A Prank Too Far

Don’t say I’m not good to you.

Very very disturbed. Just found out that my aunt likes the Twilight saga, then snapped at my best mate because it pissed me off so much. This is what a crisis of faith feels like. I didn’t think I could be related to anyone like that.

What the hell?

Review me and make me feel better.

And when I get published y’all hafta buy the book so I can get higher sales than that Meyer tit and then lord it over her stupid self.

If anyone tries to leap to the defence of the Twilight Saga I will do real and serious harm to them.

I shit you not.


Chapter 20 – Bake Sale Not Required


“You’ve done WHAT?!”

Cuddy looked up calmly from her paperwork and blinked languidly at her favourite misanthrope’s pet surgeon.

“You’re off rotation.” She restated.

Tawny opened her mouth, stood like that for a moment and then clapped it shut again. Her jaw clicked and her teeth ground. She surged up out of her seat and spun away from Cuddy, storming towards the door and then whirling back in a towering rage that was very nearly quite frightening.

“You can’t do that!”

Cuddy just arched a brow and sipped from her mug of tea. Her expression very clearly spoke of ‘oh really?’.

“You mustn’t be able to do that.” Tawny faltered now. Less sure of herself. “Surely a breach of contract. My job title is surgeon. I must be able to commit surgery, no?”

“The only committing you’re doing is yourself and into the psyche department.” Cuddy told her simply. This was the first real time that she’d had to square off against Tawny and, Cuddy had to admit, Tawny wasn’t a disappointing opponent in the slightest. The only other person that gave her as much grief was House. Tawny McQueen in a fit of temper was quite the thing to behold.

Her glasses were sharp angled red lens which leant her face a demonic countenance. Cuddy’s face rather eerily reflected back at her twice over every time their gazes clashed. Her hair was wild about her head in that tiger tumbled mane of hers and every line of her tall athletic frame quivered with the urge to do harm.

It occurred to Cuddy, rather belatedly, that she had just pissed off a very dangerous woman who happened to be quite unstable right now.

“I do not need a…a…” Tawny was so damn near apoplectic that she had completely forgotten the word in English for what she was trying to say. This, naturally, just exacerbated her mood and made her want to maim something even more.

“Shrink.” Cuddy supplied helpfully.

“One of those!” Tawny damn near bellowed and Cuddy flicked imaginary dust from her desk.

Supremely unimpressed.

“You don’t like it, go somewhere else.” Cuddy folded her hands on her desk. “That is, if anywhere else will take you once I let it slip that you’re in need of a psyche eval to confirm or deny the diagnosis of PTSD and are refusing to submit to one.”

Tawny growled.

An actual low and lethal snarl, complete with bared teeth and a crackling of bones as every single muscle in her body tensed in readiness to spring.

Cuddy wondered idly if security could get in here before Tawny killed her or if she’d even have the chance to alert them before she met her untimely demise.

“You wouldn’t…” Tawny’s chest heaved as she tried to regain some semblance of control.

Cuddy was quietly amazed, if she were honest. Aside from being overcome with a towering inferno of irate temper, Tawny gave absolutely no outward signs of being stressed, post traumatically or otherwise.

“I would, have and did.” Cuddy smiled congenially at her. “Take it or leave it.”

“So…” Tawny looked about herself as if trying to summon help from the empty air of the room. “If I…submit,” she looked like she actually retched a tiny bit as she said it, “to this evaluation, I can be put back to my work?”

“If you follow the prescribed course of action that may or may not result, then yes. You can go back to slicing and dicing with the best of them.”

Tawny flinched a tiny bit at Cuddy’s word choice and Cuddy sipped her tea in satisfaction. She took no pleasure in flinging the other woman’s phobia in her face but, if it got her to do what she had to do and if it confirmed her diagnosis even more solidly, then she was perfectly willing to go and get a blood pack and spray it all over her if it came to it.

That, and she liked her little victories a tiny bit.

Evil dictator that she was.

Tawny’s shoulder slumped and she looked dejectedly at Cuddy.

“Must I?”

Cuddy nodded firmly and Tawny spun without another word, striding from the office and leaving the door hanging open behind her.


$inister $cribe


House was surfing the internet and staring at article after article about a certain special K without taking in a single damn word of it.

His mind was on Her.

Goddamn woman and her infernal cluttering of his life.

His fingers drummed on the table top and he considered how to put his latest plot into action.

He needed to know.

Pregnancy was nothing to be trifled with, after all. Impending fatherhood was nothing to be snickered at either. If there was a tiny bundle of cells playing the parasite inside his favourite touch tummies playmate, then he decided that, not only was it a need to know affair, but that he definitely needed to know.

Problem was…she didn’t want to acknowledge this little zygote of a problem between them.

They were under the strict regime of a ceasefire and any careless meddling on his part blew up the whole peace treaty and landed him squarely back in the trenches.

He was all for fighting, spiced up his day nicely, kept things lively, but he was rather fond of rolling over in the middle of the night and finding her under is arm. She didn’t seem to mind tangling herself about him either. Anything further than that…well, he’d had enough grown up conversations with himself already today and he needed to pace himself. Best not to get spooked about the whole maturity thing. Ironically, baby steps were the way to go.

It was at times like this, when he was at a complete loss at what to do (few and far between though they were), that House asked himself on question.

What would Batman do?

House felt that any man who can think his way around Superman, beat the shit out of him and then live to tell the tale, was worth taking notes from. He was just a dude (albeit with absurd dress sense) that was prepared beyond belief for any given situation. House could identify with that, even if he did prefer to fly by the seat of his pants most of the time. There was a lot to be said for having a decent brain in your skull and knowing how to use it.

That and the Batmobile.

That, AND he’d done the fatherhood thing too!

Okay, so he’d raised a fellow vigilante, but better that than an introverted psychopath in a purple suit with clown make up on.

Batman would do some research. Know his enemy and get the kryptonite ring out of storage. He’d have contingencies on contingencies and know his enemy better than they knew themselves.

House was beginning to think that he’d stretched the metaphor to breaking point and that he could do without all this parental nonsense running about his head.

Batman had never had to deal with a pregnant woman.

Yeesh.

Babies.

Yikes, multiple births!

That was another thing. Did the Cuddy women spawn litters? What were they like when gestating? He’d need a comprehensive list of familial symptoms if he was going to have a successful diagnosis and enough evidence to warrant the bloodwork he needed. If he could convince her to at least pee on a stick then he could manage to wait the prerequisite minute, he supposed.

He considered various ways how to just take what he had wanted but, then, that hadn’t exactly given her the jollies the last time and, for once, he’d been entirely innocent of any snooping. Through mail or otherwise.

Damn it, should have taken the chance while it had presented itself. See, this was why he didn’t have scruples. Got in the way of his answers.

He needed a serious family history going on here.

Medical records were a problem, ever since he’d let it slip that he knew his little partypant’s password she’d had it on a rotating string of numbers and letters that she seemed to pull out of the ether and then change whenever the fancy took her.

So, hacking into the system and just having a look to see if she came from prolific breeding stock was out. Besides, that didn’t give him the nitty gritty details that he needed anyway. He needed to know about the swollen ankles, the morning sickness and the cravings for peanut butter and jelly on halibut in the middle of the night…ew.

The way he saw it, he had three options; out and out ask her if she’d just take the damn test, pretty please as a favour to him for some precious peace of mind, find and bribe a spy who would do it for him, go the treacherous and well travelled route of snooping through her rash and taking what he wanted anyway or…or…he supposed he could always call her mother.

House eyed the phone and something very like the voice of reason (or common sense) started wailing in the back of his head in a sound vaguely reminiscent of an air raid siren.

House reached for the phone and then let his hand drop.

No, she’d kill him.

He picked up the handset, surreptitiously checking about himself for the wicked witch’s flying monkeys, and then slapped his fingers on the tab to cut the dial tone from his ear.

If she ever found him out, she’d have him shoved through the meat grinder in the cafeteria and served as Tuesday’s Chicken Surprise…if she found out.

The voice of reason began to weep quietly somewhere in the corner of his brain.

He punched in the area code.

He was on the way to hell. Not even along that nice road of good intentions either. His intentions were thoroughly self serving and manipulative.

He squinted and tried to remember Mama Cuddy’s house number.

He wasn’t going to the nice part of hell. He was going to the gnarled Bronx part of hell, where the devil did drive by shootings and the liquor stores were always sold out of whiskey.

House was startled into dropping the handset back into the cradle when his fellow announced herself with a clatter from the door and an angry click of expensive alligator skin heels.

Tawny stormed across the room and threw herself into the chair opposite his desk. Her hands gripped the armrests until her knuckles whitened. She seethed quietly a moment and then looked up at him.

“So,” he folded his hands together and tried to look congenial. “How did it go?”

“She says that I am not to do surgery until I go to the head doctor.” Her voice was stilted, obviously having to think a bit too much about English to be as fluent as she usually was.

“You want to go?”

She glared at him.

House considered a long moment. He could get her out of this. He could march downstairs to Cuddy’s office and demand that he get his surgeon back. He could make this easier on her. Let her hide from it.

He could do that.

Or he could actually help her.

“Tough. Get yourself an appointment. Pick a shrink, go through the motions, get yourself signed off. I need a surgeon that’s willing to do nuts things for me and you’re all there is.” He sat back in his chair and folded his arms behind his head.

“You’re not going to get me out of this?”

“Why would I? I’m the one that diagnosed you. You’re much more valuable to me when you’re not having a nervous breakdown.”

“I am not going to…”

“Get in a bar fight and then flip out when you realise you’ve been bleeding?” House snapped at her. “Oh yeah, you’ve already done that.”

“So I’m not in perfect health!” Tawny surged to her feet and prowled away from him, hugging her arms about herself. “You are hardly one to cast stones on that subject.”

“It doesn’t stop me from doing my job.” He said after a long moment of crushing hypocrisy. “I can still function. You are coming apart at the seams.” He flicked his cane at her for emphasis.

“I…non…” Tawny struggled for the words.

“See? You’re struggling to remember English. Tawny, you know five languages. Fluently. The easiest one is tripping you up. What happens when you get into surgery and have the same feeling holding a guy’s heart in your hand?”

Her colour dropped at the mention of that and she gripped the chair back. Her knuckles cracking and whitening. She looked hunted. Trapped. Everyone was shoving her into a decision that she knew was wrong. Every fibre of her being rebelled against it. She wanted nothing more than to start screaming and tearing at things with her bare hands.

House knew that feeling.

“Tawny…”

She looked up at him balefully. Her shoulders slumped, her spine curled in defeat. She was a shadow of her former imposing self. House felt a flash of something very much like compassion and told himself that it was just indigestion. He was just doing this so that she would go along and get treatment like a good little frog.

“Eight years back, a guy…” House trailed off and wondered why the hell he was playing this out like it was someone else. It was him. It always had been him and it was about time he took a little bit of ownership of that. “When I got the infarction in my leg, the smart thing to do was to amputate. Made sense in every single other case that I’d ever come across with the same circumstances except…it was my leg.”

Tawny slowly sat down on the seat. She was still folded in on herself, elbows resting on her knees and hands wringing between them, but she was looking up at him with a faint kindling of something in her eyes.

“It was my leg, damn it, and I didn’t want anyone taking it from me.” House sat back in his chair and thumped his cane against the floor. “Maybe it was vanity, maybe it was fear or pride or any other one of those stupid useless emotions…but I refused. I was so dead set against that, even when they forced the procedure on me, they were only brave enough to take a piece of me when they should have taken the lot.” House seethed quietly for a moment in the white hot rage against what could have been. “Well, you know the rest. It didn’t work out so damn well for me, did it?”

“You think this will cripple me?” She said, her voice the smallest thing he had ever heard.

“I think it could kill you.”

Her shoulders hunched a little more.

“I’m afraid.”

“I know.”

“Come with me?”

House’s eyes flew up at that and met hers. Her glasses were tilted down in a rare moment of real eye contact. He opened his mouth to go and tell her to get her husband, her son, someone else, someone more suitable to go with her and hold her hand…but then it occurred to him that hand holding was the last thing she needed. She needed someone ruthless to make sure she went through with this. Someone to poke and prod her and bar the door when she tried to run.

House could do that.

He could be a mean bastard better than anyone he knew.

“Sure.” He levered himself to her feet and limped around the desk. When she hesitated to follow him he reached out and gripped her arm. He dragged her reluctant form from the office and down the hall towards the elevator. She needed to do this and he needed to help her get it done.

Change was awful. It was horrible and violent and uncomfortable and made you want to claw your eyes out, but it needed to happen. Tawny needed to go to the shrink. She needed to finally talk about whatever the hell had happened to her out there in the big bad world. She needed it.

He needed to help her.

Maybe he needed to change a little bit too. Maybe that would make things a little easier with Cuddy.

He shoved Tawny into the elevator and punched the button for the right floor with his cane. Making sure to bar the exit with it as he did so. She looked at him sullenly, more than a little frightened and then resolved to hang in the back of the elevator in the vain hope that he wouldn’t be able to punt her out when they arrived. He wasn’t going to back down this time though.

He was going to see this through no matter what.

His…his friend needed him to.

House looked at her sideways and wondered if he hadn’t been doing some of that changing business already.


$inister $cribe

“Hey.”

Cuddy looked up with surprise and blinked when she saw him towering over her. She hadn’t even heard him come in the office door. She told herself it was because she had been absorbed in the scintillating spreadsheets cluttering her desk…not in the thought of the drugstore bought test that was stuffed into the bottom of her purse.

“Uh, hi.” She was at a loss for what to do when he just stood over her. Should she stand up too? Was he going to sit down? The man offered her nothing but questions. It was infuriating. “Where have you been? I haven’t heard a peep out of you all afternoon.”

“I was with a psychiatrist.”

The pen Cuddy had been about to write with hit the paper at the wrong angle and careened off into the dim light of the office. Of all the things she had expected him to say. That hadn’t been one of them.

“Seriously?!”

“Don’t get your hopes up.” He muttered and turned slowly, letting himself settle back against the desk looking down at her with an unidentifiable expression on his face. “I was there to make sure Tawny didn’t bolt.”

“Oh.” Cuddy fidgeted a moment. “How did it go?”

“Well, we sat there for about two hours in silence.”

Cuddy looked up at him sharply. “Why?”

“To prove that she could.” House shrugged. “She’s terrified. She’s going to take back control wherever she can get it and, even if that means speaking only when she wants to, it’s what she’s going to do.”

“Who did she pick? Who’d let her just sit there for two hours?”

“I picked Farber. He’s got the personality of a potato chip and he’s going through a shitty divorce right now, but that’s because his wife is sick of him manipulating her.”

“Tawny let you pick?”

“No, I told her that was how it was going down. I also told her that she only had to go through the motions to get signed off. She thinks that Farber is going to be easy to fool.”

Cuddy’s head kicked back in understanding.

“Is he?”

“Not for an amateur like Tawny. She could probably kill him without leaving a mark on his body, but I don’t think she can think around him yet.”

“That’s a slightly disturbing image.” Cuddy pondered it for a moment and then shuddered.

“Not as disturbing as some of the stuff she finally started talking about.” House rubbed a hand over his face and Cuddy finally identified the odd tone in his voice. He sounded more than a little shaken up. Cuddy’s hand tightened on her new pen. If it was enough to make House nervous then it must have been horrific. He heaved a sigh and let his hand drop to rest back on the head of his cane. “She’s a lot more fucked up than I originally thought. The only reason that she hasn’t been reduced to a drooling wreck before now is because she’s got a stubborn streak a mile wide.”

“Wonder who that reminds me of.” Cuddy drawled without thinking and then stilled under his gaze when it swivelled to land on her.

“Yeah, well, my loose screws are more than well documented. Hers were blacked out by the French government.” He was quiet a moment. “I wonder if we’re doing the right thing.”

“We’re doing the only thing we can do.” Cuddy told him softly and laid her hand over his arm. “She will get through this. We’ll help her.”

He looked down at her hand on him and then up at her.

“You were right, by the way.”

“Of course I was.” Cuddy said immediately to cover her shock. She’d never have thought House would have said those words to her. “About what?”

“You were right to want to cut off my leg. I should have let you.”

Cuddy sat back in her chair and blinked at him. He was forever surprising her tonight.

“Uh…” She swallowed hard. “You’ve had quite a day of it haven’t you?”

“Yeah.” He moved from the desk and limped around it. He dropped down into the chair opposite her and she sat forward. He was about to drop something on her from a great height. Something bad. This was the thing he had been thinking about that morning. “I need to talk to you.”

“Is this a doctor thing or…the other thing?”

He looked uncomfortable.

“One and then the other. The first thing is…well, it’s a new treatment from Germany. It’s to do with Ketamine.”

“The animal tranquiliser?” She frowned at him fiercely. What the hell kind of scheme was he cooking up now.

House swallowed a sigh. This was going to be a long conversation.