A/N: Feedback makes my world go round! This chapter goes out to smilebackwards, DeathtotheMarySue, Dr. Rebecca Chase, Ivy3, Rose12345 and yet again Fluffy2001 for some awesome reviews. Yet again, you guys rock!

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Nothing but Jesse Spencer's fine ass. Though that's only in my head. pouts

Foreman's turn...

X x X x X

People were ignorant. They thought that just by looking at you they knew you, knew your story. They thought they knew how to play you, know you'd play them. People saw your skin and thought they knew how to get under it.

People are morons. He'd spent too much time with House not to believe that.

Foreman closed his eyes, rolled his neck and took a sickening pleasure in the cracking that came from it.

There was a time when he didn't think he was going to make it to his eighteenth birthday. He, honest to God, thought he was going to get shot down or knifed in the gut before he hit suffrage. Fear can make you weak, but if you can survive it, if you can get past it, it will make you strong. If you can't, you will fall apart.

Don't fall apart. Don't fall...

Eric's the good boy. Eric went to medical college. Hell, the fact that Eric went to college period was an achievement. Eric didn't end up in jail, addicted or dead. Eric was the good boy.

Foreman sighed, trying hard to ignore how his eyes were fogging over, how he really needed sleep, how this paperwork could wait until tomorrow, but he really didn't feel like staying late two nights in a row. Determination, discipline; its how he made it out of hell and into the world of medicine.

The ghetto's just another name for black hell. Go ahead sinners, pretend it doesn't exist. It's where you'll end up, cold, alone. There's no upside. There's no getting out.

Yet he had gotten out, no real damage done. He was a doctor, and after all, doctor's just another name for messiah. They were the one's who had saved his best friend when he was shot (the first time. It didn't work so well the second.) Living like that, it had taught him to be strong. It had taught him to survive, to be unafraid. House was nothing after you had a knife shoved in your face by a crazy crack-dealer screaming how he was gonna mess you up.

And yet...

All he had been through had taught him to hate. He hated those who had made his hell, cops and authority figures, and all he'd had been, a delinquent and a threat. He had been taught where to hit and how to lie. He had been taught how to make other people afraid while he was scared out of his mind. He had been taught that no matter how much you tried to protect the people you love, your brother from your sins and your mother for the truth, all your attempts will, in the end, fail. Life made him learn.

You never forget the lessons taught by your fellow sinner. You share your scars and take on theirs. You never forget. You never...

Foreman sighed again, turning the page slowly, pen in hand.

He never forgot.

But she did.

It was hard to watch his mother fall apart, forget the good that had come more recently and slowly slip back into the days when he stole cars and sold fake drugs, when he got into trouble and fistfights like it was sport. She couldn't see the future back then. Now she couldn't see the past.

If the ghetto's physical hell then Alzheimer's is the mental.

Foreman paused, considered biting his pen and then decided better of it. It didn't exactly belong to him, and being unaware of the previous owner made him wary. The last thing he needed was Chase's dried spit in his mouth.

Foreman smirked.

Chase was a moron. He was a good doctor, great even, and still, he was a moron. He knew medicine, probably grew up surrounded by renowned doctors, but he didn't care about people. At least House didn't claim otherwise. Chase was pretentious, obnoxious even, just a spoiled brat who hated his dad, and for what? Paying for med school? Not buying him a pony? So what if his parents split? Foreman grew up with kids who never knew their dads at all, some who didn't know either parent. He was lucky. He had both.

Then there was Cameron, who found it impossible to hate or hold a grudge, who never spoke badly of anyone and always forgave. It didn't matter what you did, how you hurt her. She'd never bite back. She'd never bite.

And yet...

She could. She could break a man with something as small as a look. But she was too good. For once noble didn't seem too strong a word. She knew how to survive.

Foreman smiled, snapped the file shut and moved on to the next yellow-tabbed folder.

Why was he still here anyway? He had long since earned enough of a reputation to earn a decent job someplace else, someplace where he had more significance than an intern, someplace where doing your job didn't involve breaking into people's homes. So why didn't he just leave?

Maybe it was because no job he could possibly take would ever be so interesting. Maybe it was because he liked the challenge. Hell, maybe he just liked to see House, on rare occasion, proved wrong.

Now House, House was interesting. Obviously brilliant, it was a still a mystery why he went into a branch of medicine that is almost entirely patient interaction. He hates people, yet bases his entire existence around them. It's like those people that hate dogs but can't help but take in stays.

Foreman smiled triumphantly, sliding the last page of treatment commentary into its respective folder. Paperwork was done. Take that Cuddy.

Foreman was used to being underestimated. Some hard-ass black kid with a gang-bangin' girl selling his mother's spice rack as crack on some corner wasn't the first kid you'd expect to make graduate first in class from Hopkins, never getting anything less than a perfect grade. People had assumed he was stupid, a junkie, another mindless youth. Now they assumed he had never seen that life.

Nobody believed getting out was an option.

Yet he had gotten out.

He had gotten out.

X x X x X

Ugh, so unsure about this chapter. I had never really given that much thought to Foreman before now, so this was pretty fun to write. How'd I do?

Have a great Christmas/Kwanzaa/Hanukah/La Fiesta de la Posada/whatever atheist holiday it is that atheists celebrate.