you zombie! be born again, my friend

She's a doctor, which means she should have plausible deniability.

Used to be, anyway. Used to have.

The first time, when she was the one pushing the plunger, she didn't research. Didn't think. Just did.

Expected to end up in jail. Expected to have to plead, to pick a gun and stick to it.

Expected to be well and truly alone, when her own time came. That was just how these things trended.

Then there was the chance, the offering. The dark, careless words that she'd never even had the desperation to imagine. She replayed them over and over again, recording the soundbite into the wax platter gray matter of her brain.

The last thing she'd ever hear: his breathing, and hers. Maybe a rattle-prone old air conditioning unit. Maybe the unsink of a spring in a motel bed as he lurched up away from her, to leave her in symmetry as the morphine took away her propensity to sway from side to side.

Thirteen was odd, but it was prime. No factors. No calculated complements.

So she'd taken House at his calm, committed word. Of course. They'd talk about it then - and since he'd already offered, it wouldn't be anywhere near that much talking, the amount of talking other people looking in from the outside might think to expect.

Fire took his flesh first, his hair and his skin and his muscle.

Fire ate the oxygen.

Fire ate the promise, and Thirteen sat shaking alone in her hotel room trying not to blame and belittle herself for how betrayed she felt.

He could be a monument of prosthetics and skin grafts, shambling limbs and permanent stitches, garbled communications and unbidden movements a sickly portrait of her imminent fate. But he had wanted to do this for her. He had agreed to do this for her. One thumb and two fingers were enough to pop a Vicodin or a peace sign.

Who really bothers to put you on a government watch list for googling sketchy things on the shitty pay-per-megabyte wifi in a DoubleTree?

She swallows, once for the uvula and once for the saliva, then proceeds to hit enter on the search query "medically assisted suicide" that, sure, seems anodyne enough.

She soon amends "legal" and "states" and then follows the Wikipedia rabbit hole around to the tour of euthanasia, lethal dose, standard person, consent, and slippery slope.

As if her single pre-cure Huntington's case would set a precedent. As if most of the families affected were riding out the mutual aid diaspora exactly the same way she was.

Well. So maybe they literally were. But maybe it would be a good precedent. Maybe something positive could come out of it, even if not a cure.

It's not an answer, she has to remind herself. It has almost nothing to do with the disease itself. Sort of like House bullying parents into letting him do an autopsy of their deceased child, not because he thought the child could unwittingly pass forward something of medical value as their final act or even because he wanted to give the parents something to rail themselves against, but because a anonymous and ludicrous killer had won a falser victory than the same disease pinned to a murder board.

Thirteen is all for letting everyone do whatever the hell they want with their lives, which was an attitude House had always been strictly awful at even pretending to maintain well despite his constant claims to be uninvested in patients' choices.

Often, with clinic patients, he'd prescribe standard medications for off-label uses - Thirteen wouldn't have been surprised to learn that it was he who had pioneered the use of botox for migraines, muscle spasms, hyperhidrosis.

(It also stands to irony that not a single one of the countless botox jokes he could have made, between her and Taub, would have done a single thing to inhibit the whole-body chorea that threatens her now, very soon.)

And just who had been the hospital's most charismatic and well-connected general counsel, sharp and ready to dig for her dinner on the spread of Cuddy's entire House-legal budget?

Enough combing back to articles from six or seven years ago reveals the name: Stacy Warner. Thirteen hates to stereotype women, but when you play the entire field, it helps to do some preliminary binning, and from the low-res pictures, Stacy looks to be an ideal candidate for House's customary administrative prey: tall, dark, and chiseled, stern and arch from her eyebrows to her blazer to her heels.

(It's one thing to imagine a woman like this advocating for her, on any count for or against. It's quite another to replace the future-hallucination of House, long fingers nimble but still so very large, with rounded nails and metal jewelry that recalls Lynda Carter but fiercer yet.)

When she attempts to locate contact information for Stacy's current law firm, however, all the links turn up 404. All the links also happen to embed Stacy's surname.

She digs some more; locates Stacy's various alma maters (Duke and UPenn), cross-references the yearbook archives for the approximate pool of graduation dates, double-checks a few people-search websites...

Greece frowns upon the specific variant of euthanasia she needs.

Enter Stacy Trantis.

well this was kind of useless but this was better