That's the tone I was trying to achieve--it's achingly painful in places, but also inevitable. Events had to unfold the way they did.

And that's true: House's thought process requires others to bounce ideas off of. Otherwise, he ends up losing motivation, momentum, the passion that is his sine qua non.

That insight was, I felt, a fundamental one: chronic pain, whether physical or emotional, operates by the same logic. House knows Andromeda could not have been stopped because he knows exactly what it is to cope with pain by self-destructive means.