A/N: Thanks everyone for continuing to read and review! I really appreciate it. I will admit I have no medical background so please suspend disbelief when I attempt to write medical stuff - thank you! :)

Week Twenty-Two: In My Defense

House yawned. It was already a long day, and the day hadn't even started – it wasn't even six in the morning.

Maybe he should have thought about this before he decided to become a doctor, he mused. It wasn't exactly a nine-to-five. Maybe he should have been a blacksmith or something like that. What did a blacksmith even do?

What, in fact, did House even do, these days at least? He sat around and mused over his failed life. It was depressing.

A phone was ringing somewhere in the apartment, and House tried to decide whether he was motivated enough to try answering it. Who could it be? Was it Cameron, trying to get him to step up to the plate (or whatever her motivation was these days)? Was it Cuddy, come to tell him how he had screwed everything up all over again and that he should be grateful his dying ass wasn't rotting in prison right now? Was it a case?

Or maybe it was just a telemarketer. Or worse, his own doctor, giving him bad news. Even good news was bad news at this point. The fact that his doctor hadn't had his own "House moment", discovering a tiny clue to break open that House didn't have leukemia at all, that he had something highly treatable that had simply gone unnoticed. House hated that in this moment he'd rather be wrong and alive than right and dead.

Or maybe it was the other way around. Recently, things had gotten so incredibly tiresome that House wondered what the point was anymore. If he couldn't practice – if he got to the point where he really couldn't practice this time – then what was the point of sticking around at all?

He snorted slightly.

Maybe the reason was that he was about to have a kid. One of those great life-changers; didn't people always write about it in the books like that? "My life was never the same after I had…" and then the name of their darling little brat.

Except, most of the time, people's lives didn't change. They were the same screwed up person before and after, except now they had a tiny person who would always be around for them to take it out on. To always blame. Their entire lives could have been different if they hadn't made that particular mistake.

Of course, there were other people who needed to have that particular mistake, who yearned for it. People like Cuddy, who fell over themselves to adopt someone else's mistake.

But why? What was it about forcing another generation to deal with one's own crap that got them all warm and fuzzy?

And what the hell was House going to do if Cameron expected him to be involved in this fiasco in some way beyond not-dying from it? And what if he did die – what was Cameron planning to do about it all then? Did she think they were going to ride off on a white horse together at the end of it all? That he was going to act like that doctor who went around the world trying to cure tuberculous?

She could keep dreaming. It wouldn't change anything.

At the end of the day, after all, House was still House.

Foreman had a department to run, terminally ill House or no terminally ill House.

There had been times in which he had gone to bed, hoping he would wake up and have this department – but now it wasn't a dream but a complete nightmare.

The endless Cameron/Cuddy/House/Chase drama was more than enough for anyone, and even a teaspoon of it would have been too much for Foreman. Sure, there had been Thirteen – and Chase would have reminded him of that quickly enough if he'd started to actually complain about it.

But this was above and beyond. It was like living in a soap opera. And unlike his mother, who had watched the damned things from dawn 'til dusk every day she had off, Foreman despised soap operas.

House, of course, had always loved them.

House also never had to put back together everything he regularly shattered into pieces – oh, he had a highly-trained staff of fellows to do that for him.

Maybe Foreman was being too hard on him. Maybe that came from the fact that the team continually complained about how he was trying to be House with the way he ran the department.

But someone had to run it, and why not run it in the way that had worked before? The only way that had ever worked?

Without the drama, Foreman had always promised himself – without the drama. Just the results, served on a platter to keep Cuddy off their backs.

He would take the reins long after everyone else had let the horses all run out of the damn barn, but that didn't mean he had to be happy about it. It was bad enough that his mentor was sick – terminally sick, in fact – not that Foreman wanted to take the time to try and process exactly what that meant for him.

He didn't want to think about it, and he would not think about it. He would simply forge ahead, House or no House. He had never really needed House; hadn't that been what he had always said?

After all, House had never needed anyone in his life – except for them. Why had he kept coming back to the same fellows, time after time?

Maybe it was some weird yearning for a family – Foreman guessed that he could get that.

But just the same, didn't every father know that one day their sons would surpass them? Wasn't that what they were supposed to do, in fact?

Except they weren't supposed to die while the sons were climbing to the top. They were supposed to vacation down in Malibu sipping martinis and getting postcards from their sons.

Why was he thinking about House like he was Foreman's father?

Foreman sighed. Maybe this would all be over with soon. Until then… there would always be work.