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[mmkaternater]

Christmas Eve. The High Mass would have started twenty minutes ago, Chicago time, by Cuddy's watch. Her father had called late in the day, wished her a "merry Christmas" and had asked her if she was going to local services. I haven't been to mass in twenty years, dad. You know that. By now, the priest would have greeted the congregation and begun to cite the Pauline epistles, then moved on and asked everyone -- conveniently on their knees -- to pray for God's mercy and to give thanks for the miracle of a holy birth two-thousand years young. Her mother would not have attended the service. In a strange twist of heretical faiths, her mother -- born in a Jewish suburb in Upstate New York -- had fallen in love with a well-spoken Irish Catholic and had managed to keep her religious independence in the face of her red-nosed, red-elbowed in-laws. Cuddy had always felt more akin to her mother's faith -- the Amidah and the Shir ha-Shirim with their rich, rooted words -- and she kept a small silver menorah on the table behind her desk during this season. It was the only time during the year that she showed any deference to a power higher than medicine.

Seven-thirty. It had not yet snowed. There were holiday parties going on all over campus -- she had been invited to several but had pleaded off for necessity of business -- and there was little staff support in the hospital save for those whose hearts weren't in the holiday (or those whose hearts weren't functioning very well at all.)

Stacy had returned a week-and-a-half prior and had brought with her the smell of sharp cloves and legal affidavits. She had worn black (but then again, when had Stacy not?) and Cuddy had given the answers that she asked for, but had tempered her responses where at all possible. The high, plucked black brows (matched perfectly to the curl of bobbed hair) had risen a few times during the course of the conversation, but Stacy liked to keep her arguments to herself until she had sufficient evidence to voice them -- it was what made her undeniably good at what she did.

Cuddy had not spoken to House outside of routine hospital palava since she had sent him home. He had appeared the next day, peaked but bearing some likeness to his former self, and had not seemed surprised when Stacy had presented herself. They seemed to make a conscious effort to avoid one another.

A milder soundtrack on her computer. Every once in a while she would tap the volume button up a few clicks, decide that it was too high, and then lower it again. This happened several times. She was on her eighth budget surplus report when, dragging her fingers around the rim of her cup, she had touched nothing but a cold, glassy shell. It had gone cold. She tipped it out into the wastebin beside her desk.

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[addxcted.livejournal.com]

Dangerous question. Possibly the only question a female could pose that was more dangerous was the terrifying 'does this ___ make me look fat?' as no possible answer was a good one.

House shifted uncomfortably, wondering at himself for having presented that bit of information; he'd known better than to think she was over it, but perhaps there was a part of him that was a glutton for punishment as well. It really made their relationship make sense. They both enjoyed being torture and torturing each other so it worked out.

Attempting a shred of nonchalance, he gave a shrug and pressed fingers into the keys of the piano to distractedly muddle through the opening chords of a 60s boogie piano arrangement of the "Marche" from the Nutcracker. "Gina Morrison."

Gina had been a decent enough student, a year older than Cuddy and had gone on to Columbia, but had never been considered a 'brilliant' doctor by her peers.

..her other redeeming qualities included blonde hair and amazing legs.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

This brought a low, incredulous laugh from her and she stepped back on one heel, her bare toes going up in a fan of barely disguised contempt. "Gina Morrison? What, did she turn in her paper topless? No." A resolute shake of her head. "There's no way that Gina Morrison could have scored higher than I did."

She turned on a confident heel and went back toward the couch. Paused and pushed a look over her shoulder, "She was sloppy with her numbers. You could've put mine through the eye of a needle."

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

Despite whatever Cuddy wanted to believe about it, Gina had scraped a 93 to Cuddy's 92. It wasn't a professional decision, but neither had been wittling Cuddy's grade down from her expected 102.3 to a 92 on principle because she had challenged him to find something wrong with the paper. She'd been graded on a different scale and had done better than House was grudgingly willing to admit.

For a Sophomore in undergraduate studies.

Had she been his peer or (fear) one of his ducklings, she'd've gotten reemed. She still attested to the fact that House didn't teach, when she was proof to point that he did.

Despite continued playing, he managed to glance at her in distracted disbelief. "You don't think people should get higher grades based simply on their endowment?"

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

Fingers so apt to point were now gathered up to rest at the stitching at her waist: one hand on either hip in a woman's classical pose of annoyance or begrudging admission. Her back was to him for a few seconds before she turned around, arcing a high and imperious expression.

"How much higher of a grade?"

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

"93. And I'll have you know that I got screamed at .. for at least five minutes before I was able to drown her out about it." Maybe that would make Cuddy feel a little better. House had been notorious for flirting and had a reputation for sleeping around, even if he didn't do it nearly as much as girls on campus claimed he did. Gina had been one of several that thought his flirtation actually meant something and she'd been insulted when it hadn't scraped her a better grade.

House's follow up that the grade had been generous and the paper was horrible had been responded to...very badly. He'd been forced to crank up his record player to the point that even his roommate had come out of hibernation in his room to see what the ruckus was about.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

"Oh, I'm sure you got screamed at," she said, her mouth a clever little 'oh' shape with the upswept brows to accompany. "Good. You deserved it. House had suffered muchly in his life, probably a little unfairly, but there was no sympathy or empathy in her for the House that she'd known in her first years of medical school. He had been hard and demanding and had given her more migraines over botched diagnoses or chemical balancing -- they had been few and far between, but they had happened -- than had probably been necessary. He'd even been cruel at times. Absolutely immovable in his assessment of her. She had never blindly followed him and he had always kept her at one long arm's length, but she had pursued his praise -- especially after a debilitating 'A-' that set fire to her heels.

And it occured to her that House liked women who yelled. Women who were difficult and who had bigger chips on their shoulders than this wholly holy men's profession would like to see. He might not have minded the yelling -- if it had had a rational basis. And Cuddy had seen the fabled Gina's paper-writing skills and there was no rational anything to support it.

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

Finally allowing his fingers to fall away from the keys and leave the song hanging to drift away into silence, he dropped both palms into his lap. Music, like medicine, was a barrier and as her storm seemed to have passed in favor of bemusement at him getting in trouble over the grading, he didn't need the barrier any longer.

"I probably did. You know this whole conversation is going to be used against you the next time you try to force me into covering someone's class." Academic favoritism based on appearance of all things combined with the fact that she clung to the idea of him not being an educator. At least he could comfortably spin up an argument when the President at Princeton decided to suggest to Cuddy that she have House teach a class riding the popularity his Nobel would bring.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

The note held and settled and if Cuddy listened, she head it slipping down the gray-painted walls like a warm rain. He was twitching his fingers against his thigh before he played, but in the wake of such a structured activity he was as smooth and calm and confident as ever she'd seen him.

"How do you figure?" She said, tight-strung arms adopting a looser, more conversational drape. "I can make a pretty convincing argument for anything."

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

"Academic favoritism, sexism, the fact that I'm a manipulative bastard," He ticked the points off with a finger as if to count them off for her, reciting like they were actually redeeming points rather than the faults they should have been viewed as. "Flippant disregard for most ethics... not exactly the sort of person you want molding young minds."

House did had his own strand of medical ethics, they just deviated sharply from what most people's ethics were. 'Off' as his morals were, the ones that he had he stuck to intensely.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

She hunkered down with her elbows on the slick black surface and rested pious palms on a stack of medical journals (like before, they were flagged with bits of lined paper that bore House's distinctive slop that passed for handwriting.) "And yet I still retain your services," she said, a note of goading in her voice, "which means that there's either something noble in you or noble in me that's worth communicating to a lecture hall." She leaned in and pressed a grin. "And in a hypothetical world, you wouldn't want to play second fiddle to an instructor who only got a '92' on an undergrad paper."

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

She was right. House, in general, didn't like playing second fiddle to anyone. He enjoyed being the center of attention in most cases -- part of being an only child, most likely -- but it was definitely not based on the fact that she had gotten a 92 on a paper.

An idle lift of his shoulders was given. "I failed plenty of papers." Because he'd refused to do certain ones, period, but that was beside the point. He'd still taken the oh-so-pleasant '0' for his unwillingness to conform. The only way professors were ever able to get him to do more than the bare minimum in any class was to make it interesting, and there were unfortunately very few that had ever challenged him into paying attention.

"I got kicked out of Hopkins. How much holding do you think I actually put into grades?"

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

"Enough to think that cheating off a guy -- who got the answer wrong anyway -- was a good idea. Come on, House." She brought the side of her hand against the piano top and spread her fingers like a fan. "You might've been sloppy, but you still cared. It just came more easily for you than it did the rest of us."

House had been able to toss off diagnoses like a shot. Nine times out of ten -- and after significant reluctance from his handlers to admit it -- he'd been right. Statistically, House was an outlier of mythic proportions.

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

There were plenty of ideas that he had that he knew weren't good ones yet he did them anyway. Sometimes, he knew they were absolutely horrible ones, but did them simply because they were either the only way or just..really, really funny. He still wasn't sure which classification his decision to cheat had been in.

..At least he'd gotten even.

As for it coming 'easier,' well... maybe the deductive reasoning he'd come pre-equipped with, but he still had to learn the material, same as anyone else. He'd just been content with his nerdiness in preliminary school to start early. The volumes upon volumes of medical journals and dictionaries that he still regularly used to this day proved that he still learned during every case.

People just didn't see it.

"I wouldn't say that. It's just bravado. If I came into your office saying 'This and this and this hasn't work so I think this very dangerous procedure will', most of my patients would die as you deliberated."

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

"That's the thing, though," she said, "you don't think -- you know. And look, I'm not trying to bolster your bravado to new levels -- I don't think the mattress funds I've got stacked away can even begin to touch that -- I'm saying it because, ninety, ninety-five percent of the time, you're right." Her fingers crept up onto their tips and she walked them toward the music stand while circling hips around the edge of the bench. 'Sat down next to him, her feet worked beneath brass piano pedals.

"But there has to be a system of checks and balances. You might be right, but that doesn't mean I'm going to give you carte blanche to do what you want."

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

House's mouth flew open briefly in a way that could have only been described as shocked insult at the insinuation that he didn't think, but she immediately deactivated the bomb by covering the statement with a backhanded compliment.

His hackles were still up, prepared to rebuttal fiercely, but he deflated carefully with her words until, by the time she was finished, the expression of indignation had worn away almost entirely.

Slowly, carefully, lips turned and he gave her a long look without fully turning his head to face her as she settled alongside him at the piano.

"..I must have done good." The tone was almost entirely comprised of obvious teasing qualities, perhaps to skirt the seriousness such a compliment suggested. "..with the whole thing about Stacy. You've never complimented me like that before."

At least not to his face.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

She had her palms on her pleated skirt and when he rumbled his incredulity about being praised -- it was only loose, somehow-striking-up-against praise -- she pushed them into the fabric and turned her face up to the ceiling, her jaw shoved forward with amusement. Her laugh was soft, abrupt and faded more quickly than the piano note had.

"Yeah, House. This is all about Stacy."

It had been 'about Stacy' for approximately five minutes in her office, when Stacy had come in wearing a new black suit (which she complimented) and a soft drape of tangy perfume (which she also complimented.) There had been a friendship there, not too far back, and somewhere between the preliminary small talk and the fourth cup of clinic coffee, Cuddy had that she liked Stacy despite Stacy. But those razorback black brows had pushed downward and Stacy had asked questions that she'd had to deflect with a veil of 'I don't know.'

It was her administrative responsibility to protect him at work. It wasn't her responsibility to protect the softer. lesser-seen aspects of him. But she'd done it anyway. She still didn't know why.

A light turn of her mouth prompted more words, but these she deflected to the piano keys: "And don't worry. I won't forget myself again."