www dot qed dot i win
Chapter 01: when the bunny hits the blade [2026-01-31]
Chapter 02: oh ninety-nine, you don't know who i am [2026-01-31]
Chapter 03: i lobe you, electrically [2026-01-31]
Chapter 04: who doesn't? [2026-02-01]
Chapter 05: take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while [2026-02-01]
Chapter 06: blackbird has spoken [2026-02-01]
Chapter 07: the proverbial brazil nut [2026-02-02]
Chapter 08: don't you dare take my edge off of me [2026-02-02]
Chapter 09: i'll get the shrinking gizmo [2026-02-02]
Chapter 10: daughter of authority and infinite time [2026-02-03]
Chapter 11: a year has passed since i wrote my note [2026-02-03]
Chapter 12: six feet under the big sky [2026-02-06]
Chapter 13: five-finger exercise [2026-02-06]
Chapter 14: if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice [2026-02-06]
Chapter 15: crying over centrifuges [2026-02-07]
Chapter 16: i'm not waiting on a lady [2026-02-08]
All the scorn they have for her principles, her namby-pamby ethics, her decidedly unexceptional exceptionalness, points to a very insistent ignorance of how anyone could actually end up this way, at this age.
Her fault. Her maddening masochistic myopia. Her stupid, infantile choice, to cling to what makes her Martha, and not Madison or Mackenzie or even Molly. Her own individual tunnel vision.
Yes, being gifted changes you just as much as you have to be changed to be gifted. Yes, her intellect owes a startling debt to nurture just as much as nature. Yes, it's a lonely way, being younger than everybody around you for every single experience in life except the ones that everyone else actually thinks matters - the kisses, the drinks, the drives.
(Dual enrollment is for community college, not residential university, but what's a dorky commuter-by-default to do?)
Somewhere, somehow, someone decided that being entered, and then entering yourself, into philosophical spaces beyond your preconceived ken is coddling. That being quiet, respectful, and excited about algebra is a horrible curse for someone who hasn't gotten her first period. That homeschooling, had she had it, is purely an aesthetic choice.
As if she hasn't had to defend herself at a distinct disadvantage for years, and years, and years. As if they didn't try to break her, marveling at the impossibility of someone born post-1990 actually coexisting with them in seminar. As if she isn't cordial, conversant, and a complete delight.
She's filed her own forms with each registrar, contested schedules and fees with the bursar while her mother read thick novels in the car. She's met with professors whose bemused and one-sidedly punctual email exchanges didn't nearly prepare them for the renaissance redhead with a lunchbox clipped to her heaving rainbow-brite backpack.
She has always been the wrong height, the wrong pitch, the wrong vibe. She would have been all of that in public school. She only exemplified it in a different way in college. Such adverse environmental factors as these usually lead one to get creative and define oneself, you know.
PPTH is yet another bold but obvious stone laid both gingerly and with the utmost enthusiasm on her strange path. Just because she makes it through the door doesn't mean she's finally reached Candy Land and intends to thrust down her delirious burdens with a sleazy, unprincipled whoop.
It would just, in a way, be so, so hard to turn the corner and start doubting herself now.
House treats her unwillingness to lie as an ignorance to reality, a gum-toothed plea for a wakeup call. A decocious denial of the inevitable.
Masters bets (figuratively, of course) that he never got that call. That all of the advantages she has had are the wrong kind of interventions, in his mind, because he didn't have them.
More precisely, didn't need them. This, she doesn't argue. It's been so much fun and such a gift entirely because she could never end up anywhere but here.
She finds it so bright and pretty, this world of knowledge and mnemonics. He sees the world in a different kind of odd colors.
House, by virtue of being head and shoulders above anybody around in a contest of wits, logic, and general knowledge (that's literally general knowledge, complete cultural and historical possession), has no use for human curiosity.
It's not to say that he's not human. He's just not one for peer review. He's not teaching to the test, but he's certainly not going off of the syllabus.
Masters, meanwhile, remains giddy in the thrill of scholastic challenge. It's the only mode of challenge she's ever had, since she quickly aged out of the arena dedicated to the kind of social spats specifically engineered to reject her.
The truth has been her vital stepladder. Without it, her curiosity would have nowhere to climb.
She can't abandon the truth. She has too great a love for handling the truth. She's not just gullible, she's reverent.
But maybe, just maybe, she can accept that it's an instrument. One critical belief she and House share about such elemental things: the simplest devices that are the most complicated to master are those which promise to serve as the most brilliant philosophical toys.
She never planned to be aloof and mysterious, when she applied for this fellowship - such as it was. Well, no more than she ever is, just personally.
Any demonstration of even marginally less mask-off zealotry than Amber had shown would afford her a comfortable niche of level-headedness. Starting with such a wide spectrum of competitors just made it easy to lock in.
And locked in she remains, ambivalent to the snark about her being the diversity hire - what they do know is plenty for them to hurt themselves with. During the peak frequency of jokes about her sexuality, Thirteen does stop a moment to consider whether being bisexual made her like a secret agent or if it's always been the other way around. Maybe this is just the final evolution of her badass form.
It's never a bad thing for others to think that you're two steps ahead, that everything is going according to your private master plan. If they don't trust you, that's their fault. If they're right, then they're right.
Carrying yourself confidently is the key to everything.
It's even better if people feel weird about calling you by your name. Quiet power, amassed very gently. Something special you can dole out, whenever you feel. Something to separate you and them, or you and you.
If nobody uses it on you, it really doesn't mean anything. It's what you do get people to call you that counts.
House isn't much of a doler, though. Thirteen likes to think that her quiet power only flickers when within his radius of interference - that, for instance, if she dropped a "Greg" and proceeded to drop her eyes back down to her file, he would be the one clearing his throat and continuing, instead of her, as beady eyes locked on.
She's not that interested, of course. The others (Kutner especially) might treat it as a manifest mystery, that House so surely does not embody his given name in a manner that suggests, what's this, he resents it? But Thirteen really doesn't care that much.
He obviously hasn't been a secret agent in a med-school lab coat for a very long time. He's one of those listless military children who only cherishes his mother. He's got no self-evident doctor friends, here or anywhere else. He has no life outside of the hospital, despite what he may proclaim about hookers and monster trucks.
He is his bizarre mononym, for better or for worse.
Thirteen, the unlucky number, could never be anything so simple as a noun.
House's reflections are reserved for patients who die, patients who want to die, patients who don't want to die, Wilson's rare grave criticism, and Cuddy, in that order.
Except that, by rate of occurrence, he reflects on his relationship with Cuddy much more often. It's a pretty lopsided fave five.
So much of what she says to him is impotent, repetitive, boilerplate. So much of what he replies, no matter how dry and incisive, manages to lack substance all the same.
Maybe everything but the final diagnoses lack substance, because he does such little reflection. Maybe not talking to patients doesn't just save him drivel and deflections, it deprives him of exposure to varied personalities against which to refine his of-the-moment observations.
Or maybe he's afraid that the moment he says something he actually means to Cuddy is the moment he loses her tenuous orbit for real.
None of these options are all that compelling, either logically or emotionally, rationally or irrationally, which is why usually he likes Wilson to do his reflection for him. Just like when he purloins half a sandwich - it's not that he's poor, it just seems to benefit the natural rhythm of things when each responds according to his gifts.
Wilson's gifts are being rich and pensive, to the point of caricature as he gestures with featureless watch-laden wrist. House's gift is the aura of being so thrifty that he doesn't need time to think, nor demonstrate with slender doctors' fingers.
Cuddy, directly between, drives her own state of perpetual motion through an athletic commitment to being sharp and decisive, a living authority with a omnipresent mechanism of self-correction that she chooses so shrewdly when to show.
Wilson is a perfectly fine man with a perfectly fine array of weak spots and neuroses well-balanced against his perfectly fine array of talents and pleasant traits. Sure, he's a foil. House pays his rent on the premise that Wilson is his foil. Wilson is House's very own 800-plus credit score; the sentient promise that the piano is no less than instrumental and fair.
But Cuddy, House once discovered in a painful lights-out haze on a night when he should have been either asleep or awake enjoying any superficial order of worldly comfort, is put together in all the ways that her biggest liability is falling apart.
He will never reach Wilson's end of the spectrum. He will never be that kind or that cookie-cutter. For one thing, he'll never get married.
If Cuddy thought marriage was really all that important, she'd have pursued it as part of her baby timeline. If she really wanted a better relationship with her mother, she'd be letting it affect her personality instead of pulling desperate damage control. If she really was the sham Vogler wanted to make her out to be, she'd have folded long ago.
Cuddy hates compromise almost as much as she hates coups. And House, lulled to sleep by the ceiling fan, is either the ultimate of both or nothing at all.
"You're letting me get away with things."
Two observations file themselves neatly into the admitting entrance of Cuddy's brain as she hears this:
First, that even though House is leveling an accusation at her, he doesn't sound hurt or even irritated. Instead, he's lucid with alacrity, triumphant on the stinging hum of a stopped horn.
Second, that most any other man would be crossing his arms upon entering her office expressly to deliver this recent, and apparently astonishing, information. House is not unable to stand without his cane, but he is unwilling to part with it when there's no convenient piece of scenery to malign.
If this were a hushed, awestruck realization of insult, standing in place with your arms at your side would only ever serve to make you look defenseless, beaten, confused, no matter how much leverage you've contrived.
House maintains composure by tilting his back to match his eyebrow angle and keeping his fist tight on the handle.
Cuddy stewards hers by returning her gaze to the cascade of invoices laid out over her desk mat. Yes, nurse practitioners can prescribe antidepressants, but the billing code makes it count as a psychiatric prescription, so the patient will get charged for a specialist visit even if they have PPTH listed as their PCP. Generating the report that lists all bills for clinic visits that include a range of special line items isn't Cuddy's job, and neither is the busywork of reviewing all these claims to make sure they all were handled according to the same procedure, but deciding whether or not to allow CRNPs to act as MDs - since nobody ever complained about being charged a specialist copay when they were treated by slacks in a lab coat instead of joggers and scrubs - has ballooned into a board issue concerning standard of care, standardization and normalization of behavioral health(care), unfettered access to SSRIs for patients who really should be getting actual psych consults...
Cuddy's glad she has a board. She's glad there are checks and cross-checks and mechanisms via which to temper her own fraying sanity. She's glad she has this job and its myriad challenges that keep her mind and conscience sharp. She's even glad that sometimes she can zone out while scanning endless explanations of benefits.
House thinks she's letting him get away with things on purpose. Ergo, House thinks her both capable and willing when it comes to his games. Even if she doesn't actually remember whose turn it is and what the last card was, let alone what lurks in the remainder of the shoe.
She smiles. "You don't sound too upset."
He tilts back up, shifts the cane to accommodate and synchronize with his thinking - thinking face, thinking eyes, thinking heart.
"Sounds like you're not actually just letting me get what I want."
Cuddy can't help but roll her eyes. Again, is he even scorned?
It took him this long to string together a series of vaguely congruous decisions about outlandish procedures - apparently she'd given a pretty good performance while preserving pseudorandomness - and call her on it, but his expectation had been that she'd fold with a discontented sigh. Instead, she'd smirked. True to form, it's much easier for House to keep poking holes in her position than it is for him to wander over to the other side and hypothesize that the rules have recently and necessarily evolved due to the players now mutually providing each other with something they both really, really want.
If House gets stupid on the drug of Cuddy's patience, she'll only have herself to sue for complaisance. And the thing she loves most about him is the fact that he's so self-defeatingly smart.
Hence, the game. Hence, the faux suspicion. Hence, biting her lip and praying that pain is proud.
"What you want is anyone's guess. I'm just trying to keep up."
(Third, that it could ever be anything less than letting.)
The candy nightmares disappear along with the masses - the tumor, she forgets to take with her upon discharge. It was a nice dream, for a little while, to think that love would be strong enough to change things.
(To think that hope would ever be enough.)
And Lisa Cuddy is not, as a rule, categorically immune to those desperate daydreams about a lost connection being made unbroken once more, by a chance circumstance or a tender conversation. That's how she found Rachel, how Rachel unbroke her heart.
These things don't happen with men, though. They never have. She's never needed them to.
Instead, when the haunting images of that piercing stare return to her unconscious mind (well, subconscious, but it seems to her that they only come when she's really, truly out), irrelevant to the spectacle of the erupting classic car, they're fixed on Rachel - not eight years old, not smiling, not mischievous or even salty-sweary.
She's sixteen. She's beautiful. Her face is crumpled in a horrible combination of tears and rage, just as the cartoonishly waxy legal-size piece of paper is crumpled in her fist. The only part of it legible from this distance reads a stark, bright 1580.
Maybe it's NFPA 1580? She's imagining Rachel, not yet out of high school, giving House a well-deserved thrashing for violating the standard for emergency responder occupational health and wellness. A sort of dystopian daughterly pride and protection for her mother's legacy as an A-1 harangue.
Rachel won't grow up to be like that, though, because her mother isn't a Dean of Medicine anymore. She's well-qualified to be an administrator and facilitator of any kind, so she develops and delivers corporate training modules from home. Stuff related to health risks and workplace safety, of course. But not medicine. Never medicine.
Lisa didn't discourage Rachel from any interest she did show in medicine or law or any other stuffed-shirt field. House had promised her, once, that Rachel wasn't dumb - just dumb-ish, to match all her grandmother's grand cultural expectations. So if she wanted to play doctor, Lisa let her play doctor.
In the dream, the letters and numbers arranged on the placard jump and dance with each fresh throttle. Now it looks like...a test result.
Test scores. SAT scores.
House smolders, so quietly. He's got that dangerous look, the closest he ever gets to apoplexy when it's someone else's hypocrisy that manages to be completely divorced from his own.
"It's almost perfect. It's good enough."
Almost perfect? Not even close. Unless they changed the format. So maybe they did.
Of course Lisa Cuddy dreams of her daughter getting perfect, top-percentile test scores. Of course. Any mother would.
Rachel shakes - her fist, and herself.
"It's not good enough. It can't be, because there's something wrong with it."
"It's a damn test," House snarls. "It's more than good enough - you can get into any college you want, just pick a seaboard. You've got no father! Your essays are easy! Just accept that it's not perfect and GROW UP!"
He doesn't rattle off something apparently wrong with Rachel's mother, biological or otherwise, but that framing detail does little to quell the veil-thin horror Lisa feels at watching an apparition of the man she bodily removed from her life railing against her daughter, teenage or otherwise.
Still shaking, Rachel fights back.
"Why don't you get it? Why do you pick now to be stupid? Why can't you SEE?"
Nothing softens about House, save for a single hitching breath.
"You never stopped doing horrific things to Mom, to yourself, and she never stopped loving you. Because you were smart. Because you proved that you were valuable."
House's jaw squeezes - she thinks it does, anyway, but the face she knew so well in sickness and in health, in calculation and in pain, is growing fuzzy.
How did she know that was Rachel? Why did she assume that it was? How will Rachel ever know who to be?
When House stopped "coming over to play," Lisa told Rachel that he was sick. And it was true.
When House came over to play in a big way and left the Cuddy household with a new walk-up garage, Lisa told Rachel that they had to move because there'd been some problems at the hospital and some people were very angry. And it was true.
When Wilson called to let her know that he was dying and to give his best wishes to Rachel, Lisa told Rachel that Uncle Wilson was sick. And it was true.
It was very sad, sobering news. It was painfully ironic. It was far from the last memory she wanted to have of her old friend and colleague, but at least it meant that there was nothing left for her back in New Jersey anymore.
(Besides her mother. And her sister. And Rachel's cousins. So, the mischpocha becomes a diaspora.)
Truth was important. Not because it was virtuous, and not because it wasn't, but just because it was the only thing that you could guarantee even when your pockets and your heart were empty. "Could" being the operative word, since nearly all policies are eventually violated.
If Uncle Wilson was sick, then what about House? Did he ever get better?
"I'm not sure, honey," Lisa would say. She meant to keep saying that until Wilson's funeral, but the call about that - from Foreman, from Cameron, from anyone - never came.
Six months later, she dialed her old extension. It felt like forever, but it had only been two years. Thankfully, they hadn't overhauled the system.
"I just wanted to know... I didn't want to call him...?" Just biting her lip pushed her cheeks high enough to start tears - or had those come first?
She could hear Foreman's same old familiar sigh of resignation. "We...don't know. But we assume so. Maybe soon we'll hear from a lawyer. Maybe not. Once House died, he just...disappeared."
When Rachel found her, shell-shocked with the landline handset separated from base station abandoned in her lap, Lisa told her that Uncle Wilson had died. Eventually, enough half-truths would pile together to make a whole.
And eventually, Rachel would ask why she didn't have a father. It was the all-important discussion that had been biding its time ever since the difficult questions of the bathtub surgery. Lisa wasn't going to give her that truth until she asked, until she was ready to be upset. She was well-prepared with all the effusive anecdotes about how much she wanted Rachel, how hard she worked to get her.
You know, since adopting unplanned children isn't just one of those normal things the head of a hospital does as part of their job.
Maybe it's Lisa that isn't ready to be upset, isn't ready to ask her daughter why she didn't wonder. The fragility of their two-player prophecy, just two girls rocking on against the world, defies anyone to deflate it. Lucas, for one. House, for sure another.
House, who never treated two sick people at a time, except when he wasn't supposed to. House, who would have cured Uncle Wilson if he was alive. House, who knew everything but what was wrong with himself.
So, even as dumb-ish and no-filter as she might childishly have been, Rachel quickly caught on to the fact that saying you "don't know" what happened to your dad is much less effective on the playground than gravely and cleverly revealing that he chose to walk the plank.
The thing is--
Park is really not an optimist, let alone an opportunist, because she really has enough to worry about accepting that things may be dull and worse-than-expected but they're still better than they could have been.
Not "living in America instead of the Philippines" or "working in a hospital instead of a sweatshop" circumstantial gratitude, but acknowledging that her parents being overbearing in the way that methodically places five different options for banchan in her lunch when the choice of two is plenty of excitement on its own...instead of the way that would have her more terrified of them than of the disciplinary committee, is not a bad thing.
The concept of "not bad" has a relationship of definitional skepticism with "good". Which is fine. It's better than it could have been. Having somewhere to fall, literally and figuratively, that isn't too too far away, physically or spiritually, is comforting and validating, all at once.
No pity. It messes with the flow. No gifts. They upset the delicate balance.
Park is marginally successful, and marginally independent. That's all it needs to be.
Things change far too easily on their own, year over year, for Park to ever walk forward and encourage that something new and exciting happen. She has to square away as much understanding as she can, and change can worm its way into whatever space remains.
The thing is, hitting her boss was definitely not in the plans, but it was deserved, but it wasn't, but it was, and it was imperative, actually, except it wasn't, but it was...?
Because now, here she is. Valued in her strangeness, her violence, her inability and unwillingness to cow down.
The diagnostics department makes Park, momentarily, more self-conscious. And then, less and less and less.
It's a weird, six-armed human experiment with seven and a half legs and two antennae attached to House exclusively. It's a strikingly non-symbiotic organism constantly self-monitoring its constituents and constituence and constituency.
Well, Park's part of it is, anyway. Of course House is - he's the pain center, and they're all just his nervy feelers. Chase seems to have given up thinking long ago, in exchange for ongoing private philosophical dilemmas. You know, and getting stabbed.
Adams isn't like that. She's so busy confusing her motivations and justifications for buying the $120 shoes that she doesn't realize Park would never wear them if they were $20 from Payless. She doesn't even realize that she almost seems more clueless than mean.
(Park knows herself to lie somewhere left of a woman. The fact that Adams doesn't seem to care one way or another, to either extent of visible overcompensation, stirs an equally queer feeling from her guts to her clogs.)
She's not clueless, though. She just has...different priorities. Expensive priorities. Sensibilities of humanitarianism and taste that aren't wrong or vapid or girly, just...different.
Maybe Park should make her - herself! - a priority. Maybe she should try to take the reckoning with her helmet as a human on its face like she does every variable she's in control of and none of the ones she's not.
Maybe what she is, right now, is actually just a dismal could-have-been. The things about herself that she does like (and those that she doesn't) might be capable of an awesome magnification.
She's neurotic, like all autistic doctors should be. That doesn't just have to mean overthinking.
If she were, in fact, to take a strange whiff of self-advocacy and discernment...well, what's the worst that could happen?
Everybody lies. Everybody cheats. Everybody puts on a fantastic performance.
It's a great thesis statement, because it's universally applicable and really gets attention. You can use it over, and over, and over, and it never loses its punch. Or, it's a sucky thesis statement, because it's entirely too broad. It's too abstract for an abstract to even subtly refine.
So! There are two ways to drill: one, quantitative, supplying anecdotes that motivate and prove this claim. He's got a hundred, one from every patient in a case or in the clinic. Clinic lies and liars are, of course, generally lighter-weight; stupider. That doesn't mean a good liar gets respect.
Number two, qualitative: what does it mean, everybody? Who is everybody? What is the weight of a population? What defines a bona fide sample? What biases obscure the ever-persistent exceptions to the rule? Even better - what defines a lie?
Everybody, fundamentally, is uncomfortable with their own truth. Life is unfair. It happens. It sucks. They aren't able to accomplish what they need to with the facts as laid before them, so they figure to hell with post-hoc rationalization and just change the facts after the fact.
(Which, you know, points to a sort of skill issue. Everybody lies, but everybody doesn't have to lie, to get what they want. Not always.)
Everybody's telling stories. Everybody's informing the world.
To some people, that is the truth - even truer, some say, because they made it. Custom designed it. Monogrammed it with their hopes and dreams.
Everybody's got a different style, a trademark not just in the tell but in the telling.
Cuddy goes at it full force. Foreman is careful, regimented. Cameron pussyfoots. Chase lies for pussy and ends up sticking his foot in.
(House himself? It's impossible to know. He never and always tells the truth.)
Wilson lies by omission. He covers. He bails. He attempts a so-called "ethical lying" that promotes only noble agendas and - this is the kicker - promises not to hurt anybody.
He scatters his virtues to the four heavenly winds by throwing his demonstrative palm up, down, and sideways. And yet he still doesn't know how to choose between red herrings, white lies, and blue moons.
So House, famous hater of the long con, really doesn't care that Wilson is angry when he lies to save House's ass.
I didn't tell you to do that. Only you thought it was necessary. The prescription grift? A joint decision, my hand and my leg on your pen and your pad. My pain now for your pain later. It all checks out. It all fits.
What is anger, anyway? The emotion is redirected shame at being betrayed, disobeyed, or taken for a ride. Take your pick, it's all the same in the end for what it does to the nose on your face. The emission, then, is lashing out, because anger is hurt is pain is loss of control is lack of ultimate trust.
Wilson's angry because he doesn't trust House to do as he says and get the better of Tritter. Won't want to take him at his wicked old word. Thinks the lying law is a surer thing than the leights of the layman. Now, just whose fault is that?
Ah, authenticity - a manifest welfare, one of those lovely societally-shared burdens that nobody seems to actually want.
And so, ladies and gents, there you have it: everybody lies because everybody lies.
You don't love people, Wilson tells him, as confused as he is confident. You just like to use them to stroke your own ego, to serve your own goals.
And, thinks House, just what is supposed to be the difference?
The sheer volume of names and faces House cycles through his wheelhouse because he found them interesting enough to ensnare for a while - isn't that, really, an elemental form of love? Hanging around people because they captivate you sure seems a hell of a lot more romantic than cozying up to the nearest source of body heat.
House will never profess to being a being composed of love. Obviously not. He's not one of those people who thinks of love as a great force instead of a simple exchange of bonding chemicals. But if he must participate in somebody's rituals, he'll choose the way that suits him best.
No, he doesn't love the hookers. He likes them, though. Likes them a lot. Likes them enough to have favorites, to have almost-friendship with the special ones.
(To have a death-grip attachment to the ones he likes the best, enough to--
Actually, we can't bury the lead in a parenthetical.
Enough to interfere. Enough to intervene. Enough to superimpose his own judgement.
Yeah, yeah, House bullies everyone within arm's reach and some of those without if they deviate from him significantly enough. And yeah, yeah, he crosses a lot-a-lot of lines - some physical, some medical, some social, some spiritual.
He reserves his good manners for the people he hates the most - and even then, only under duress. His negative games are gambits of esteem, attempting to bring his colleagues up to his level because it's the only air he knows how to breathe.
(Because when he breathes the basic oxygen, he's not nearly as criminally sharp. That's the only time the world knows how to see you - when you're nothing less than brilliant.)
But to say that he doesn't love people, any of them, just because the ways he shows it are strange?
It's a crude defense for a crude man. That's why he never makes such an argument.
But then Wilson says, I need you to tell me you love me. I need to know it's going to be okay.
And both of these are oxymoronical statements. If House tells, he doesn't love. If Wilson dies, it's not okay.
How can he love Wilson if Wilson's going to be gone? How can he change Wilson's life, leave his everlasting stamp on it, if Wilson's life is over?
Don't you change me, man whose mother named James. Don't you cage me.
Don't you let me love you. Don't ever let me be nice.
Chris Taub accepted that some things were facts of genetics. Male pattern baldness was principal among them. Also height, downturned eyes, and prominent noses. Several environs of the buccal space. He usually stayed away from otoplasties.
Personally, he accepted this. Professionally, he was a wizard behind a white-coated curtain bestowing upon his suppliants the too-good-to-be-true cheat code promising, or at the very least paywalling, lives of respect and attraction. So, people like House would argue, he didn't accept this personally either. Seeing as he didn't, according to House, have very much of a personality to come home to.
"How come you always seem so bored?" Kutner would ask him - Kutner, the only one on the team who'd ever dream of uttering the boss's trademark pronouncement of "cool" when learning of an intractable and incurable problem in perfectly incomprehensible form.
Kutner, who defied the stereotype (you know, because Indian doctors aren't a product of genetics but rather long-steeped generational culture) by being a kinesiologist instead of a physician and stopping along the way to fall asleep in class. If he hadn't wandered into PPTH, he'd be off somewhere giving athletes and actors their lives back. He'd have an extraordinary ticket out of the oft-maligned Central Jersey into the lights of the island.
But Kutner didn't want that. He didn't want a great and glamorous life. He didn't even want to help people in such a tactile fashion. He just wanted a life, a job and not a career, that would live itself out without incident. Only so much chaos into every life can roll. So Kutner wanted to be great at House's elbow, and keep his own geeky schnozz clean.
"Because medicine is boring," Taub would reply. "That's why they call it jargon."
Anything is jargon, once you become removed from a profession that deals itself above the desk in boob jobs and tummy tucks. Yeah, yeah. Laugh at the middle-aged man talking like a middle-schooler. Somehow, it sounds so much more fake when you call it a -plasty.
There was nothing he could point to that specifically told him he couldn't enjoy his work. No reason he couldn't talk the talk, play the games. Even distribution on either side. Perfect ambivalence, for an unsentimental world.
But House would poke and prod and press until he punctured the last remaining bulb of Taub's ever-shifting self-esteem. Not because he couldn't stand people who were happy, but because he couldn't stand people who chalked it up and didn't care.
The Remy B. Hadley Memorial Scholarship for the Advancement of the Sciences in Young Women with Neurological and Developmental Disorders, otherwise known as the Thirteens Prize, comprises awards of several orders of magnitude. Middle school applicants will win $1300 to cover the cost of registration for various STEM summer camps available across the country. High schoolers will see $13,000 for advanced enrollment into junior REUs. The actual undergraduates have a chance at $130,000, equivalent to two years of full tuition and fees at most private research universities. Honorable mentions can expect to enjoy $130 for individual textbooks, experiment kits, and miscellaneous field trips.
As overwrought and kitschy as the concept is, it's also bluntly targeted to its intended outcome: maximize the time available for curious individuals to ask life-changing questions. Some may feel like their lives are on hold. Others may be brimming with the possibilities spread out in front of them as their lives are about to begin. All of them need one less reason to say why not.
The funds for the scholarship surfaced from the cushy coffers of Dr. James Wilson's retirement accounts, with instructions for aggressive reinvestment. These were augmented slightly by the sale of the piano the late doctor had bought a decade prior, in addition to a stray rollover with a suspiciously similar financial contour to the liquid assets once possessed by a reckless, ruthless motorcycle rider who made his last promise and died in a fire.
Dean Foreman was assigned to be the steward, because he was a neurologist and because he could accept that it only made sense. Still, he recruited Dr. Cuddy as a more visibly appropriate figurehead, and she judges applications from afar in a quiet, shaky-smiled transport of and from grief.
(The panel, of course, displays a greater de facto diversity of pedigree than what comes of simply assembling Dr. Hadley's once-immediate colleagues, but the primary members that remain year over year, in addition to Dr. Cuddy, are Drs. Masters, Adams, and Park.)
Dr. Cuddy's daughter is somewhat ambivalent about the sciences. She participates earnestly, if not eagerly, in her classes and likes the drawing-conclusions segment of the scientific method. Also, she enjoys listing errata and addenda in unnecessary detail. Or maybe she just likes the feel of Latin plural forms under the tip of her tongue.
She doesn't apply for the Thirteens. Her epilepsy, on most days, is of greater note as a 504 than it is as an actual impediment. It would skew the judging, anyway - make the committee waste time scrambling for a new way to weight scores in the absence of Dr. Cuddy's inherently conflicted interest.
Rachel doesn't apply, and she doesn't attend the convocation at Einstein either. Her reward is being allowed to stay at home without a babysitter, but the general moroseness of this somber teenage moment lacks any sparkle.
Such a weighty responsibility. Such a strong, independent upbringing. Such an empty rancher bungalow, to be replaced with the foreign sameness of a classmate's on the morrow.
She's not on her period, thankfully, but she feels like vegetating anyway.
She sighs. She squirms. She thinks about raiding the fridge for something sweeter than lasgna leftovers. Almost restless enough to fidget with the lightswitches until she can discern the ghost of creature comfort - but not quite.
Act natural. Talk amongst yourselves. Pretend there's nobody here.
A strange car pulls up to the end of their driveway, idling conspiciously. Were her mother home, Rachel would dismiss it. Just someone trying to cut through the no-thru-traffic development (as someone she can't quite remember used to say, when they put up that sign, you know that cul-de-sac really has something special to offer; only thing more exciting is "Duck Crossing") and wind up in the industrial park on the other side.
It's not a No Outlet. It's not that you can't cut through. It's just that the residents would really, really prefer you not to. Or the zoning committee, anyway.
(Maybe the enticing sign was Mute Child At Play. Maybe that's what the crotchety parrot of wisdom said.)
The longer the car idles, the tighter Rachel draws up her knees toward her chest. Her tablet collapses over its soft-touch kickstand and Rachel absently thumbs at it to pause the video. Any hope of distracting herself long enough to get up and get a blanket is softly suffocated.
When another car passes by (doing 35 and not a righteous 20), Rachel momentarily fumbles the signal. She can't hear it - did it putter away?
But no, its idling had been far too discontented and gravelly for it to have shifted into drive and blown the attendant popsicle stand without merging with the passing car entirely.
Rachel peers up over the back of the couch, through the tea lights in the bay window, across the front lawn.
The vehicle is more nondescript than it had sounded, but not so nondescript as to be definitely a stalker. Of course, it's difficult to tell if the headlights are blacked out when the lights are off entirely. Not a regular sedan, but not a sports car either. Something more like a vintage police car.
Who would want to kidnap her? Who would know that her mother's gone to a conference, of sorts, and isn't there to defend her roost? More than that, who would possess both of these pieces of information put together?
Rachel had had an idyllic enough childhood that she hadn't immediately resorted to complex fantasies of reunions and rediscoveries, people appearing at strange places and times or else at weddings and funerals and bat mitzvahs.
Not immediately. But she had stood at the bimah, gazing out over the entire synagogue packed with its usual Saturday-morning cast and very few people she actually cared to make proud, and stumbled her way through the aliyah, and wondered for a moment if some mysterious stranger might appear in the threshold and grace her coming of age with a strange and fantastic change.
Someone whose face she had forgotten and never been allowed to recall. Someone whose scent had long faded from her memories of toddlerhood.
(Someone she intermittently wanted to google but wouldn't, because she shared a sort of superstition about her mother's latent fear. And because she was equally afraid of finding something and of finding nothing at all.)
She's broken out of her panicked reverie by the sound of the Crown Victoria turning over, then cutting out just as suddenly.
Don't answer the door for strangers. Obviously. To say nothing of letting them into your life, don't let them into your safe space. Mom had stressed that, and Rachel had dismissed it. Obviously. I get that. I know.
She knows, but she ignores. She hears, but she doesn't listen.
As the midnight visitor lurches up the walk, diverting around the parked car like a disc magnet experiencing repulsion, Rachel swallows and pops her jaw from side to side. Maybe she'd feel more ready for the encroaching threat if she were wearing anything sterner than taupe fuzzy slippers.
But the porch gives way to the entrant's final approach, delivering a step of three beats to her ears.
She flings the solid front door open and wide, refusing to give the spook the satisfaction of a knock.
And then, because she's been watching Doc Martin as religiously as the battery-sapped Kindle Fire will allow, Rachel Cuddy erupts her fourteen-year-old fury:
"You...bloody...SCALLYWAG!"
For the duration of House's tenure (perhaps literal, perhaps figurative) at PPTH under the stress of the infarction, he regularly proclaimed himself as a cripple (and if, in those days, he had been told to stop perpetuating the usage of an insensitive ableist slur, he would only have redoubled his commitment). He did not, however, ever stoop to describing his injured leg as a stump, and since only an incredibly sparse fraction of his acquaintances had ever actually seen the scar, it was a strange incoherence to attempt to match the pejorative disability with the man who had supposedly become disabled.
He couldn't run, no, but who needed to run in a hospital? Indeed, his stalking gait was quicker and surer than most, so it seemed. Excepting the brief stint with the shoulder physio, he so rarely actually showed his omnipresent and omnipotent pain. Even if his bones were hollow, his biceps were healthy. No less capable. No less confident. He hid his handicap well, as much as he alternately flaunted and flouted it; he appeared to be a particularly agile specimen of headless horse.
All that to say, the last time Rachel saw House, he seemed larger than life and stronger than suns. Her mother could move mountains with her little finger, but House could move them with his mind. Now, ten years departed, there was no such hiding it. She thought with a coppery pang that he might really have been stabler if he did have those wooden legs.
So, she couldn't kick. Instead, she had no choice but to sucker-punch.
Wilson has always had trouble suspecting things about House. After all, Gregory House is not one about which one is often or ever granted the great luxury of suspecting. He's not one about which one often needs to develop theories.
Moreover, he never wastes time being suspicious. He's ironclad, or else in an iron lung. Just know and do - he lives it.
Lived it. And then he died. In a blaze of glory, you could say.
Wilson never suspected for a moment that House wasn't actually dead. He might have wished it, might have fantasized, might have submerged himself in sickly denial, but if he had truly lain in wait for another trick coming, his hand would have been first to the pocket to check the phone that no one on earth at that very dour moment had any heavenly right to call.
House, the ruiner of hardasses' funerals, didn't deserve a beautiful moment, so Wilson didn't give him one. Neither did he gift him a glorious strain of loyalty.
Beautiful. Unblemished. Radiating beams and symmetry. Yes, glorious. And never boring!
But House was not any particular theoretical mathematician. Always strictly applied, his physics. Always completely irrelevant and acontextual, his metaphors.
(The thing about a cop car, House would say, apropos of nothing, is that you never know it's just speeding until it doesn't turn its strobe light on. Meanwhile, us plebeians are stuck nursing the speed limit to cover our fenders. And then some decorated and well-meaning protein vector would turn out to be up to no good, drunk driving. The perfect crime for a municipal bully.)
He suspected that House had never really loved him for his beauty, the way everyone else was drawn to an impeccably clean-shaven youthful complexion tempered with distinguished threads of gray. He suspected that House had more of an inside-out hatred than a genuine appreciation for most forms of human beauty. He suspected that he would die never really knowing what it was that he had done, in this most singular of arenas, to distinguish himself.
A matter of coincidence? But of course, all coincidences are suspicious.
You don't suspect something that can never be proven true. So it would be foolish for Wilson to say that he ever suspected House would enjoy being the walking dead. That he would relish living in the shadows, pulling strings without ever again having to front up a thorough throughline of personality. That he would be somehow right at home in a Cast Away convent, drawing faces on himself and his cane.
It would be foolish. It would be ludicrous. Not least of all, because House was the poster manchild for stir-crazy.
(You also don't suspect things that you know, point blank. And yet House had always been an incredibly suspicious individual.)
It would also be foolish to be Wilson, three years ago, and not ever once see it coming.
The study of people and privacy is not one House considers to be most efficiently motivated by the multicolor hula hoop of beseeching his subordinates to smile and wave, clear their throats, go around in a circle and share. What they want to reveal is usually not possibly all that interesting, and certainly never remotely actually revealing. There are those who carry auras of esoterica and erudition (of course, these heralded by aspirated Hs), encouraging the mundane arcana in full breadth of plain speech, that do indeed draw manifest benefit from the infinitesimal regimenting of their discussions in such a way that the communal experience becomes a sort of spiritual kindergarten of the arts...but House is not one.
House is a doctor. He's not a professor. He's certainly not a teacher.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym. And those who can't teach gym are corporate middle-managers.
Or so they say.
(Damn it, Jim.)
But since Kutner had appeared to remain entrenched in a sort of unscholastic forever-young joie de vivre up until the very moment that he hadn't, when House had sarcastically posed the prompt that they sing Kumbayah and tell each other about their favorite patients - in order to avoid one about which they all felt unadulterated sluggish ambivalence while waiting on blood cultures and other complications - he'd shot up in his seat: "Ooh, I got one!"
And then House, who employed his cane liberally even in such fine-motor contexts as that of rolling his eyes, leaned all the way forward and all the way back until he found the strength to sputter out, "Okay, class," and pause for gravitas, "Lawrence" - he launched the muddy syllabic join off of some aerodynamic slope betwixt hard palate, molars and canines - "wants to share."
During his residency at CU Boulder, he'd been in the OR with a symphony orchestra conductor whose right rotator cuff had, more or less, fallen off the bone. Three screws saw it reattached, and Kutner had attended enthusiastically for the recovery and initial rounds of physical therapy.
"Guy was crazy, but kinda cool. He told me all about his life. How he was lucky that he learned to conduct left-handed from one of his teachers and how he knew there was no way he'd ever trade all his concerts for an uninjured arm. He said..."
Kutner trailed off, smiling to himself. Once he'd glanced around and confirmed the rapt-ish attention of all present, he finished: "Conductors don't retire. They just drop dead. Maybe on stage. Maybe in their dressing rooms. But he said it's all good."
It's all good. No blaze of glory. Natural causes, because you so chose to invest yourself.
Frequently, House's mind returns to that baseless claim. There is no reason for life beyond the Big Bang, so it is feasible to construct an equal lack of justification on the part of the reaper. And yet, who could possibly be so nonchalant?
Guy was crazy, but successful. In other words, intense. House can't imagine such a palpable personal intensity that ever lets anything go.
(He wants, retroactively, to have been in the room with that guy. To have engaged the rational loss of a limb. To destroy the myth of the genius, well-adjusted.)
(To plug his intellectual finger into the source of the stimulation, the case that tipped clean-conscienced Kutner off his rocker.)
House doesn't remember the piano teacher (Mrs. Rosemary Miller, whose living room was always vaguely frigid and whose reading glasses case always smelled faintly of potpourri) ever having to manually position his hands for best technique. Having studied her own arthritic pumps of Clementi and Anna Magdalena, he could clearly tell what a hindrance it would be to puppet his fingers over the keys and clomp down in a rough rhythm poised to enact complete sabotage unto the elegance of the obligato, the ostinato, the strolling Alberti bass.
It had to be fluid. You couldn't clamp the heels of your hands to the chin of the keyboard either, but if one imagined a pulley system with elbows as counterweights...it was a delicate equilibrium.
He didn't spend very long with Mrs. Miller. She taught him the value of a two-note phrase, listened to his technical interpretations with the kind of only-sometimes-keen eye and ear that could provide the most subtly thought-provoking feedback or else the most blatantly gormless praise, and indicated what it was about Chopin études that would or wouldn't follow in sequence from Beethoven bagatelles. And then he moved, and she moved on to the next unwitting eight-year-old upon which she proceeded to dole out her half-woken pedagogy.
The teenage Greg didn't "go to the living room" to "practice his scales"; instead, he ferretted out institutional instruments wherever he could find them and determined that the abstract figures of jazz, so casually open to being started and stopped ad libitum, were to be his anchor.
Rachmaninoff sounded like a perverted Runglish colloquialism, and House had long decided to save his shoulders for horizontal torsion by way of lost athleticism rather than emphatic vertical hammering until the pianoforte climaxed and the orchestra had to take over to cover its chattering chromatic orgasm.
In a flash of something completely different, House returns himself to reality: Rachel Cuddy, her five-year-old fingers, and the total lack of caution that is the starkest removal of this scene from that OR seven years prior where tiny muscles had flexed to grasp onto a smooth ivory lever of force connected to a machine far more complex than they realized.
Rachel slouches dramatically, and her wrists take on a posture mirroring that of her ceiling-pointed chin. "Don't like these noootes," she proclaims. "Why can't I play something pretty like you?"
Her chin swivels down and sideways, giggling eyes threaded by untrimmed bangs much less threatening than her velcro Mary Janes dangling in range to stomp a socked, sneakerless foot. The utility of the left hand, in House's mind, easily trumps that of the damper pedal, so he sits down-bench with his bad leg bumping up against Rachel. Sitting in somebody else's lap is no way to establish a solid relationship with the action of the keys.
It's true, sonatinas do little to inspire the thrilling young heart just learning to sing. House isn't sure the Great American Songbook has much to say to modern-day juveniles non-delinquent, either, but maybe it's worth a try.
(If all music must be beautiful ("pretty") by definition or edict, then Rachel's deficiency is purely a problem of technique. If beauty is in the heart of the beholder, then House is beholden to no ideals of classicism, and neither is she. So maybe that's true.)
If Rachel stretches her little digits out as far as they'll go, they can reach about the same number of notes that House can with his palm relaxed, so he directs her to hold up her best counting fingers and covers her right hand with his own, hovering over middle C.
Someday, my prince will come - he doesn't sing it, but hums it close-mouthed while his left hand arpeggiates the chord progression underneath. First a perfect fourth, then seconds and thirds within the space it carved out. The same again with a minor sixth. Motif and sequence. A perfect quote, the calm cross-section of an infinite river.
At first, Rachel has all her concentration screwed up into the bit of tongue poking out between her lips, determined to ace her part in this performance, but once she realizes that her hand has become little more than an extension of House's, she peers up into his face to examine the source of the humming.
He winces. He draws back his ears. All the muscles in his face go blank. And then he smiles, still with his eyes closed.
She feels his joints curve above hers, pressing both of their fingertips to the keys and then swiping away the tension as coolly as it had appeared. The song sounds full, melody simple and harmony intricate, and even though Rachel's mind is far from the advanced musical mechanism that can introduce and excise descant ornaments at will, she feels House's hand fidget less and less for the flicker of other opportunities the more they play.
Rachel usually only plays for about three minutes at a time, and as much as her mother loves to see her dedicating herself to a challenging task with singular focus, she's an active and inquisitive enough child that not making her execute thirty minutes of due diligence daily is hardly a concession, at five years old.
She could sit here for three hours, however, she decides, and not nearly be overcome by a fit of the wiggles or the urge to fall asleep. Even if House seems like he's going to. Even if he hasn't looked this peaceful in a long time. She wouldn't pull back her hand even if she could.
House knows better than anyone that knowing about something, confirming it, is not nearly the same thing as getting ahead of it.
Should know, anyway. Has spent more than enough time (more than too much) obsessing over cases, non-clinical extreme one-off instances, lost lives long gone by the wayside, trying desperately just to wring out the last possible drop of truth. Even when it doesn't change anything. Especially when it can't change anything, because then it's that much easier for him to convince the grieving families to grant autopsy consent.
And that's when he's focused on guilting himself, blaming his brain, for not being able to solve the puzzle and provide the treatment. Huntington's doesn't have one. Its onset will be obvious, if it comes. What's the point in knowing?
(What's the point in hoping, is the real rhetorical question Thirteen refuses to phrase.)
What about his leg? What about how he wanted to delay the inevitable, leave the rotting muscle stranded in the median of the traffic circle in his leg, just begging to start throwing garbage into the windows of oncoming cars?
He found out too late. A matter of days. What wicked, haggard vindication is he seeking now?
How could you not know, he says. How could you not know, he said to his attending. How could you not know, Remy thinks to her younger self.
But it wouldn't have changed anything. It couldn't have changed anything. So she goes on, living her life, assuming as faintly as the ghostly comfort of suicidal ideation that eventually the tremors will come.
She's not pretending. She's ignoring. There's a difference - one much subtler than mere coincidence.
It's her choice. Obviously. House, the master of coercion, understands this fact but refuses to acknowledge it, because he thinks that little of fate and that much of Thirteen. Or, because he's truly that polarized against any earthly form of hypocrisy.
Because when he really knows someone, they become beholden to his rules. Because he's compelled to treat her as he does himself.
Because he can't know if or when his end is going to come. But her life is right there for the taking.
The intractability of their work, she believes, she can stand. It's not always an enviable position, but it's a noble kind of one. Not everyone can do it. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's difficult work, and it naturally requires empathy.
When House can't provide that empathy, Cameron is happy to be the one who steps up. Who steps in, if need be. Maybe her approach is the last resort sometimes. Most times. Sports metaphors - most Hail Marys are senseless last-ditch attempts, but in accordance with House's logic, he calls in Cameron when all of his long shots have failed to stick the landing.
Save the best for last. Maybe House can be right that making a compassionate dosage of thoroughly informed consent the initial strategy won't do an aggressive treatment plan any favors. One that really needs that many favors eventually just won't pan out, though.
It's who she is. She won't be ashamed of it, as much as House persists in attempting to make her so.
No, she's fine with being wrong. She's fine with not always being right, or vindicated. It's the vetoing of her every decisive effort that batters her where it counts. The relentless flinging of every sensible middle ground out to the fringe where it can be tried, tested, and treated for its apparent weakness.
Chase is called a suck-up because he tends to get along with his boss. Foreman butts heads with him and follows his example all the same.
They're not stupid. They're not facile. And House knows it. That's why they're here. Not just to learn and hover at the elbow of the master, but to act as his multiplicative, multi-specialized instruments. To take a swim around inside his brain and get something done for all the people he can't be bothered to engage.
Cameron's still not sure whether or not she believes he actually could do it all on his own, ignorant of lab timelines and the god-given gift of nurses. She's definitely sure Chase and Foreman need the extra hands, eyes and ears. Just like her.
Diversity hire, House says. Affirmative action. Just for your looks. Oh, but you might have been equally interesting if you were ugly. There's an explanation for everything, and no coincidences. Don't worry, I like that you hit like a girl.
He throws the insults around so casually, and Cameron swears she's tough enough to brush them off, but she's not immune to flesh wounds just because her heart, of all her fellows', is closest to the sleeve.
She wants to coexist with them. She wants to be able to enjoy her work on her terms. Whenever she and Chase and Foreman are sitting together in the conference room, enjoying each other's company as they read journals or chart or gossip, that's the cue for House to stalk in and disturb everything.
Wilson has it right (even though Wilson has no right to agree, to know). He despises anything that does something so awful as cohere and hang together. He has to tamper, to break it.
There's no room for either homogeneity or heterogeneity on House's team. Not even for a prolonged status of "interesting" or complex or one-note or kick-ass or kiss-ass. Only complete, brutal separation, administered in impartial dimensionless quantities right up until the end.
The feeling is less like that of seeing a substitute teacher at the supermarket and more like that of listening to the classical public radio announcer pronounce each majestic syllable of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as if the name is new and foreign and the composition, daring and novel instead of bouncy and trite, equally qualified toward the prospect of lending cultural mystery and aural intrigue.
(Like someone's overcompensating for counting to four. We know what it is, people. We got it. We're good.)
A million countries. A thousand eyes. A hundred hands. And always, one thumb stroking across the high, shallow arc of her cheekbone. Knowing. Telling. Pleading.
As his fellows went, Thirteen had always been one to whom House had nothing much to give. There were things he thrust upon the others, mostly brutally honest and brutally insensitive commentary on the dirtiest and most circuitously laid innards of their lives, and things he took from them all across the tapestry of capacities they each possessed and served, but Thirteen promised much more to him than he had ever promised to her.
(Of note, prim and unapologetic bisexuality, the kind that straddled the fence so intuitively that the target became unassailable. The kind that made everybody, no matter what, want you on their team.)
He offered to her, as he did to everyone, nothing but the truth, where he saw his way to clear to spotlight it. She already lived her perfect, seamless truth, however. Her charisma remained propped up by no beautifying, obscuring and accentuating lie.
Except this. Except this, which he could and would (and, told himself, should) give her, as no physician since Kevorkian ever dreamed to do.
He didn't save lives. He solved puzzles. This had always been true, ever manifest. He was also, currently, behind and beyond the law, so there was no need to essay forth to the Pacific Northwest to make do of it. To lay the final tile, and ensure that all had said their piece.
This, what he could give to her. This, what he would take from her. This, the sowing and the reaping.
Thirteen, smooth-talking fast-walking angel, was offered, by her doctor, death.
In the middle of the laundry aisle, surrounded by matches and paper towels, wearing a pilly black peacoat and a two-frame time-delay scowl that seems to click at the approximate volume of a strawberry seed stuck in a six-year molar as it grows and shrinks, grows and shrinks, not just minute but menial.
(Of particular exclusion: Rachel Cuddy and Mark Warner.)