(no subject)

[mmkaternater]

Ann Arbor in late August might have been the epicenter of a global warming crisis in 1985, even before the words "global" and "warming" had come to be smushed together in the common vernacular. It was oppressively hot and there was little that the administration could do to counter it, save to install several box fans in the larger lecture halls and hope that their students were wise enough to keep sufficiently hydrated (several of them had canteens strapped to the bulging backpacks, along with small handheld fans) and keep their complaining to a minimum.

Lisa Cuddy, entering her second year of undergraduate work, had classes stacked back-to-back from eight o'clock in the morning until eleven, a break for a lab colloquium at noon, and a straight drive to the finish line from two o'clock to four o'clock. In the hustle of academia, she would find little time for lunch or other more pressing social activities, but she was pushing hard for A's across the board, and her academic adviser seemed content to fill her days with Gross Anatomy, Ethics, and a host of other sanctioned classes.

She had done well her first year. Her classes had called for analytical thinking and she had pursued, with dogged determination, a perfect grade point average. She had very nearly achieved it, save for a snafu regarding the distribution of a perfect "A" in her Institutional Administrations course -- she had taken the "A-", but grudgingly.

Her roommate was a pert blonde whose interest was occupational therapy. They had little in common but a few shared traits -- a fondness for David Bowie and his Ziggy Stardust period; a general distaste for the Reagan administration -- and were sociable and pleasant to one another without the need to foster a deeper sorority bond. There had, of course, been an interesting incident during the comparison of schedules a few days prior. Cuddy had slapped the print-off onto the desk and demanded to know why she had been put in Lynch's Practical Anatomy seminar instead of Matthias Reed, M.D., her first choice. Her roommate had screwed up her nose at the misdeed, drawn a long red fingernail across the paper and then let out a low whistle --

"Greg House is the T.A."

"Who?"

"Lisa, don't tell me you haven't -- oh, hon. He's just about the only guy in the graduate program worth knowing. Guy's got an ego out to here," and she had demonstrated with her hands spread two feet apart, "and, from what I hear from some of the other girls in Lynch's seminar?" She had pushed her tongue to the inside of her cheek and made her eyebrows two blond mountain peaks. Her hands went to a span of three feet.

"Oh, please."

"Seriously, Lisa. Watch yourself around this guy. And watch this guy. If I ever do anything for you -- ever -- it'll be to see you spout some of that three-point-nine-nine GPA stuff at him. Seriously. You won't remember you complained about not getting in Reed's good graces after you meet Greg House. Buh-leeve me."

So on this particular morning, hot off the hot pavement from a dash between buildings, Cuddy had no more enthusiasm for the T.A. than she did the professor, and thumbed the bag across her shoulder with a hard gesture. The lecture hall was like the inside of a sauna and her feet were heavily placed coming down the aisle.

Front row. She had never sat anywhere else. She took pen, notebook and textbook out of her bag. Adjusted in the sticky plastic seat. She was five minutes early, but the class was already beginning to fill. Rabble conversations were occuring all around her, dizzying with a multitude of topics and pitches. She wrote the date, time and class title at the top of a lined page.

8/28/85
10:00 am
Practical Anatomy

Comments

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

Practical Anatomy. House had been furious with the assignment and had promptly reemed his student advisor for sticking him in a course that could have been just as easily taught by a baboon to a class of like-minded individuals. She'd been calm in dealing with him, underlining the fact that his course load was already over-the-top and that the other class he was responsible for T.A.ing for -- Infectuous Diseases -- would be a burden enough to him that she'd thought he could use a liter course to round out his semester.

Inevitably, he'd lost the fight to have an equally interesting subject for his second class, but the advisor had been given an earfull despite and she was most likely quite happy she wouldn't have to see him again until late November to discuss the next semester when his back was to her door.

He was stuck. Worse yet, he was trapped into an hour and a half class twice a week with a bunch of undergraduate hopefuls that didn't have the common sense to know that they'd learn more Practical Anatomy if they hit the local clubs a few nights a week rather than listen to a 54 year old British man who most likely hadn't seen breasts since his residency ramble on about the more obvious points of differential human anatomy.

He'd actually been to class earlier than he normally would have been, but it was only because there had been a mandatory meeting with the professor about his expected workload. Typically, he would arrive at the start time or a few minutes later.

It wasn't like the professor would say anything interesting in the first two minutes of class anyway...

Slumping down the stairs towards the front row of the lecture hall with all the grace and annoyance of a very angry cat, pale blue caught a glimpse of an open seat next to a hovering undergrad with her nose all but pushed to her paper as she ignored the conversation around her and he slid into it without pomp, dropping his bookbag heavily into the scant space between the legs of their desks (and bumping her desk as he did so).

Shrinking back into a heavy lean, he rolled his neck back and forth once, tipped a Red Sox ballcap low over his eyes, and to all conventional purposes, appeared to lapse into sleep -- right there, in the front row, next to the girl who was taking notes five minutes before class began.

He hadn't even bothered to pull out a textbook.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

The '5' on the end of her date stamp took a hard leftward jerk when her seat was bumped, pen cutting a royal blue line right down to the margin. She glanced sidelong, registered her distaste and irritation with hooded eyes, and then pressed her lips into a line that was more even than the numeral she'd written. The jostle had shifted her textbook across the small desktop and she pushed a trio of fingers against the spine, pushing it back into place.

Beside her, the long creature with grasshopper legs and arms appeared to settle, thumbs shoved beneath his arms. He did not reach beneath him for a textbook -- or even a notebook -- and she firmly decided not to offer him one or be charitable if and when he did ask. She had been in lectures with students of his ilk: ones who appeared to be invested in their studies -- came to class and sat in the front row, even -- but who were no more versed in medical terminology than she was in, say, classical ballet poses.

Cuddy straightened her spine and put a hard elbow on the desktop, pushing her cheek into her hand -- instant blockade between herself and the intrusive, idle man sitting next to her.

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

He felt more than saw the barrier go up between him and the female alongside him. Oh, so she was one of -those-. Snotty four-point-oh hopeful who considered herself God's gift to medicine and anyone else better get the hell out of her way 'else suffer wrath on calliber with the Old Testament.

Personally, House had always had a keen interest in being struck by lightning. It would make a great story.

Cracking an eyelid idly to scope a closer look at her out from under the bill of his cap, an impossibly long and defined neckline was the first thing noticed and he let his attention linger there until the heat in his gaze was nearly palpable.

He kept the ballcap low but sat up a little straighter to peer over her shoulder at the loopy handwriting on her page.

"'Practical Anatomy,' huh? Think he's going to make us sing that... 'toe-bone's connected to the foot bone' song or do you think he might actually be able to conjure up a way to teach kids --" Note, not us as would have been a better choice term. "-- to use a practical knowledge of anatomy in medical diagnosis?"

When House had taken the class personally, it had just turned out to be a glorified Anatomy/Physiology course. He hadn't minded fully, as he'd memorized all the bones in the body back in..what..his 6th year of preliminary school? and it served as a fantastic class to catch up on his sleep in, but he would have preferred to have actually learned something.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

She had shifted her elbow inward when he'd begun to snoop and peer, bringing the shadow of her wrist across what she'd written, as stingy with preliminary notes as she was with test answers. She glanced at his profile, then turned her eyes to the front of the room. The blackboard had been wiped clean, a tottering old Elmo projector stacked with papers to be distributed. She confirmed the proper selection of her textbook for the course by comparing book spines. It was another moment before she answered him:

"If you think his teaching methods are so juvenile, why didn't you sign up for Reed's lecture? He's teaching the exact same material at two o'clock every Tuesday and Thursday. And I don't think there's a lot of 'Paddycake'-ing going on in his seminar."

She was still bitter at having been ousted from Matthias Reed's clearly superior echelon. It had niggled at her every since she had discovered the discrepancy and she couldn't help but feel that the move was personal. It had no reason to be, as she had never come under Reed's direct purview. But she had written a paper at the end of Spring term that had been circulated around the department and she had been told -- indirectly -- that it had crossed his desk. She had not been told that he was "impressed" by her calculations, but that he had been "interested."

Cuddy was irritated by the oversight.

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

Holier Than Thou and spunk. Maybe this class wouldn't be so bad afterall...

Rather than be set off by the confrontational tone, House seemed amused instead, expression fighting between a mocking seriousness, mirroring her own, and a smirk that threatened to overtake his lips at every turn.

"Can't. Two o'clock's my naptime every day. I get pretty cranky without it -- paddycaking is tiring." The question hadn't really been directed at him anyway, so he felt comfortable with the smartass response. Not that he would have felt uncomfortable with it anyway... "Why didn't you join Reed's seminar? Didn't manage to scrape that perfect four-point last semester? A-, right? Don't tell me you got a B+..."

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

Surprise weathered a furrow in the center of her forehead that was, thankfully, a brief blip in an otherwise impassable reaction. She lifted her chin from the cup of her palm and brought her wrist down across the paper. "No," and there was youthful indignation in her tone at the very presumption, then, "Lynch wrote the book on exploratory surgery. Pound for pound, he's better at internal systems than Reed is, no matter how he handles the delivery."

It was partially true, at least. Lynch had written a fairly well-received textbook on modern exploratory surgery and he was lauded in his native England for a number of impressive medical advances. But his methods were loose and his data was sparse at best and -- when compared to Reed -- he had the professional staying power of a short-lived star. Reed was higher caliber. She knew it. He didn't coddle his students or spend office hours polishing his plaques like his colleague. You had to work to earn his praise. And Cuddy, still struggling to get her hand on the top of the pile, wanted badly for it.

"And anyway, Practical Anatomy is just a primer course. If I wanted to rehash eighth grade A and P, I would have gone to a state school. I'm going to do it and move on."

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

House's brows slanted slightly as he watched her carefully in her rebuttal, dissecting her almost far-too-carefully rehearsed response. It must have been what she was preparing to tell her doting parents, striking out all of Lynch's pluses in one breath so that if they had the slightest inclination that it was possibly a class their baby girl didn't want, they wouldn't call up the Dean of Medicine and rave until her schedule was altered.

Smirking, House shook his head and leaned away from his angle over her shoulder to consider her notebook, threading fingers together and lacing both arms over his head into a lock. He stretched his legs out comfortably, casting an idle glance to the clock. All self-assurance, this one.

"Nice try. Might attempt to be a little less convincing next time. Try so hard and it's obvious.. you got excluded from his class and it's burned you. That's the only reason anyone would propose this idiot was a better teacher than Reed." House had already taken two of Reed's courses and he was one of the very few professors he could stand.

On a good day, anyway.

"..If it bothers you that much, I might be able to put in a word for you. Schedules aren't final for another week or so..."

At that moment, Lynch stepped into the aisle from behind House and dropped an annoyingly thick pile of papers onto his desk. House scowled, but reluctantly snagged up the stack and slid to his feet to hand them out.

Notebook's syllabus was tossed at her with little regard to the fact that it was four pages thick. Either she'd catch it or she'd look silly having to scramble on the floor to collect it.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

Lynch was the quintessential Englishman, right down to the poesy in his tweed buttonhole. He was well-groomed and slick-palmed, with a high forehead and a wave of greased gray-black hair that looked like it came out of a tube rather than a chromosomal arrangement. He was a fan of the long-winded syllabus, and spent more time than necessary detailing his accreditation and qualifications (not that much was needed for an intermediate course on anatomy.)

Assaulted by stimuli -- Lynch's sudden appearance, the irritant at her side getting up from his long-limbed splay, the flying syllabus -- and Cuddy struggled for a moment to catch up. A runner who had stumbled at the starting block, having to make up strides. The sheath of papers went flying across the slick surface of the desk, spilled over into her palm, and very nearly burst apart at one faulty staple edge.

"Thanks," she said, and the way she punctuated the word was indicative of a less than wholehearted feeling. 'Tucked knees together beneath the gummy desktop and began to read the list of Awards And Grants Received, though she kept her vision tracking the red ballcap that moved, still lazily, up and down the aisle to distribute the rest of the syllabi.

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

Once Lynch was down to his desk and had begun to scrawl his name on the blackboard, House had taken the shortcut of handing out a chunk of the syllabi and having the students pass them around on their own. Meandering back to his desk, he sank down down into the seat, having not even kept one of the syllabi for himself.

Instead, he cast an idle eye over Notebook's shoulder to the text in front of her. He got about one line into the awards and grants section when he snorted and turned his attention away. His arms retook their position in a thread behind his head, cap tipping forward once again... and he appeared to doze off.

--

House remained oddly motionless throughout the entirety of the professor going over the syllabus aloud (a long process in itself), though his breathing did level and deepen in a trademark of sleep. To his credit, he didn't snore, and the professor seemed to ignore him -- save casting him the occasional glance under far-too-bushy brows in annoyance.

He didn't appear to wake up until they were finished with the syllabus and the ancient overhead had been utilized to show an image pulled from the first chapter of the professor's book, (he taught with his own book) A Greater Understanding of Anatomy. The image was of a human body above from the waist up, with a detailed overview of all muscular systems.

The professor was discussing differed sensation and pain, and it took House all of two seconds of studying the diagram to decide he didn't like it. Frowning, he shifted to his left and snagged a pen out of his bag before reaching over to give a small tug on the edge of Notebook's textbook to get her attention.

Leaning in slightly, he hushed his tone, keeping a wary eye on the rambling professor as he spoke.

"You know your basic nervous system quadrants, right..?" He waved the pen around slightly before letting it falter into a lazy spin between long fingers.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

Notetaking was an artform in itself. Medical students were taught early on that shorthand would save their lives and the university offered classes on the subject in the fervent hope that some of their students would adopt it. Cuddy had taken the lessons she'd learned in introductory courses and adapted them for her own use, resulting in a system of symbols and substitutions -- like cuneiform -- that took less time to write and less space to fill.

She had been diligently pursuing this objective, her hand neat and confident in the transferal of words to text, and had set her mind up to block the rough breathing of the student beside her. He had stirred a few times in the middle of his quietude; 'shuffled his feet loudly beneath the desk row (and earned a steely glare from Lynch, whose Lanolin shine forehead was further emphasized by the overhead glow) and appeared to be completely oblivious to the lecture happening all around him. Cuddy would not budge in her first impressions.

She was further grounded in her analysis of him when he leaned over, a strong presence and rough whisper, and asked a question of her that was so basic that it briefly chafed that she'd even been asked at all. She pressed her eyes toward the forward screen. Her voice scratched past a looped corner of mouth. "You know how difficult it is to take notes when someone's hovering, right?"

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

"..You don't need those notes." Since she was reluctant to relinquish control over her textbook, House had to crane his neck a small amount, but easily enough stretched his arm over hers and, with the tip of his ballpoint scrawled out four largish circles enclosing the quadrants into their own sections on her book.

"Sensation and pain can be differed inter-quadrantally or into adjacent quadrants." So if someone was to have differed pain in their upper left quadrant, they could feel it as far as their left toes or right fingers. "If the pain travels vertically, it's following the spinal column and is fairly benign. If it travels horizontally or into an -opposite- quadrant..." He gave a minor shrug, discrediting the seriousness behind such a possibility. If the pain was traveling -against- nerve paths, it suggested neurological damage.

He hesitated, then grinned aside to her. "..so an example of benign differsion would be that tingling sensation in your toes after an orgasm. Or have you note had that distinct pleasure..?"

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

"If it's just my toes tingling," she said, "someone's not doing their job." A beat. "What you should really be concerned about is the medial and lateral systems and how they deal with pain. The qualitative response versus the quantitative. If you start to see a disparity between the two, you can bet that it's neurological --" she leaned in, brushed arms "-- neurological: the head on top of your shoulders."

The clarification affected, Cuddy leaned back into her own cubicle seat and picked from memory the notes she had missed in the immediate past. Lynch was describing, in agonizing detail, the muscle regions as they correlated to the skeletal track. When he would reach a point of emphasis his voice would spike with that highbrow Oxford accent and he would strike a finger into the air to clear up any doubt as to the veracity of his argument.

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

All amusement at her response, House didn't shy from the brushing of arms, instead listening passively until she was finished before deciding it was more interesting to divert the conversation altogether from the scientific to the more interesting aspect they were breaching anyway.

"Why is your concentration so fixated on pain? Into that sort of thing..?" They'd gone from the more interesting aspects of differed sensation to pain on a dime and he couldn't quite say that he preferred the latter to the former.

' -- Mr. House --'

Greg grimaced and corrected before fully realizing that he was speaking the correction alloud. "..Just House." Apparently, the professor had been giving instructions that him and Notebook had ignored in favor of their discussion.

Lynch hesitated, gave a glaze-eyed glance in House's direction, and refused to correct it, instead crossing over to hand him a new packet to be handed out to the students.

'-- will be coming around with your writing assignments. All papers should be turned in to him no later than tomorrow evening.'

Taking the packet, House skimmed over the words on the top most packet. Standard prompted writing packet, much like what you'd see in an AP exam. Apparently, he was asking his students for a short essay over differed sensation processes and House got the task of grading them.

Clambering to his feet once again, he faltered into the process of handing the packets out. Several different questions, all broadly on the same subject. He went out of his way to find the hardest question in the stack before passing it with a cheery smile to Notebook.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

House.

She bled a glance from under her pointed brows, half-curious, half-surprised. Her mouth came up into an Ah ha! curve and she pushed her shoulders back against the seat, flipping her notebook closed with a light overturn of palm. 'Kept eye contact while he passed her the marked form, giving it a cursory look before returning eyes and confident expression:

"I'll be sure to bring my toes to your office when I drop this off."

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

"Eh.. I'm not there very often." He hesitated as she determined to speak to him more directly with less annoyance in her tone (he sort of liked her better when she was annoyed, unfortunately; he was suddenly concerned that she was going to get boring now that she had it affirmed to her that he wasn't just a lazy student. Lynch had broken that charade for him, and it was obvious in her expression that she'd realized who he was only after the announcement), taking the time to toss a packet over her head into an easy lob towards a student behind her.

"You can stuff it under the door if you want but I can't guarantee I'll have it graded any time in the next two months. Better to just run it by my place -- live over in Northwood. If I'm not there, my bum of a roommate never leaves unless it's for meals. He'll stick it on my desk. Maybe."

..or she could brave the campus itself and actually find him.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

Lynch was making his closing arguments, trying to lift his voice over the rabble of the already tired and shuffling lecture hall -- These assignments count for one quarter of your total semester grade; don't think I won't hold you all to the highest standard -- but British voices weren't made for authority in states like this, lecture halls like this, seasons like this. He was clearly put off by the rabble that his gangly TA had roused.

The candid, easy way he had suggested that he find her -- outside the boundries of a typical TA's authority -- set him in Cuddy's mind as the worst kind of intellectual: the kind that knew their IQ and, rather than wear it on their tailored sleeve like Lynch, waited for you to step into it until the quicksand effect took hold and you were no more sure of your footing than you were of what they might do with you once you got stuck in it.

She folded the assignment once (a very neat, dismissive crease) and lifted the barrier of her desktop to collect her things, slinging the bag over one heat-marked shoulder. He was still hovering, tossing packets to anyone within range, and he had height on her, assuredly, but she was sure that -- if she really came toe-to-toe with him -- that they would be on equal terms. Youth and moxie were full of such sureties.

Cuddy threaded by him and joined the queue leading out of the hall. "You'll grade it," she said, a harder tone that was the bedfellow of irritation, "and I'll get an 'A'." She thumbed the bag higher on her shoulder. "Then we'll see how you do."

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

House gave an idle nod but refrained from scoffing at the certainty in her voice. "Practical Anatomy. Rattle off some theoretical Grade School twist on the text in your book and we'll see how long you hang on to that three-point-nine-nine."

A beat, and then to a student who had gotten in front of him just before he tossed another packet. "Heads up."

He was finished with Notebook -- at least until he got hold of her paper.