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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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[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

Cuddy wasn't sure of what song she was trying to immitate and sometimes the notes came three at a time, stumbling over one another. Sometimes they were long and single. She held some down while she barely grazed others. 'Just got the impression of a sound. She had both hands on the keyboard, her wrists limp and pressing against the ledge. She had no formal training. House could move with sureity and where her rhythm and meter failed, he brought it around with a quick rescue of 'tips on keys.

"Oh, I think you did better with 'double specialty. Psychology would have been tough for you to handle." She brought her left wrist up, adjusting to a downward trickle of notes. "Diseases are easier to change than the people who carry them."

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

"I wouldn't have tried." To change people. He definitely would not have been the sort of treatment psychologist with the big office, squishy chairs, and ink blot images for people to decipher. Research for the most part had been his gear.

House's faith and appreciation for humanity were honestly too weak to really dedicate himself into correcting their mental pitfalls. He had enough of his own and didn't need other people's skeletons in his closet, too.

The reason House caused so much controversy in the medical community was because he treated diseases and symptoms and not the person with the ailments. If medicine was ever forced to become about the patients for him, his interest in it would taper off.

He was just too far down the jaded path and eventually -- once you got that far -- you simply couldn't find your way back home.

"If anything, I'd've gone into Criminal Psychology." He often to this day found himself fascinated with quirks of the human psyche -- notably serial killers, then again, he had always had odd interests. "But then knowing my luck I'd've gotten stuck partnered up with Tritter."

And he would have committed suicide years ago.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

Cuddy lifted her foot from one pedal and brought it down on another, interested in the difference. Now the notes were abrupt. They did not carry at all. She heard muffled vibrations from inside the lid that cut off immediately. A voice choked off. She didn't like the sudden silences that followed every note so she pulled back on her heel and the notes came more freely and lasted longer.

She furrowed her mouth into a terse line at the mention of Tritter, but it didn't qualify enough in her perception to be followed through on. The whole debacle had worn heavily on her and, like most traumatic events, Cuddy was reluctant to talk about it unless it was in front of an official review board -- and even then she'd championed House, supplementing her on-the-stand testimony with as much detail as she could provide. They had looked down their noses at her but she had been confident and the matter had, for the most part, faded from all radars.

Her hands moved down the scale. "I don't know what I'dve done if I hadn't gone into medicine," while ducking under his wrist to strike a note that pleased her, "I always knew that I would. I never had the conflict of having to wonder about all the 'If only's' and 'Would I rather's'." She brought her fingers back to task. "I wanted to be a doctor since I was twelve. I really wanted to be a damn good doctor when I hit nineteen, twenty." She gave him a wry slice of a smile that implied that he had had no little role in that decision.

[addxcted.livejournal.com]

He didn't make the process of ducking under his wrist easy if only because it gave him the excuse to press down a little harder and feel her arm swoop slightly under his before she found the note she was seeking. It was vaguely entertaining to him that she was playing the way she was, like a five year old very intent on being a pianist.

Smirking at the jab at him, he turned eyes away from the keys to watch her instead, though he still was capable of keeping up with her without actually watching what he was doing with his fingers. She was more interesting, anyway, love the piano as he might.

"I never could figure out why my opinion mattered so much." He'd just been a bastard upperclassmen. Why anyone would have ever wanted to prove themselves to him was beyond him, but he saw similiar actions even to date with his ducklings.

[betteroffdean.livejournal.com]

An amused little 'hnh' sound pushed against the backs of her teeth; 'sound that was an audible translation of the thought You had to ask. She shook her head and drew lower lip back over her teeth, scraping top jaw over the skin while she figured out which chords sounded better together. Finding notes on a piano that matched was somewhat like finding out which areas of the brain stimulated what parts of the body. The only way to get a reaction was to plug your little electric box into the skull and experiment until you got a result. So too, Cuddy and her explorative fingers on the keys.

She blinked her amusement aside and shouldered the weight of her mouth to the left. An idle roll of her shoulder. "At first it was about your opinion. 'Time went on, it became more and more about the medicine."