AN: Thank y'all so much for your latest reviews. I've never had so many at once, and I'm really grateful to everyone. As a reward, here's (a slightly short) Chapter 6, six days early. tpel raised a good point about the plausibility of his injuries and being back at work in two weeks. Well, as I understand it, normally, someone would not be able to break another man's femur, period. However, Tritter's got to be a pretty strong guy – he works for the police, so he can't be too out of shape. Also, breaking House's right thigh bone would be easier than for any other person as he doesn't have any muscle protecting in. In reality, this would just about work, provided that Tritter worked out enough. The being back at work in two weeks thing? Well, all will be explained later on.

Still an M. Beware. Some fairly horrible stuff coming up, as usual. Blame tpel – that review put this idea in my head, and it wouldn't go away.

Chapter 6

House squeezed his lips together tightly to stop himself babbling. The pain was terrible. House couldn't help but start to panic. Was he going to die in here, in this abandoned warehouse? There was no way in hell that Tritter was going to let him go. There was also no way in hell that he was going to escape, not with a busted leg and no cane. He could barely even raise his head, and he was sure that he must have lost a whole lot of blood from the compound fracture. He turned his head to the left to look at his hand. It looked awful, like something out of a horror movie. The middle and index fingers, along with the thumb, were a dark purple colour and badly swollen. The ring and baby fingers were much more of a concern.

They had turned black. Oh God, his hand was rotting. Like the builder, Cuddy's builder, the one that had fallen off the roof, Alfredo. Alfredo's hand and House's own became one confused, blurry mental picture. Even as he watched the fingers grew darker and darker. House watched in utter horror as the fingernail of his little finger detached from the flesh and slid onto the floor. The flesh was shrivelling. He could see the bone of his smallest finger. The bone was broken in the middle, between the first and second knuckles. The end of the bone fell onto the floor with a clatter.

House began to hyperventilate as the same thing happened with his ring finger. The other three fingers were also beginning to darken and shrivel up. A fly buzzed over to him and settled on the ruined thumb and started to suck up the juices of the dead flesh. He could smell it. He could smell the rotting appendage. It turned his stomach and he retched, but there was nothing left in his stomach to come up except for a small amount of bile. Stomach acid burnt at the back of his throat as he heaved and coughed, trying to tear his eyes away from the sight of his dead hand, now minus all of his fingers. And yet it was still rotting, the necrosis spreading to the main body of his hand. He could still feel his fingers burning and throbbing in pain, and yet this was impossible. His fingers were gone. They were a thing of the past.

Repulsed, House squeezed his eyes shut, and turned his head to the right, desperate to stop watching the death of his hand. He couldn't keep his eyes closed, though; it was like a car crash. He didn't want to watch, but he couldn't help himself. However, before he could look back at his hand, his attention was caught by his thigh. The bone was still there, sticking out of the muscle, or what was left of it. Was it just him, or was there even more bone poking out than before? As he watched, distracted from his fingers, the bone slid out another few inches. His pant leg ripped and fell away, and he could see his leg.

Oh God.

It had opened up along the old surgical incision, the whole muscle opened up as though his leg was being dissected. House gagged as the quad muscle began to darken. It should be red, not purple, not...

Black. His thigh muscle was dying. Again. This wasn't happening. It couldn't be happening.

The excruciating pain in his thigh and hand told him that this wasn't a dream. He wasn't that lucky. He watched as the muscle shrivelled up as his fingers had. He could now see the femur quite clearly. It was broken exactly in the middle, and with no flesh left to hold the leg together, the bottom half of his leg fell off as his fingers had done and rolled away across the floor towards Tritter.

House's brain couldn't take the horror any more and shut itself down. House slid gratefully into the dark.

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Tritter sat in his chair, watching House writhing on the floor. Tritter felt fairly pleased with what he had managed so far. From where he was sitting, House looked a pretty long way from sane. Tritter was slightly surprised at just how much pain he had managed to cause simply by pressing down on the damaged thigh. Still, he had a fairly long way to go before he was satisfied that House was completely broken and was ready to kill him. Tritter looked at House's hand. He was fairly pleased with the damage that he had done – all five broken fingers were swollen and purple. Maybe later he would work on the main body of the hand. Yes, that sounded like a good idea.

The leg, he wasn't quite so happy with. He had definitely heard a crack when he was bending and twisting the leg yesterday. Admittedly that hadn't been a part of the original plan, but the more pain, the better, he reasoned. There was probably a hairline fracture to the femur, nothing more.

But the physical injuries would, in time, get better. House's hand would mend, the pain in his thigh would ease. The mental anguish, however, was something that Tritter was sure wouldn't go away completely for the rest of House's life.

Tritter would make sure of that.