and if i swallow anything evil, put your fingers down my throat
"You seem to be bizarrely convinced of the notion that I am going to do more for you than anyone else. That I am going to protect you."
More for you than for anyone else. More for you than anyone else would ever dream of doing.
"I'm not," Martha says automatically, and though she successfully manages to avoid stuttering, her inflection drips downward, querulous, sheepish.
She's never been afraid to be an eager beaver, to be the open mouth in pursuit of the hand that feeds, because she's never had the choice. She has always been the one asking for exceptions, jumping over boundaries, forcing herself into spaces not designed for her. You know, because gifted kids have trauma too. There's a horrible, haggardly shame she feels at the very fact that she must insistently deny being special, especially now.
So what if he thinks that? So what if he's uncomfortable?
He makes it sound so juvenile. That's what the problem is.
I'm not. I'm not! I have all my own notions! I know you're not going to protect me. You're not. You're not!
"Of course you are," sputters House in return. His whole chest surges forward to complement his emphatics. "You are because you've already seen that Cuddy will do it for you, so you think I'm the same way."
Not the hand that feeds, but the mother bird's trembling beak. Does he know, she wonders, how he's just paralleled himself to her?
He's not an administrator. God, he'd be a horrible administrator. He's already a horrible advisor, supervisor, hypervisor.
You see that the top banana is batting - and a thousand - for you, so you think everybody else is going to do the same.
Everybody, or just Gregory House?
"Why would I think that? You fire me three times a week. You hide differentials from me. You hate me."
You know, besides the fact that it's professionally ridiculous.
People who are older than her, wiser than her, advanced in age instead of just academics, would be incensed at such treatment. Martha's found her way around getting bored of it. A funny thing, that - getting resigned to not being allowed to submit your resignation.
Even still, the impotent hate that House showcases (which he backs up with a passion when it comes to actually threatening her, the thing that is most ludicrously appalling) is so like the apathetic disinterest she's experienced all her life. If you love Martha, you love her. If you hate her, you kinda just don't care.
To this day, it rings true: "Oh, no, Masters. I don't hate you. It's so much worse than that: I don't care about you at all."
And even though Martha knows he's lying, so bitterly that it must scrape the taste off of his serpent's tongue, the security of the truth really doesn't make her feel all that much better, right now.
Is it so bad to be hated? Is it so terrible, if your company isn't universally enjoyed?
There are better things to strive for than being likeable. Obviously. Historically, geniuses have always been pariahs. Think of Beethoven, Kafka, Nietzsche, Pollock - Tchaikovsky, Tesla, Turing. Munch, Warhol, Van Gogh. Dalí, obviously. Lord Byron. Howard Hughes. Einstein, Einstein!
But then, it's pretty arrogant to jump straight to painting herself as an outcast, a striving social stratifier, in order to reconcile her babyish hurt feelings. There's neuroticism, and then there's narcissism. Which, not all of them had, to be fair. And there are no women on that list, come to think of it...
There has to be an explanation, a cause - or three - for all this effect. Has to be.
(Take that: her math is applied enough for rational scientific inquiry. Take that: she won't believe in a coincidence.)
Take the control subject, for example. She's a girl, and autistic girls, at her relatively privileged point on the spectrum, usually have it better than the boys, as far as being rejected from polite company for habits she does or doesn't have. She's...harmless. Neutral, if not neutered. Scholarly - juvenile, despite the multiple doctorates. Sexless, rather than mangy, to say nothing of her hyperquirky pseudosexualized sense of fashion that everybody always seems to think is so ripe for sniffs and criticism. But hey, at least they're noticing it! At least...
At least they're paying attention. At least they want to talk at, about, if not with, wit and mouth, her.
At least she's not completely undesirable. It would be...irresponsible, ungrounded, irrational, to be completely undesirable.
She doesn't have to be liked, no.
She wants it, though.
(She wants more than begging for scraps of validation at the big-kid table. She knows she should.)
So, then...how long has it really been since she's wanted something she knows she doesn't need?
Look at House, ashamed of how he wants to protect her, but vindicated in the way he rejects it, stands over it, gets ahead of it.
He knows he doesn't need it, shouldn't want it - doesn't want it. Doesn't want her. Hasn't opened up the weakness of his pores, long-closed and stubbled over, to gape and gooze at the mushy feeling of stewarding a mentee.
Martha has always, always adored her mentors. Every one, even the ones that she didn't get along with at first, she found something to learn from them. Now, the ones who bent university rules, trifled with their postdocs' fragile, frizzled time; those, she didn't consider her mentors. She didn't count them now.
(Is that mature, the refusal to claim that which does not serve her? Is that childish, the lack of dialectical ability to synthesize the contrasting into the complete whole?)
What would House be, when this was all over - sooner, or later? Maybe she'd divide it by all the separate episodes, the nonexistent gaps in her employment.
What about Cuddy? Maybe she'd divide it by all the separate episodes, the stacks of termination papers she never signed.
The scattered conversations, breathless and purse-lipped, constructed in distracted glances and coy head tilts and both sides' self-conscious flicking of framing hair. The trust, implicit, gained and waning.
The trust that goes between all women, as soon as you're certain they won't stab you in the back.
Martha has always been certain of that. Sometimes way too quickly certain. But never quite...wrong. Just...different.
House is one of those "words don't matter, only actions" people, isn't he? Maybe he just attempts to betray himself from both sides for the fun of it.
Still. It's interesting, how House never has time for her but always does, and Cuddy always has time for her but never does.
If you act like you're important, they'll think you are. If you act like you really believe it.
If you are bizarrely convinced of your own worthiness to be saved.
"Are you just vouching for me because I'm a woman?"
She'd had to correct herself. She'd wanted to say girl.
"Is there a problem with that?"
There's the rueful, bashful, breathy little laugh. There's the stutter, the squint, the shuffling of papers. Always the shuffling of papers. Just because you're a powerful woman doesn't mean you have to copy the men and be a genius, disorganized. Not that you have to not do that, either. Be prim and proper, just like they expect, cleaning up all their messes... Well, you can do whatever you'd like. You can--
You can take a deep breath. But hide it - so it's for you, not them.
Martha's steady, disconcerting stare has always been one of her greatest assets. She's just let too many people, over too many years and careers and institutions, convince her that she's too intense for them; that she'd better pack it away where she keeps her private thoughts and never once think again of turning it on them.
Well, too bad. This is me. Is there a problem with that?
"Is there a better reason?"
Is there really anyone better you think I could be?