love in an elevator

"I heard somebody had sex in an MRI machine once," Thirteen says, instead of acknowledging the rubble scattered around her. "MRI machine" sounds redundant and thus idiotically colloquial, but it isn't. It's still too many words for the moment.

If she were attempting to reinforce Cameron's (well, actually Foreman's) ancient treatise on gendered power and the influence of palpable discomfort as a result of implicit gender-based violence on the workplace relationship, she might have continued into a graphic discussion of the manifest twisting of innards that such a feat would require - that the researchers who convened the experiment had meant specifically to study, by contrast.

"In Groningen," replies House, leaving aside an overpronunciation of the distinction between this word and some star candidate others in favor of subtle authenticity. Then, he adds, "Appropriately riddled with swamps."

"You read the study?"

"That would be," he clicks his tongue neatly against the back of his front teeth, "woefully uncharacteristic. I never think - my penis thinks for me."

Thirteen snorts. Okay, loser.

"My penis was also jealous of the one guy who didn't have to take Viagra. I mean, not then, but you know. Sight of hinds is still 20/20."

The pun is weak. He's not exactly firing on all cylinders either, then. Emotionally, for whatever it takes out of the tank just to banter with her.

To comfort her, in her own naked refusal to comfort herself.

"I want it to be dark. I want it to be quiet. I want it to be still."

Sure. Reasonable asks. The rent-a-fence chic around the destroyed wall of the imaging suite isn't liable to inspire much confidence in those who want the evil to be sealed off, if not defeated, House will admit. Anything in this building that proceeds as normal is a too-stark sensory deprivation, compared to all of that.

"I want to be safe." Most of the color has returned to her cheeks, but something still hangs ragged. "And I want somebody to take the gun out of my hand."

"Okay," says House, with the quick breath and the blinking nod. "Okay."

The ultrasound. You do it both ways, right? I mean, standing up and sitting down.

The problem is, someone has to be standing up to start the table sliding into the tunnel, even though they're not actually going to turn the magnets on. There's no getting an arm out to fumble with the mouse, and Thirteen has no mind to fight with a ten-ton piece of equipment by any stretch, so she stands behind the computer cart, still stationed innocently at the foot of the table, as she meekly folds her slacks and sweater together into a tidy-enough pile on top of her boots.

It's the middle of the night, because even though Thirteen would have been content for the darkness to be artificial, she's not as jazzed about the concept of getting caught. Also, she figures House isn't particularly jazzed about letting his scar go toward the light. It'd be convenient if the nerve damage stopped his hamstrings from communicating the liquid kiss of frigid metal up into his brain, but he's got other things to worry about.

(Also, thinking of her brief exchange with Foreman, she's not sorry that she went back to sucking it up long enough to sleep-suffer through her first dialysis session.)

He'd dropped his pants on the opposite side of the machine and held his left hand over his crotch as his right helped hoist his leg onto the tray, then absently began stroking himself while staring up into the arc of the tube above and slightly behind his forehead to avoid thinking about the fact that she's doing this for him, too. Right? Has to be.

Has to be, because no one ever asks him to do anything for them. They ask him to do his job, or a favor, but doing it never comes into it, like that. No one ever asks - wants, hopes, trusts - House to do something personal for them, if you don't count gluteus maximus injections.

Half of it is the unserious commitment to replicating the conditions of the study, such as it was: no clothes, no clues, and no ED except the preexisting kind. Half of it is the dead-serious unwillingness to act like people instead of bodies, intelligent vegetables instead of rotting meat.

"You looked like death warmed over. Not even." Like that's going to help him get even half-hard.

"I look a little better now," Thirteen replies. "You think maybe I feel it?"

You think maybe those fucked-up things I did weren't just a raucous girl-on-girl display for you?

But she presses the button all the same, loading House unceremoniously into the unplugged microwave so he can ready himself to wrap his forearms around a corpse and pretend for the both of them to be dead together.

When she crawls in, her chill-hardened nipples stripe brittle lines of sensation up his chest - over his own areolae - and her sternum ghosts past his dick in perfect alignment. Neither of her thighs really touch his until she settles all the way down. She keeps her head down, because she's got no choice, and House lowers his chin to touch the very center crown of her head, as mechanically as a guide arm.

Her hair's still a little greasy. Meanwhile, her skin is dry, freshly washed. House doesn't feel dirty enough that it would be unequivocally disgusting for them to peel their buttocks off the tray and not immediately clean up after themselves, but he doesn't feel sterile, either.

Thirteen's movements, just then, are the same way: just a little bit jerky, a little bit awkwardly human if not giddy, but angled with the intent to produce a result. She's humping him...politely. Briskly. Not gently.

He almost wishes she would talk to him. But he knows she can't.

"I fought back" is not much of a conversation, and it's certainly not dirty talk.

Her clit hits his head once, twice, three times. If listening to an MRI flick its own electromagnetic bean, on and off, on and off, has ever turned anybody on, House wishes they could experience such a rare treat as this, right now.

The part that gets him teetering toward the edge isn't Thirteen's rhythm. It's the fact that she's taking the initiative of ugly-bumping at all.

Pupils dilate, but he can't see that. Arteries constrict, but if either of them have chest pain, it's indistinguishable from the unique cramped feeling overall. Core temperature rises, but that much is a given when two bare chests are pressed together without a single crack to break the insulation. Heart races, but her wrists are under his jaw, not the other way around. Blood pressure skyrockets, but if either of them are dizzy, they either can't tell or aren't saying. Respiration becomes rapid and shallow, but Thirteen is an ace at hiding when she's out of breath. The brain fires bursts of electrical impulses from nowhere to nowhere and secretions spit out of every gland and the muscles tense and spasm like you're lifting three times your body weight, but...

Okay, so they didn't get to that part yet. House wonders if Thirteen was lying about the dark and the quiet and the still; if she's reckless enough to get them both convulsing in a coffee can purely for the bizarro thrill of it all.

But then, she slows. She's finished her slices, done flipping her magnet, mapped out all she could.

"I was never much for kegels," she says, to break the fresh silence.

"Oh, poor you, you get too much action to have any time for maintenance."

Thirteen ignores him. "Maybe I can..." She sweeps her right arm over House's head, momentarily introducing his nose to her unshaven pit, then wriggles her elbow between their boobs until her fingers have made it out the other side.

She reaches underneath herself, propping her fingertip just at the flap of the foreskin, and pushes House's penis up while tilting her hips as far forward as the tube will allow to make a path in the wilderness for one fleshy organ to slide into and rest within another.

Which is all well and good - if House didn't think it a logistical nightmare, he would have been silently gagging for it from the start.

"You just made it ten times more difficult to get us out of here."

"Gun's in your hand, House," Thirteen mumbles as she flexes her palm open and shut, waiting for his interlocking grasp. Her form is slender, her gradients sharp, but somehow she seems to take up exactly as much space as him. "Up to you, but I say, if we do get out, we get out together."

i know what you're thinking. i know. we're pretending that the starburst was all it was AND we're pretending that it wasn't just a cat scan. i hope this doesn't ruin any enjoyment you may have gleaned. i don't careeeee