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Chapter 01: give birth to the next beat [2026-02-24]

"But it's Thursday. You never have plans on Thursday."

"This week is concert week."

The patient needs overnight observation, or their scheming partner does, or their parents are sobbing, or they're presumptuously - fallaciously, misguidedly, overconfidently - preparing to be discharged, or he's gloating, or he's lonely, or he's sick of people altogether, or he's trying to pass off some administrative penalty or other, or he's just trying to be an ass. Any or all could be true. Everyone else has already disappeared, leaving only Taub to mope about the outer office in his usual miserable single-ish-ness.

Taub, who suddenly looks harried, as if he's got someplace with a hard start to go and he's late. All House can think to say is, "Why?"

"I thought about trying out for the Jefferson university chorus," Taub replies airily, "but the parking's a drag, and I just don't think Sataloff likes me."

Of course House knows the parking in Philly's abominable - for people who don't have handicapped tags, that is. Attending the Orchestra's concerts was a strictly Stacy affair, but he was still the one who bought the tickets in the conductor's circle, fruitlessly circled block after block of the Avenue of the Arts trying in vain to find that mythical underground Kimmel parking garage, and standing to the side smiling nervously as his partner made enthusiastic post-concert conversations of her own with other audience members ("We came all this way, Greg, might as well enjoy it a little!").

But somehow he has no particular inclination to let Taub know that. Let him while away the hours at Alexander Hall playing Mozart with med students and English majors. It's his business.

His fellows' personal business, of course, being one of Gregory House's acute professional specialities.

When House steps inside the dimly-lit gothic hall, he imagines that this is what Old Man Marley must have felt like entering that church in Home Alone: not excluded by definition, but rather by personal perpetuation of reputation as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He sees Park and Masters chatting as they unpack, Adams positioning her rock stop on stage, and sure enough, Taub tuning an upright bass whose pegs hover benevolently above his bald spot. Also, Cuddy, assembling a clarinet, and Amber, through setting up and coyly offering her best 442 A. Because of course she has to control everything.

He finds Cameron at the northwest stand of the first concentric ring (what is that, associate principal?) sitting next to an Asian woman in scrubs with embroidered eyeglasses. Cameron is focused and intent on slowly ironing out the intracies of a quasi-scalular run with string crossings - one such intricacy, apparently, being the rhythmic bob of her head that accidentally applies accents to every fourth note.

The third stand outside first violinist, however, is not warming up, and is instead just staring at her. Violin is an unexpected hobby occupation for Chase, House has to admit; bowling made much more sense. But there are the things people like to say about surgeons' hands, and then there's sticking your stubby digits into rubber holes inside a greasy sphere of resin and polyurethane. So maybe not everything Chase does has to be about being Australian.

Speaking of crude stereotypes, Foreman can be spotted somewhere in the back ranks of the violas, also sporting the blank stare of intense concentration - distantly, House reminds himself that just because his fellows are hopelessly green and recklessly special to him doesn't mean that they hold any such promising juvenile weight among a doctors' orchestra based at an institution that prioritizes undergraduates, so it's no marker of skill whether or not they're visible from below the mezzanine.

Is it even really a doctors' orchestra, though? House can't help but smirk to himself when he sees Dobson tucked into a row of brass instruments of varying sizes. Sure, he knows the difference between a trumpet and a trombone, but he's not so sure on mellophones versus baritones versus euphoniums, and whether or not orchestras tend to use them. The thing Brennan's holding is probably definitely a tuba, and--

And House hates himself for second-guessing, for inserting himself into a context into which he obviously has not been invited and does not belong.

Thirteen's got physical therapy on Thursdays, supposedly. Cole's got a kid. Kutner...

...is in the wings balancing a triangle against the beater and the clip holding it to the stand.

Basically, everyone's here but Wilson, House's sole ally, and unless all those years of downright abysmal displays of coordination and non-sequiturious two-step hand gestures have been naught but a clever ruse, House takes some small measure of comfort in the fact that the bassoonists look like random long-haired med students and not like fastidious department heads.

(He wonders what Thirteen would play, if she were here. If it would help stave off her Huntington's or just hurt it on the uptake the same way a punch to the gut might even feel worse if your muscles were tensed and ready for it. If any of the French horn players ever sacrifice pitch or tone quality just to get lazy and rest the bell on their leg.)

He sort of wants Cuddy to be bad at the clarinet, because there would be a klezmer joke in there somewhere and because it would justify her being a party girl instead of a band geek, but he also doesn't, because it would be unattractive.

Unless the resident community orchestra of an Ivy League university is across-the-board tone-deaf and sounds like a garbage fire without so much as setting a single viola on fire, this whole thing is actually a remarkable spectacle of hypercompetence.

House finds confidence attractive (yeah, yeah, who doesn't?). House finds himself unconfident watching his fellows and their musical colleagues go about their evening speaking the classical language together. Jazz trios are exposed, precise, fluid. Orchestras are eighty-piece organic machines.

And House finds himself, instead of shrugging off the conductor's inquisition with a quip about forming the ultimate five-chord band, hoping to hear Rhapsody in Blue with the soloist in absentia. Maybe it's not very likely, during concert week, but a music man can dream, can't he?