Chuck hated his cunt of a mother for many, many reasons, but one of them was that she gave him the name Francis and never bothered to tell him it was a pussy name. So he walked into kindergarten completely unaware and got his nose bloodied the very first day.

Cunt.

He’d learned to fight well, hard and nasty but with honor, and had settled on Chuck as his real first name by third grade. The fights tapered off then until junior high, when guys started to get hair on their nuts and being different was the worst possible sin. He’d honed his skills then, learned how to inflict the most pain or the most humiliating pain, how to leave marks and how not to.

When Larry, piss-drunk on Everclear, proposed that they go find themselves some towel-heads to teach a lesson to, and Todd nodded and added, “Or fags,” Chuck found himself nodding too. He didn’t give a shit if people came from a different country, and what a guy wanted to do with his prick was his own damn problem. He had no feelings one way or the other about who.

But it had been a long time since the crunch and splatter had rung in his ears, and his knuckles were positively itching.

Foreman’s seen it, with his own eyes, and he can’t un-see it.

It has no relevance to his life whatsoever – House quickly proved oh so conclusively how unrelated the real world is to what Foreman saw – but he can’t shut the pictures off.

He saw the full-motion, live-action real thing, but what his brain spits back to him, at unpredictable intervals, are still photos.

He’s in the lab with Cameron. She beckons him over to the microscope; he bends, settles his eyes, and instead of cells, he sees Wilson with his fist cocked, knuckles already bloody.

He’s in the diagnostics conference room, sitting back and smirking at the ridiculous path Chase and Cameron have gone down in this differential. House snaps an insult and drags a marker across the whiteboard, slashing a thick black line that becomes the vivid red stripe up House’s side, puffed out from his pale skin and dotted with pinpricks of blood.

He’s in his bed, relaxed, music lightly playing and his eyes shut against the world. He’s beginning to float, on the edge of the universe, and there’s the head of House’s cock, peeking out from under Wilson’s shoe-clad right foot, which is planted in House’s groin.

He’s walking into the hospital. Cuddy greets him courteously, professionally, and hands him a file to review. He flips to the middle, to review the test results she’s indicating, and the lines on the graph resolve into House’s face. Content, adoring, blissful, happy.

Foreman can’t un-see it.