They all said he hadn't changed after the infarction; up and down they swore that he'd always been that way, that the leg was just a convenient excuse. But Greg House knew better than any of them what the real truth of the situation was: he had changed. He'd changed just as his life had changed... while all around him, everyone else continued undisturbed, happy little swirling pockets of sanity while he himself had been forced to re-build everything he'd thought he'd had.
Seeing the worst in people is an art form; it's all about paying attention and looking beyond the convenient status quo. But hating people truly happens when you realize, finally, that everyone's a hypocrite; everyone's got a price or a platitude. Everyone knows how you should live your life, what you should be grateful for, how hard it is for you and exactly when it'll get easier.
None of these predictions were true.
In the end, everybody was simply looking out for number one.
Patients lied because they were supposed to have been studying but in fact had been off having wild hot monkey sex with a girlfriend; patients lied because he'd been stepping out on his wife, because she'd been stepping out on her husband. They lied because they wanted to keep their jobs, because they wanted to lose their jobs, because they wanted to live or wanted to die or to maintain a perfect image that was as fragile and easily shattered as the stained glass windows of their equally false devotions.
Parents lied to their children, doctors lied to their patients, Stacy Childress had lied when in those first hellish red-tinged days of tears and Vicodin she'd sworn she'd see it through, lied with that last I love you, friends lied with It gets easier and Just give it time, Greg, and the world lied with every noxious, fume-choked breath; promising truth, promising happiness, promising everything but what you got: the real goddamn thing.
Imperfect.
Maimed.
Damaged.
And after a while, he learned to separate himself from them: from the mess, from the rat raze, the ever-present rattle of the vial in a pocket and the subtle isolation of his office. He learned that most doctors would never even begin to grasp what may have been the basic truth of all of the practice of medicine: Nothing is ever simple. Everybody lies. And if they're dying on the outside, then it's a pretty safe fucking bet that there's something rotting on the inside, to match.
Finding that, decoding it -- that's what he was for.
As for the rest of them?
Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Go directly to Hell.
He'd make sure to save them a seat.