but we know you're smoking wherever you are

a note on me is that in my past fandom life i was most deeply invested in the relationship between an impossibly beautiful and impossibly tragic young female character and the variously grizzled self-loathing old guy who thinks she's kinda perfect and awesome, et cetera et cetera, to the point of overshadowing my (now very embarrassing) singular yaoi fixation for that same guy. now, it didn't happen much with these two in specific because she was primary and he was tertiary, but if i saw sexual/ship content of other similar pairs onto which i and my friends had ascribed familial characteristics (think like if people insisted that wilson was thirteen's dad) i would usually have to go on discord or twitter and find friend(s) to vent to/with in order that i would calm down a little bit and refocus on myself. if i wrote something with the slash tag i always had to excuse it as a one-sided, as queer questioning, as intricate and impossible crush. but these were also ageless android beings; eventually i abandoned such a moral crusade. still, i find the distinction important.

so, this to say, i hope i am not igniting little fires of rage in the houseteen daddy-daughter dance fandom; i have been you and i am still you. i will observe and support from afar...

Remy's idea of a father is a man that stands still while his wife and children die shaking. He is a three-quarter view face on the other side of a window, a height imbalance from repose in a kitchen chair, a grange fair attendee too young to righteously dissociate; to be really somewhere else at the time.

A forehead that doesn't wrinkle so much as perpetually slant. A reluctant smile that doesn't believe in its own impetus. A role fulfilled by going through the motions, because too much unpredictable motion has agitated away the parts of him that knew what to do for himself.

A man who is kind, supportive, genuine, but who really doesn't need to be tried with another trick like bisexuality in the upcoming 2010s. A man who is not cruel, but who would not particularly love to be treated to the promise of yet more deviance from the projected domestic norm that he himself failed, through no fault of his or any other's own.

It's all gravy, all wavy, all postmortem pariah with nothing underneath to soak it up. Too salty. No satisfaction. No flavor. He returns to himself, living alone, but the part that he thought would be magical was broken. All he had was protecting his kids.

Remy knows there's nothing she can do for her father now. No visitations. No vicarious vicissitudes. So she doesn't. And that's okay.

(She can't even do for him what she did for her brother. Obviously. But he's not her brother, he's her father. And that's okay.)

And meanwhile, throughout the flickers of her post-adolescent life being illuminated in relief at this hospital--

buying cocaine with Taub, curling up on the lounge couch with Cameron, dodging those weird coy advances from Chase, dodging innumerable bullets when it came to Foreman, passing her best queer wishes on to Masters, bringing a letter opener to a knife fight with Amber, finding Kutner and then finding Kutner and wondering why it took her of all people so long to do it

--she sees sketches of House's concept (House's concept of what it meant to be a House, until he came on the scene and threw it all out in the gutter): a father is a man for whom you do everything in your life, the way he wanted, not because it's what you think he would want but because he told it to you, directly or indirectly, and you listened, because your life was made of nothing but what you heard.

You live your life for your father, because there's no one else to live it for.

So those are House's fellows, the lot of them, overflowing handfuls of perfectly intelligent and self-motivated specialists in all manner of fields with all manner of passions and predispositions, but they all invariably end up doing things because House would want them to act in such a way, they think.

Thirteen is not immune to this. After all, she's the one who leaned into her hiring games assignment - she made herself into a mystery for him, so idiomatically ideal as to be hand-delivered for the man who probably wouldn't relish the responsibility of wheeling out a handtruck to take her in, who wouldn't do it and would instead reduce her to dust if he thought she was being unattractively facetious or sly.

She wants to commit to herself. She has to commit to herself, because no one else would be crazy enough to do it. She has to, because this place really, really wants you to get caught up in the motions and forget that hospitals only get their hooks in about fifteen percent of their patients.

One hundred percent of the diagnostics department, which performs procedures across all disciplines and has tossed regular working hours to the wind. It's a permanent stay. Her personal chart, played in context here, is the accumulation of every clipboard, every prescription, she's ever signed. Such an eternal rotation makes one wonder: are you the doctor or are you the patient?

But Thirteen, of course, casually rebuffs the challenge that she is a head case by way of the glass conference room. She isolates each new day's strange behavior. She excuses herself, for the things she does. She will get over it. She will be over it. She will keep growing up and around.

It's no big confidence trick, to assert yourself as not more but something west of one of House's underlings. Work is work. You work the angles. The next thing she does won't be more or less than this; it'll just be different. Just like being an adult is not usually such a natural progression from being a child.

House, who never grew up. House, who was athletic and loving but who got bit and then changed, all at once.

House, who throws his life away every day by every possible mechanism, chemical and physical and mental and structural and logistical and figurative and mean, and yet could never dream, in his most lurid hyperventilated hallucinations, to ever be as free as Thirteen. You know, the awesome, turtleneck-wearing, fate-deflecting, lesbian-bar-hopping Thirteen.

Doesn't matter if she's lucky. Doesn't matter if she's cursed.

She's aloof. She's successful. Even when she's losing, she wins.

Thirteen's idea of House, himself: brooding eyebrows, agile hands, wrinkled clothing, spunky sneakers, inappropriate curiosity, and unspoken wishes.

Something like her. But also, entirely different.

Dying in a fire, you know...it's pretty cool.

Very avant-garde. Very symbolic.

Very letting yourself be consumed because you're afraid to be the consumption, because you're afraid to be half so powerful as the force that made you, that lies dormant, that doesn't even mean anything, anymore.

It's what progeneration should be: blessing the next of kin, and saving it, because you think that much of them and that little of yourself.

Letting it be. Letting it on to do its own figuring, because it no longer matters what you would want.

You had your action. You see the distant consequence. Even if it meant nothing, and nothing, and nothing, it seems that your time is done.

another note on me is that in my past fandom life i was a big fish in a small pond (though in present day the landscape is harem/crossover/self-insert every other fic and the community of interchanging oneshots has all but disappeared) and i very often shot myself in the foot while trying to reconcile my Demonstrable Skill with the knowledge that anybody could at any time drop something of their own for one of my ~rarepairs~ and say in the notes "i can't believe i have to do it myself" or get comments thanking them for doing as much. that nobody really has to care about you at all if they don't want to. this in turn made me deeply invested in citation and circulation of fandom history as my way of engagement and showing appreciation. i wanted to absorb and homage every piece written about my chosen side characters, and i never wanted to choose willful ignorance as my method of validating my own efforts.

so, this to say, my current fandom life is in an ocean about three to five times the size and the thought of cataloguing such a thing is of course ridiculous. i am still trying to organize myself with respect to leaving comments and presenting myself as someone with valuable thoughts and ideas. maybe someday.