General A/N: First of all, thank you to everyone who has read and reviewed my House stories so far. I appreciate it more than I can say. I've really enjoyed writing and sharing this stuff, and I hope to continue! Secondly, I'd like to apologize to any of my followers from the ER fandom. I've unintentionally taken an extended vacation from the fandom and my related stories and I'm not sure when I'll be coming back.

'Not a Lie' A/N: As of right now, this is a brief one-shot exploring what House's train of thought might've been during or after 7.22 "Help Me." I have ideas about extending it into a longer story with an actual plot line, but they're only ideas at the moment.

Cuddy wasn't the only one taken aback by his comment about his leg, the admission that he wished it'd been amputated. The revelation shocked him to his core the moment it came out his mouth.

The thought had crossed his mind in waxing and waning intervals for nearly ten years. It began immediately upon emerging from that second round of post-operative anesthesia. He screamed at anyone who would listen that if they were going to remove major muscles and render his leg completely useless, why didn't they just finish the job and take the whole goddamn thing? Six hours later, when a modicum of coherency had been returned to him, his surgeon asked if what he'd said in the recovery room was true: did he really want them to amputate? because, even though they'd have to wait a day or two, it could be done. Get the fuck out my room had been the only response the surgeon received.

He wished his leg would just disappear every time the pain woke him in the middle of night and kept him from falling back asleep; whenever it caused him to bite his bottom lip until it bled to stifle screaming and sobbing and swearing; every time he had to ask for help or caught those pitying stares directed his way; and every single time the pain left him feeling only anger and annoyance and hatred. Those were the times he most regretted his decision – his bullheaded, arrogant, and illogical decision – to keep his leg.

But those times passed, following the pattern of the pain itself. There was the agonizing pain, the pain that was so-severe-you-can't-tell-anyone-what-your-goddamned-pain-rating-is-because-you-can't-fucking-talk-without-fucking-screaming-so-stop-fucking-asking; the pain that rivaled only that of in the infarction itself. That was the pain that made him seriously think about sawing off his own leg with a letter opener or butter knife or a teeny tiny razor blade. Detoxing elicited the same desire; his first week at Mayfield, when he was enclosed in the concrete room, restrained to a hospital bed, and marinating in a mixture of his own vomit and sweat, was filled with silent pleads for his leg to simply disappear and the pain to go with it. But then there was the normal pain, his saving grace. That pain was the fours and the fives and sometimes the sixes. It was his baseline and was what most days were made of. Those were the days that reassured him that he may have made the right decision.

And the cycle continued, day after day and week after week and month after month and so on for ten years. It wasn't pleasant but it kept him from having to make a decision one way or another. And that was what mattered, because he didn't know what the right decision was. How could he when one night could be spent praying to every single god he didn't believe in that his leg would be gone when he woke up, but the next five or eight or thirteen days would pass without any sick, screwed up fantasies of spontaneous amputation?

And yet there he was, wedged under the debris of a collapsed parking garage, convincing his patient to let him amputate her leg by telling her he wished his doctor had amputated his.

What he'd told Hannah hadn't been a lie, but that didn't mean it was the truth.