of foreign lands and people

awright...one more time. don't mind the word count i'm afraid of everybody and i'm crazy. and that's all i can say for now

Lydia doesn't know that House doesn't like smiling. Doesn't have the history to confirm, and hasn't elected to believe it of Greg on her own merits either.

She knows that he likes being contrarian. She knows that he hates the thought of ever leaving well enough alone. That things can be well enough as an approximation. Supposing they are well, and sufficiently so. Then you wouldn't try to coddle it.

The bit about worrying at hangnails until they bleed, she gets from the way he reserves all his blinks for the precious time when she's not talking. He listens to her with his eyes. He was shocked not to be written up for his failure to have honest, peer-to-peer conversations; he was disturbed by it.

Even the funny is not funny to him. He says all of these ridiculous things, and then he stares at his shoes.

He's guilty. She's met many guilty, disturbed men in Ward No. 6. Many of them circle the piano, listing toward the window. Annie nods forward, then back again. They do the opposite. She isn't sure how to help them, and they don't ask.

So many of them. Ten years. Unfortunately, most are likelier to ask for Amazing Grace than they are to critique her pedal technique. Not so many of them want her, personally, to believe in them, to notice how they notice her play.

(It's difficult to know if Greg thinks of her as more sane than him just because she can ask an orderly for a dolly and they'll give it to her. It's difficult to know if she truly thinks of herself as more sane than him.)

She thinks he wants to smile. She thinks he wants to have a reason, not just one that's good enough.

Anything he can betray by showing such an emotion, he already does with the way he looks at the piano, the way he coaxes melodies from it with a practiced, businesslike reverence - starting, of course, from the way he handed her the cane.

These are the complementary motions. Two rivers, falling inward. Occasionally, you count to twelve. This is how you share the bench. This is how you sing a song.

"You're a little light on the left hand," she says, showing him her dimples three the better to discern his toy-soldier triplets. He keeps turning back to the keys, and then again back to her. He would not smile so much at his own improvising fingers. Not on this piano.

"What would you rather have me play - full moon...and open arms...?" he croons questioningly, less mischievous than his usual even as his chin waggles with the vibrato.

A question, a real question - not just a quizzical nod to the concept of valuing someone else's opinion. Because if Lydia doesn't want to listen to it, then he's not so sure he really wants to play.

"It's 'full moon and empty arms'," corrects Lydia with a perfect, quiet tact. Far be it from her ever to ruin something simple and nice, indeed, but it is a sad song more than it is hopeful, she thinks, and what responsibility she does take for House's happiness and conscience communicates itself by resurrecting the boundary of propriety; his arms are not open for her any more than the piano lid is open for his private or public amusal, these days.

He looks at her in order to see her looking away, or closing her eyes, or thinking of something else other than him. To say what he can say only with music, less personal for its canonical nature and for its impermanence. The full moon, which will recur monatlich, is somehow a product of happenstance, unlike the permanently empty arms.

And that is what they have here. An entire set of octaves, with and without appropriate damper. Music old and new, borrowed and blue. A nice way of demonstrating their commonality.

The musicianship will remain with each of them when they eventually leave this place, as all people eventually must. Departing, no longer going and coming in phrases mutually adjacent to clinical insanity. What will have made them well enough, to sit together, in this time?

He would like to smile upon four hands, she thinks. But it is not a good enough reason. It is not quite right, for them to share the bench facing the same way.