."
"At first it may indeed look like that," Foreman agreed. "But once you get it all worked into your routines you will find that it's not much different than managing any other chronic illness, like diabetes for example."
"I hear you are leaving the hospital in two days?" Wilson asked.
"Yes, we are," John said. "And I'm rather glad about it, because living in a hospital when you are not ill yourself is not that much fun. Though I have seen worse cafeterias than the one you have here."
"Not many," House threw in from the sidelines.
"You seem to be wolfing their Reuben's regularly enough," Cuddy rose to defend her hospital.
"He is," Blythe smiled. "And thank you Lisa for helping us with the flat."
"No need to thank me," Cuddy said. "That is why the hospital has those flats: so that out-patients have somewhere to live if their homes are too far away. Besides, you are paying normal rent so it's not like I'm doing you any special favours."
"But you will still be around a lot, then," Cameron assumed.
"Yes, I'm still under observation and Eric seems to want to do more tests to check how the medication works with me," Blythe agreed. "And I still have several appointments with the therapist."
"I just want to make sure that everything is covered before I let you out of my sight," Foreman explained.
"He knows his career depends on it," House inserted.
"Enough!" Blythe demanded. "I'm sure I will be just fine and you would not make things difficult for Eric just because something unexpected goes wrong."
"Yes, I would," House stated. "Because there really are very few unexpected things that cannot be traced to the doctor in charge."
"Oh, yes," Wilson sighed. "Blame the doctor! You never trust anyone else. Whenever you get a patient you must do all the tests and all the scans and everything all over again, because you think the previous doctors messed up."
"They do," House shrugged. "Most doctors are idiots."
"I thought it was the patients," Cuddy laughed.
"Them too," House agreed.
"And you are the only one who knows anything?" John asked his son with some exasperation.
"I'm the only one who will not pass the bucket," House said. "They come here they stay here until I know what is wrong with them."
"You were always such a know-it-all," John sighed. "Even when you were 16 you thought you knew better; would not listen to wiser heads, no matter what."
"I have always listened to wiser heads," House flipped at his father.
"Is that why Toby was able to con you into warming his toes?" John asked his son with a somewhat patronising smile.
"Here we go again!" House looked up appealing to the powers that be.
"I find it hard to believe anyone has ever been able to con House into anything," Cuddy wondered. "My experience tends to be that he is the one doing the conning."
"It's and old story," Blythe tried to silence her husband. "Nothing nobody wants to hear, I'm sure."
"I'm interested!" Wilson inserted. He was quite happy to hear anything that might take House down a notch or two.
"Well, we had been stationed in Japan," John obliged. "That is where Greg got it into his head to become a doctor. I don't know why; I had quite expected him to end up in the military like me, but for some reason he wanted to be a doctor. Anyway, once we were home we found a house next to a VA facility that was helping men wounded in the war to get back to civilian life. This was in 1975, you understand. Most of the veterans in there were there only for a few months, possibly a year until they got back to their families, but there were two men there, who didn't have any families and had been there for ten years already. Toby and Jon. They were best friends since I don't know kids, I think."
"Regular David and Jonathan!" House inserted with a twist of sarcasm.
"Anyway," John went of ignoring his son. "Toby told Greg that his toes were freezing and Greg spent hours with him trying to find ways to warm them up. He spent hours in the library trying to find something to help; he talked with doctors, nurses, and anyone he could think of. It got downright embarrassing!"
"Why?" Cameron asked. "I know it is disconcerting to hear that he took such interest in a patient – well, sort of a patient, I suppose, when we are used to him not even wanting to meet them, but I don't think I get the point of your story."
"The point is that Toby had no toes!" John laughed – though nobody joined in. They still waited for the punch line. "Toby had lost his legs in Vietnam. His left foot was amputated from the ankle, and his right leg from the knee. He didn't have any toes that could freeze!"
Cameron opened her mouth to say something but before she could utter it, House frowned her into silence. Foreman seemed to have an opinion, too, but after one glance at House he, too, kept his peace.
"Oh," Wilson said lamely. "I see." Then he chose to remain silent as well.
House took his coffee and headed out of the room: "You don't mind if I go and sulk in the balcony, now?"
"Greg?" Blythe House called after him.
"Its ok, Mother," he called back, but did not stop.
--------
About fifteen minutes later Cuddy followed House to the balcony. She found him sitting on the recliner with the pink blanket covering his legs. She took the other chair and a blanket for herself.
"So what was the real story? The one you don't want your father to know?" she asked.
"It's not a question of me not wanting him to know. I did try to tell him the truth at the time, but he is a man who does not believe unless he can see proof. Explaining such a thing as phantom pain to him – no way can you succeed!" House laughed sarcastically.
"But what was the story? I would like to know."
"Toby and Jon were both wounded at the same time. Toby's loss Dad already told you, but Jon lost both his legs from mid-thigh down. They both felt their legs, but Toby was fortunate. He only sensed cold. Jon had been fine at first, at least after the stumps had healed, but then five years after that he started to feel pain; a little at first, then more and more. He had tried to get help, but it was like Toby's cold toes, either nobody believed him or if they did, they didn't think anything could be done as the legs just weren't there. You know that there has been research on phantom pain only recently and there are still very little we can do about it. In 1975 it was even worse. I tried quite a few of the methods that are used today: massage, cold and warm compresses, pressure, binding, over the counter pain medication ... The list was pretty impressive even if I say so myself. Finally we found that the only thing that worked for Jon was morphine."
"Morphine!" Cuddy exclaimed. "How did you get him morphine?"
"Stole it," House said simply. "Once we had discovered that, we knew we were in trouble. First of all, the supply was uncertain – I had no way of knowing how long I could get it and secondly it is highly addictive and will eventually cease to work. The pain was getting worse and Jon knew he could not handle it long, not without medication."
"So what did he do?"
"As I said, Toby and Jon were like David and Jonathan," House mused. "They were lovers, though I would not suggest you try to make my Father see that. They were a lot like an old married couple; they had been together for fifteen years. We discussed all the options we had, and Jon decided that his only option was to kill himself. Toby agreed to it. Jon died a week later."
"He couldn't handle the pain?" Cuddy asked.
"No. It robbed him of any life he had left." House explained. They sat in silence for a moment.
Then Cuddy had to ask: "Is that why you refused to let us amputate your leg?"
"Because I was afraid of phantom pain?" House clarified. Cuddy nodded. "Well if that was the reason for my refusal, then I got right royally screwed, didn't I?"
"I'm sorry," Cuddy didn't know what else to say.
"No, fear of pain was not the reason I refused," House said. "I just could not give you permission to do it. That is all."
"I'm sure that is not all, you always have a reason, and you haven't given me one yet."
"Maybe," House admitted. "But either the reason is private, or something I don't think others could understand. I'm rather used to not being understood, you know."
"Yeah," Cuddy bit her lip. "I sort of gathered that much."
"He actually talked to Toby, you know," House went on. "He asked Toby to confess to me that he had been conning me because my obsession was becoming publicly embarrassing."
"How do you know?" Cuddy asked. "John does not seem like the sort of man who would have told you that."
"No, he didn't," House agreed. "Toby told me. He offered me a chance to back off, stop my research. But I was intrigued. I found phantom pain puzzling and I wanted to find out as much as I could about it. So I told Toby that it didn't matter. That what my Father thought did not matter anymore. And it didn't."