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"Life is pain!" House explodes at him and then shortly after that he is dead, and Chris Taub finds he cannot go on anymore.
Not in the borderline-suicidal way his boss seems to have embraced - none of them believe that going up in flames was anything other than intentional, and typical - but in the sense that he does not want to do this anymore.
For the past few years, the field of diagnostics has kept him interested and focused and sane. He's been able to forget about the shitshow that is his personal life, and how that spilled out into his professional one, because he was doing something almost no one else got to do - work with House, solve near-impossible cases, make groundbreaking saves on a weekly basis. It was exhilarating at least as much as it was frustrating and occasionally humiliating, always aware of how fellowships are designed for twentysomethings who can get by on little sleep and even less money, people who don't have families to support.
He made it work.
And he never really imagined House was anything other than human and frail - he was too old to put anyone on a pedestal like that, or, at least, he caught himself when he did it. He knew from the beginning he was working for a selfish prick. But it was worth it, somehow.
No longer. House is dead, and he has two daughters he wants to be there for, and there are so many other ways he can be a doctor beyond plastics.
Chris Taub no longer believes that his career, his calling as a doctor, his brain, is what is most important in life.
Look at where that got House, after all - a body so badly burned that it could only be identified through dental records, a best friend left so shaken that he ran out of the funeral, a handful of people who remember him with a mix of fondness and fury.
It's not worth it.
He has two beautiful daughters. Even if the circumstances are less than ideal.
So he takes what work he can. Clinic hours, boring but manageable. It is easy for him. Predictable. There are no late nights, no dives into the latest research, no mystifying conditions.
There are no last-minute epiphanies, no improbable saves.
If House had been able to accept that this is just life, he thinks, he would still be alive.
This is life. Pain both large and small. Pain that must be endured. Sometimes it lurks in the body, and sometimes in the soul - that tedium, that weariness, that ache that is simply what it means to be a human.
House just couldn't hack it, he thinks, and for a while he feels superior, and then just tired.
Just so fucking tired.
He's not sure when, exactly, he decides. By the time the day comes, it feels inevitable, as though this was the only way it could ever end.
He leaves letters for the girls - he's not a monster.
If there is an afterlife, he thinks, House will be waiting with a knowing smirk. Maybe that's okay. Maybe this is how it was always going to go.