they say no one has ever escaped from stalag 13

paying my tricksy little homage to these [1] [2]

Thirteen, by virtue of never having been particularly devoted to her work, can never quite decide whether she truly appreciates - appreciated - having had a boundary-pusher rather than a pencil-pusher for a boss. It makes it tougher to avoiding all that leaning in. It also makes it much, much easier to withdraw.

It's counterintuitive, isn't it? You'd think that attending a cult of personality by day would lead to you being funny in the head at night. But if nobody's performing personality at all, you get too caught up on the little things. You get to feel a little bit self-crazy.

She's never worked corporate and she never will. From white coat to orange jumpsuit to a halo, tied like a noose. Maybe it's what the gold collar really should be.

House, meanwhile, snarls so much he could probably do with a shock collar. He's an edgy jerk, a terminal teenager, a human middle finger with two thumbs and three legs. His business is getting into other people's business, and convincing them that they should be that way too. Except when it comes to his business, of course. He used to be more guarded in practice, but since rehab and lockup it seems to Thirteen that all that remains is the theory, the behavior beyond the reward. All teeth and no tongue. Obviously.

No secrets. No soft-touch. No sanctity. No sympathy. Shocking, that he'd been doing domestic doctoring in the dark of night virtually in parallel with her. Maybe less shocking but more chilling, that he'd been the one to teach Chase everything he knows.

The problem is, he's not just indiscriminately (totally discriminately) consuming of everyone and everything at work, his own centrifugal black hole; he's consumed by his work. He's addicted to the pills and the promise of putting off paperwork in equal measure.

He never asked, do you prefer hipsters or boyshorts? Instead, he said, I'll kill you if you don't come back to work for me.

Right. Saving her from herself, from him, from the big scary hospital where she killed a man with muscular atrophy, shuddered through the motions of killing herself with a cocktail of intravenous drugs, and unwittingly participated in the defrauding of a clinical trial by way of being too beautiful ever to fail or decline, in the administrator's eyes.

Thomas Stark had been her first patient loss. The first one, you're supposed to get over, and at the same time, never forget.

Was it because he was relatively young, because he had already lost so much that this final brutal inch seemed an even crueler injustice to levy?

Or was it because he was already disabled, that he had so little left to lose in the eyes of society?

Disposable. Procedural. And the dog died too, so that helped wrap up loose ends.

Every time Thirteen grasped for this thread as an idle comfort, a Doylist rationalization, she had to slap herself back. Amber was right to haunt her for that. Amber would be right to haunt her, even still.

It would never be okay. Still, it would have to be. Not all malpracticing doctors die fast and young in bus crashes and jail cells.

Some live to get old and wretched and dedicate their lives to the lymph of what was lost.

House can't possibly harbor, say, Hourani's guilt. It's never been that kind of identity theft, and the transplant surgeon doesn't weigh in on the committee or their list. Say, Richardson, stoned out of his toilet bowl, gray areaing someone's gray matter because this is the gifted calling and we'd all be better off if we tabled it and went to Woodstock, baby! Is balancing a body's veins on the pad of your latex finger really so matter-of-fact?

House doesn't deal that way.

He doesn't believe in absolution, and he especially doesn't believe in it on the part of others. He hasn't just isolated himself from every possible person, he's othered himself.

It almost begs the question: is House a performative male?

Thirteen ponders this in tandem with her current state skewed out on House's couch, both of them in their own variations on t-shirt and boxers, squinting across at each other as they alternately nurse black coffee and ice water.

Sort of gimmicky. But refreshing that way.

She'd found that it was actually more stressful to force herself to haul up out of the Chinese-food-and-Dutch-beer stupor and stagger her shaky way along home to Amy than it was to just accept that Friday night and Saturday morning were conjoined twins, sharing one heart at bloody midnight.

So now she's here, with House. He massages his thigh and fights back acid reflux. She twitches her neck and wishes to know the difference between a factitious psychosomatic placebo and onset, when it's her own extremities querulously quivering.

"People are strange," she mutters. It's a small delight. A very small one.

"I think I heard that in a song once," he replies, voice blithe but gaze narrow.

"Sometimes I feel like you're not a person."

"Because I'm a god? Oh, right, no, because I don't believe in one."

His voice has that thin, scuzzy quality that comes of him only opening his mouth halfway while still trying to talk up out of it. The "because" is hopelessly, stupidly garbled. It's harmless. Neutered. Cohesive with the rest of the picture, neck knifed out at an angle to compensate for poor posterior posture against the back of the couch (the better to alleviate pressure on the leg from the groin).

She might once have called it his Cuddy voice. Not that she was around at the time. But it's sort of performative, this tenor, and it's so different from the way he used to speak to her - Thirteen, her - and the way they spoke to each other in Schenectady. Lots of words falling down out of painstakingly loosed lips; upper lip daring, lower lip holding fast.

"The motorcycle was a big surprise."

"Really?"

House tries not to sound genuinely interested, because it's small talk, but because it's small talk, he has no choice: for him, sounding bored is actually a chore.

"Really," repeats Thirteen, almost mocking him but not quite. "I remember asking Wilson about it. He said it didn't make sense to him either, but it also did - 'part Fonzie, part Monk, part...Dean Winchester,'" she says, mimicking Wilson's unmistakable tight-buttoned tumble-forth all-for-the-lack-of-a-motive rhythm with fluttering but unfrustrated eyelids.

"Well, when you put it that way, it should have been obvious who I was going to hire."

Still here, hungover, in the indistinct tone. "Yeah?"

House motions with loosely curled fist as if his index finger points down the length of his cane and his thumb hugs it from the side. Target practice toward an invisible bullseye on the far wall. "Got a thing for neurotic Jews."

"Fonzie wasn't Jewish."

"Yeah he was. He just didn't know it because he was cozying up to the WASPs so close he got honey stuck up his ass."

"So...Kutner inverted?"

The phantom cane drops. "I was gonna say that Foreman's a hood. But sure, Kutner's got the hair."

Now he sounds a little more Houselike, if a lot more self-conscious, which is very un-House-like. Because he has made himself up to be a very specific person with very specific gouges, like the coffee table the mismatched mugs sit on: it boasts three chips unmarked and one dubbed Alvie. All accounted for. All checked and balanced.

Just like how having a boring boss or a nondescript, indecipherable father makes it more difficult to buy a Christmas gift instead of less. House puts a hell of a lot of effort into showing you all of the things he can do, know, say, be, wonder, so that you won't have any time or space left over to contemplate anything that he doesn't already know about himself.

Like that he's balding, maybe. Maybe it's all just overcompensation for that one spot, but that one spot is spreading. He's running out of time to build better myths, sharper arrows, stronger walls.

"Whatever," rejoins Thirteen, uncomfortable with pretending self-centered even to save House, let alone herself, but distantly resigned to protecting Kutner's memory from further posthumous lambast. "What about me?"

"Bisexual, family trauma, looks good in cars that aren't nearly as functionally aerodynamic as their passengers." He leaves a beat. "Killed a man."

Game face. Game body. Thirteen takes the beat under advisement and remembers that she's half-naked.

She's still smoking hot, even shivering. It's House's own choice to make himself look like a mangy dog from the waist up. And these are, she wishes it could go without saying, nowhere near the most critical validating qualities about any human being that has ever lived or died of this disease or any other, but if House would rather be a nonperson than a good-looking guy who used to play golf, then she's going to keep on being just as superhumanly unapproachable.

Remy and Amy. Amy and Thirteen. Thirteen dared to go on Thirty. Amy Pond and Rory Williams. Remy Lucky Hadley.

If she could be twenty-one in Yonkers again, knowing and feeling everything she knows now, she still probably wouldn't go around introducing herself to study buddies as Thirteen, full stop. But she also wouldn't be as chill referencing my friend, you know, his name is House.

House. Man. Brows. Eyes. Staring. Staring. Staring. Staring.

Thirteen stares back. She never got to learn how to drive stick, since there had been a brief window between the rise of the automatic transmission and the fall of Anne Hadley's health that had necessitated the exile of the clutch pedal. She'd like to punch her foot through the footwell now and prove to House that she's not afraid of no Lee Iacocca.

Way to break the cycle of bisexual family trauma.

"Mysterious death-defying connections to weirdos with blue eyes and scratchy voices."

"I was gonna say long, annoying guys with long, annoying hair. Who are you talking about?"

"I knew there was no way you were watching a CW drama. Too much realism for you."

And by realism, she means, reservation. You know, people who say they're fine and lie about it. People who hit the floor because they're dead, not because they need the fainting couch. People who are...repressed. And who have killed people, incidentally. Thirteen has yet to catch up on the sixth season, but the per-episode toll seems to be rising.

"Shut up. Why am I a weirdo?"

"You want me to count the ways? I'm sure there are at least thirteen. How about," she clears her throat and pops a mental mint, "how come you knew that guy was bisexual if you don't even know about his angel mancrush?"

Blah blah blah, deflecting. Blah blah blah, projecting.

"You know, I bet the 13th Doctor's gonna be a woman," House says brightly. "Shame they already tried the suspenders shtick."

"Calling bisexual woman aliens with two hearts. Nice," replies Thirteen, measuring malice by the area of a fingernail because she's certainly not admitting to being endeared by this useless conversation. Another part of her feels a painful twitch, purely psychological, at the invocation of Taub and Kutner's erstwhile intersecting interest.

House doesn't watch Who, classic or otherwise, just like he doesn't watch Supernatural. Him acquiescing to the forward motion of the zeitgeist skywheel is less his reluctance to be left behind and more his acknowledgement that he will be.

That he is a person. That he does age. That he will die.

That he will look at Thirteen, splayed out on his couch with her toes curled into the broad-side gash on the edge of the coffee table, and feel irreconcilable guilt for a crime he did not commit, a fate he did not cause, hurtling away into the distance, toward something, toward nothing, away from everything he has ever known.

That Thirteen is showing him herself, more plainly, and he's just serving her another one of his irreparably crippled, invariably altered states.

"Somehow 'aliens are strange' just doesn't seem to have the same ring to it."

check this out so awesome. i believe the sneaker posts are even more many and various