readingrat | fic: The Kelpie - Part III Chapter 1 (Reply)

Part III: Princeton

Chapter 1: The Gathering of the Clouds

When Wilson passes Nolan's office with his overnight bag, Nolan is waiting to intercept him.

"You're sure about this, James?" he asks, concern in his eyes.

"Yes," he answers, looking straight into Nolan's eyes. "If I can't manage this, how will I cope with getting released, starting to work again in a strange environment and building up new relationships?"

"You know my opinion on this, but it's your own decision. You realise that it wasn't just House in Princeton who encouraged your unconstructive behavioural patterns? Princeton is no island of bliss just because House isn't there anymore."

"Yes, I realise that. But people are the same everywhere. Once I've been in New York for a while, I'll also be tempted to fall back into enabling patterns there."

"Very well," Nolan says. "Here's your pass." He pats Wilson on the shoulder. "Have fun!"

Wilson switches the bag to his other hand so as to pull open the heavy front door with his stronger left arm. He is greeted by a low-standing, but warm October sun. Early autumn is showing itself from its best side. The trees around him are decked in bright reds and oranges, the air is mellow, a squirrel bounds across the lawn to his left. A little way down the drive Cuddy is waiting beside her car; she knows he's punctual so she hasn't bothered to pull into the parking lot next to the main building. She is dressed in a black dress that is cut out low in the back but flares out below the waist, with a pearl necklace and matching earrings. Her shoes, though, are sensible; for driving down and back, he guesses. She'll have a pair of her killer heels in the car.

"All set?" she asks as he approaches. He nods, giving his tie a quick tug. She steps forward to give him an awkward hug. Appraising his overnight bag she says, "It's so small you can toss it in the back seat. Come!"

"You look good," he says somewhat belatedly.

"So do you," she returns, sliding behind the steering wheel. As they pass the gates she says, "I won't be staying overnight, but Cameron will bring you back tomorrow."

"Oh." He feels steam-rolled, a ridiculous reaction considering the irrelevance of the change in plans. He is to spend the night at Allison's place anyway, and it really makes no difference who brings him back to Mayfield. He closes his eyes and tries to analyse his reaction, as he's been taught to do. It's not the fact that the plans have changed that is upsetting him; he's stressed out by what he'll face at PPTH today - the surreptitious glances and whispers, the ex-colleagues exuding jovial bonhomie while they pretend to believe his story that he's always pined for a job in research, his staff biding him a tearful farewell. He has been clinging to routine and predictability these past days in an effort to counter the panic that rises in him when he thinks of the evening ahead of him. For a moment he considers telling Cuddy to turn the car and take him back, but no. He has had no chance to say goodbye, to close with this chapter of his life, the one that encompassed both his longest professional commitment and his most enduring personal relationship. If he starts afresh in New York without taking leave of his former existence, it'll always be niggling at him at the back of his head, suggesting that what he left behind was far better, more fulfilling, more satisfying than what he has now.

"Problems with the babysitter?" he asks, more out of politeness than real interest. Cuddy's childcare problems are the last thing on his mind at the moment.

"No, not really," Cuddy pronounces carefully. Her tone makes his head swivel around; so far his eyes have been trained on the road, as though fixing the tarmac with his stare will make the miles pass slower. Cuddy's eyes are on the traffic, but her lips are working, as though trying out the taste of the words that lie on them. "I promised Pete that I wouldn't spend any more time alone with you."

In his state of nervous befuddlement it takes him a few seconds to decipher what she just said. "You mean House," he says, surprised and disapproving on more than one count. Her calling House 'Pete' is ridiculous; House may not know that he's not Pete, but both of them do, and referring to him by his false identity is plain stupid. But that's the least of his many objections to her statement.

"I went to Boston to see him last weekend."

His mind reels at that, so he says the first thing that makes it from his brain to his tongue. "I thought you were at a conference."

"I lied," she says with no sign of guilt.

"Cuddy, this is insane! What are you trying to do?"

"I'd say that's pretty obvious: stay in contact with him and get some sort of relationship up and moving." She says this calmly, as though it were the most natural of impulses to want closer communion with House. Which it is, but it carries with it a truckload of dynamite.

"I thought you said you ended it." A feeling of impending doom claws at his chest. How can she talk so calmly about meeting House when she's opening the gateway to chaos by doing so?

"No. I didn't specify who ended it, but he did. Not because we weren't on the same page, though. He objected to my seeing you."

"So you've decided that the best way to deal with the unfounded jealousy of a guy who already parked his car in your house once on seeing you with another man is to eschew all contact with other members of the male sex," he says with bitter irony, "because then nothing can go wrong anymore."

Cuddy wrinkles up her nose. "It isn't jealousy per se. Pete is worried that you'll get abusive if I give you the notion that there could be something between us again."

"Excellent point! Except that you've got the protagonist and the antagonist mixed up."

She casts a sideway glance at him. He wishes she wouldn't - traffic is dense on the freeway, and fast. "He has, not me."

"Wait, wait, let me see whether I got this right." He's waving his hands around in front of him in choppy movements that he'd like to be able to control better. "You're forsaking me and abandoning our friendship because your present love interest - who happens to be House, but it probably is of no consequence who he is - has absolutely ludicrous objections to me?"

Cuddy abruptly pulls up in an emergency bay. "Okay," she says, "let's have this out." She turns towards Wilson as far as her seatbelt will allow her. "My 'love interest's' objection is perfectly reasonable from his point of view. He assumes (a) that you are a former lover of mine, and (b) that you tried to murder me. Either one would suffice to make most men object to their girlfriends spending any time with you at all, let alone on a one-to-one basis. If you want to take a stand on this, if my friendship is that important to you, go ahead! Tell him the truth! I won't try to stop you."

He is floundering - he has a bad feeling about where this is going. "Telling House who he is and what he did would be cruel. We've been through this before; you agreed with me there." He looks at her appealingly. "You can't expect me to do that. Look, I gave up House's friendship to enable him to become happy, and you know what his friendship meant to me." He closes his eyes briefly at the memory of the past years that he had to survive without his curious bond with House to carry him through. "Can't you do the same?"

"No, because that isn't the choice I'm having to make. You," she pokes a finger in his chest, "are saying that I should give up what I have with Pete in order to continue this friendship - if that's what it is - with you. I'm saying that if I have to choose, I'll choose Pete."

"You mean House," he corrects austerely. Cuddy believes that if she gives House a new identity, she can somehow change the man and mould him into who she wants him to be. But House is House, brilliant, screwed-up and unmanageable, no matter what name one gives him; and Peter is definitely too tame for those wild, primal forces at work in him.

Cuddy takes only a brief moment to consider this. "No, I mean Pete. I will not let you dictate how I think of him. And you're hardly in a position to object to my priorities. You always put House first, before your marriages even, and you certainly always put him before me."

He can understand that Cuddy would bring this up; he isn't proud of how he handled his private life in the past, but that's neither here nor there. He can't grasp that Cuddy is so willing to shut her eyes to the real danger of what she is doing. "The more he sees and hears of you, the more likely he is to run into someone or something that tells him who he is and what he did. By choosing him, as you term it, you're precipitating him into his past."

"You can't be so naive as to believe that he won't discover his past sooner or later. I saw his travel itinerary - after Boston he wants to head south to Maryland. That means he's heading for Johns Hopkins." Cuddy touches her forehead briefly with her fingertips. "Even if he doesn't find himself in the archives, we'd have to be really lucky for him not to run into someone he knows over there. I'm surprised it didn't happen in New York. There must be people he went to med school with, people he met at conferences before the infarction, people who know him by sight, at med schools all over the country. And don't even tell me they won't recognise him. He was notorious all of his life, and now that he's clean shaven and halfway groomed again, he's very, very recognisable. He looks like he did at Michigan, plus thirty years."

Wilson pinches the bridge of his nose. "Even if this didn't affect our friendship, I'd still object, and you know that. You kept it a secret from me for that reason." She doesn't deny it. "Four years ago, you and House had a relationship that was a disaster from beginning to end." She stares at him in disbelief. "Oh, come on, Cuddy! You were on the verge of dumping him right from the start. I don't even know why you bothered to start that relationship at all, the way you carried on."

"Crap!" Cuddy says. She looks at him as if seeing him for the first time. "You really have no idea, do you?"

"I know," he says angrily, "that you were constantly threatening to break up if he didn't do as you wanted." Looking back, he wonders what made him push House into that pool of sharks. That House had lost all sense of reality at the chance of dating Cuddy was understandable; that he, Wilson, had done so too and encouraged his friend's idiocy was unforgiveable.

"No." She laughs in disbelief. "There was never any danger of a break-up before my cancer scare. House knew it and I knew it. That's why I could afford to insist on the things that were important to me, and he could afford to play games with me before giving in."

"And if he hadn't given in?"

"I knew he'd give in," she says with absolute certainty.

"What, when you made him promise never to lie to you, you knew he'd do it?" The whole ridiculous episode still makes his teeth feel as though he's hearing chalk scrape over a blackboard: House wondering whether to endanger his patient for Cuddy's sake, House trying his best to convince Cuddy that he'd done no wrong, House attending that goddam wedding, the one where he, Wilson, got dumped by Sam, to placate Cuddy ...

"Yes." She throws up her hands. "Wilson, I'm not an idiot. I only pick battles that I know I can win. I avoid the rest. I knew he'd give in and promise he'd never lie to me; I also knew he wouldn't keep that promise."

"Then why ..."

"Because I wanted to be sure that he'd never do it light-heartedly, just because he could. Because that's what he did: he did things simply because he could, because no one stopped him. The only time we ever got close to a break-up before that final fiasco was when I made him treat my mother."

"Yes, I was somewhat surprised to hear that he'd agreed to that," he says tightly.

"Oh, treating her wasn't the problem - I knew he'd cave on that. The problem started when she threatened to kill herself by getting transferred to Princeton General. If I hadn't stopped her from leaving, I would have lost House - he'd have dumped me as unceremoniously as I dumped him later - so I brought my mother back." She smiles reminiscently. "His patients were the only things he really cared about. The rest was all bluster."

Looking back at those turbulent months four years ago, he considers her view of things. She could be right, he concedes reluctantly. House may not have been happy at having to go without for longer periods of time, but he was never fazed or seriously bothered during all their minor and major tiffs, not the way he was when she finally dumped him.

"So all that fuss was just you showing him and the world that you had him beaten." He doesn't bother about tactful phrasing, he's that pissed. And he really, really doesn't like the way she talks of House in the past tense, as though he doesn't exist anymore and his body has been taken over by some benevolent alien, some pod person.

Her tightened lips show that she has caught his mood. "If you want to put it that way, yes. More about convincing myself than the world, though. House was someone who did what he liked, when he liked and how he liked it. It was challenging enough dealing with that at the hospital, but having it in my private life too, losing all control, was overwhelming. All those power games - that was me trying to convince myself that I had House under control and that therefore nothing could go wrong, no matter how much he tried to screw things up." She fiddles with her pearls. "You know, what I wanted was someone who'd support me and who'd get along with Rachel. What I got was someone who couldn't have cared less about Rachel ..."

"He liked Rachel," Wilson feels obliged to protest.

"Like hell he did! He resented her at first and tolerated her later, but he certainly never liked her. Maybe someday he would have loved her, but 'like' is one of those wishy-washy emotions that House didn't do. There's a world of difference in the way you interact with Rachel, listening to her and playing with her, and the way he only noticed her when who she was impacted our relationship. And instead of giving support when I needed it, he went and got himself into a state where he needed support. I knew all this when I got into the relationship, but I chose to close both my eyes to the truth. "

"What makes you think he's changed so much? He still won't like Rachel, and I doubt he's that much more of a pillar of strength and a rock in the tempest than he was before. This is going to go down the same route to hell as the last time."

"This," Cuddy says wryly, "isn't going to last long enough to go down any route at all. Pete is going to find out any day now who he is, and he isn't going to like it. At all. He won't want to be in a relationship with a woman who's seen his worst side, not when there are millions of others who only know his new unsullied persona."

"Then why are you doing this?" he asks desperately. "You are pursuing a guy who, you say, is totally unsuitable relationship material and who you're sure will leave you any second now. What do you hope to gain by this?"

Cuddy sighs. "A few moments of happiness. First I tried relationships with guys who fitted my notion of what I needed - steadiness, reliability, etc. - and it didn't work. Then I tried a relationship with a guy I wanted, and tried to fit him into my notion of what Rachel and I needed, and it didn't work." She throws up her hands. "I'm not even thinking of where this is going or whether it has a chance. It doesn't. I'm doing something for myself with no regard for the long-term consequences."

Somehow that doesn't sound new. It sounds exactly like what Cuddy has been doing all her life, but there seems little sense in telling her that. "Isn't that a bit irresponsible?" Wilson ventures.

"The last time I did something responsible and sober was when I dumped House. Although neither he nor I ever put it into so many words, we both knew I was doing it because of Rachel." She is silent, searching for words. "If I'd only had to think about myself, I'd have given it a chance, but the cancer crisis showed me that I'd need to invest a lot of time keeping him on his feet, time that I owed Rachel. It wasn't so much that he wasn't a father-figure, although there was that too. It's more that he was so high maintenance when things got rough that you couldn't really have a kid and him. And he knew that - he said right at the start that he was an insane choice for a mother. So, I dumped him, thinking it was best for Rachel, and that set off the chain of events that put Rachel into a wheelchair."

"You're blaming him for Rachel's disability," Wilson states, his eyes narrowed.

"No. I'm blaming myself. I should have known that he'd let his anger and frustration out on someone, and the obvious choice would have been Rachel, so I'm lucky he chose to take it out on me - I don't for a moment think that he was aiming to hurt Rachel in any way. I was an idiot to start something with a guy who could become a danger to my child and even more of an idiot to believe I could shield her from the consequences of our break-up."

He's confused now, in a not-so-good way. "You said," he says slowly, "that you believed me when I said that he was trying to commit suicide."

She leans her forehead on the steering wheel. "That's what I want to believe. But I'll never really know, will I? And even if he was, he was doing it to get even with me."

"Okay … let's sum this up. You insist on continuing a relationship with a guy who is going to dump you in the near future, who is potentially abusive and who is not cut out to fit into your family life, and this makes sense to you because," he flicks a hand illustratively, "when you do things the right way, they go wrong. You have therefore come to the conclusion that if you do things the wrong way, they'll turn out right. Hmmm, interesting. The logical fallacy lies in your assumption that because A (doing things right) implies B (things go wrong), the reverse – B implies A - is true too."

Cuddy sits up and snorts. "A, you've lost me. B, you and House may find these verbal games funny, but I'm not intrigued by logic at the moment. Nor am I interested in what you think of what I'm doing. I have spent years listening to you telling me what's best for House."

She lowers her voice to mimic him. "'Let's make House detox, so that he'll realise he's an addict, but he can't know it's my idea.' - 'Let's not tell him he cured his last patient because it'll increase his hubris, but don't tell him it was my idea.' - 'Let's make a deal with Tritter ...' Oh, wait, you never told me about that before you did it; you went and did it, and I had to commit perjury to keep House out of jail. Now you've fried his brain, and I'm supposed to support your efforts to keep that from backfiring. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not playing your games any longer. This amnesia plot wasn't my idea, no one asked me, and heaven knows I would never have approved had I known of it. You can't make me stick to rules that you make up along the way, in a game that I never agreed to play."

"This is not a game! You are endangering House's well-being - again! You're assuming that this time things will go well, because you believe he doesn't care about you. What if you're wrong? What if he crashes again? He nearly died the last time you dumped him; his blood will be on your head!"

Cuddy's eyes flash, and he's happy she's restrained by her seat belt. "Oh no, you don't get to do this, Wilson! I'm prepared to take the responsibility for my actions, but not for his. Yes, I was wrong to start a relationship with him the last time, and maybe I was wrong to dump him - I don't know. But what he did and what he made of the situation is on him, not on me. I'm responsible for the hurt I caused him, but not for the way he chose to cope with his feelings. And you - you certainly don't get to blame me. You walked out on him when Amber died. You are nothing but a self-righteous dick!"

She starts the car and pulls out of the bay with screeching tires.

"Oh, wow!" Wilson says, mostly to himself.

He's done in Boston, and he wants to head south, via Baltimore (Johns Hopkins) to Norfolk (Eastern Virginia Medical School), Atlanta (Emory) and then south to Florida. Since Princeton is on the way, he may as well drop in there this weekend. It isn't that he doesn't trust her; it's James he doesn't trust. So he travels down to Princeton on Saturday morning to check out the place. He can skip the university since it doesn't have a medical department. As for the hospital, it would be interesting to nose around in it to find out a bit more about James. It'll have to be after the Anniversary Gala that Lisa is attending, because he's conspicuous and he'd rather not have Lisa find out that he's microscoping her professional and private past.

He drives past the hospital a couple of times before he pulls into the parking lot. A part of it is cordoned off, and there's a lot of bustle at the front entrance, with delivery vans unloading everything from folding tables to cutlery. Maybe he can get inside and look around under cover of all this hullaballoo without drawing any attention to himself.

He walks over to the main entrance. It is festooned with a big banner proclaiming 'Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital - 125 Years of Medical and Academic Excellence'. No false modesty here. The hospital itself is a red-brick neo-gothic structure with two wings, augmented by a modern expansion connecting the original two wings and surrounded by well-tended lawns interspersed with wooden benches. It's an architectural catastrophe, and it's probably no fun whatsoever to maintain the older part of the hospital according to modern medical standards. He sits down on a strategically positioned bench and observes the comings and goings of the delivery personnel and the maintenance crew. He'd like to go in carrying something so that the slight unevenness of his gait is attributed to his load, so he gets up and goes to the largest of the delivery vans, one of a fleet of three from Princeton Caterers. Two men are unloading boxes and crates from the back of the van, a third is stacking the boxes that are handed down to him onto a two-wheeler.

"Hey," he says by way of greeting as he comes up behind the third man. The man jumps, dropping the box he just received from his mate. There's a resounding crash and the tinkle of breaking glass, followed by a round of curses.

"You crazy or something?" the man yells at him.

He puts up both hands in a defensive gesture - he doesn't feel like getting socked on the nose by some paranoid hunk. This one sports too much muscle and too many tattoos for him to risk aggravating him.

One of the men on the back of the van leans down. "What box was that?"

The hunk leans down for a look. "It says 'Glasses, white wine.'" He opens the box and peers inside, shrugs and tosses the box to the side. "We c'n forget those."

"Jason, you're an idiot," the man on the back of the van says. "That's the second crate you've dropped today."

"Am not! What does it matter? We've already unpacked at least three boxes of these. How much wine can people drink?"

"The other boxes were red wine glasses," his colleague says tiredly. "We need both."

"Let the big-wigs drink their white wine from the red wine glasses! They look the same, don't they?" the jumpy hunk says, pointing at the pictograms on the boxes.

"Red wine glasses are larger," Pete can't help pointing out, "and you need both on the table, the white wine to go with fish and poultry, the red one for red meats."

"You!" Jumpy Guy barks. "Don't interfere! You caused this!"

"Wait," the guy on the van says, looking him over. "You know about this kind of stuff?"

"It's not exactly a state secret," Pete says. "And this guy's problem isn't just ignorance, it's his drug consumption. Hey, get off of me!" He's on his butt, dabbing his nose, his head ringing.

The two men in the back of the van jump down and pull Dope Head aside before he can cause more damage. There's a vociferous altercation that ends with Jumpy Jason becoming once more a recipient of whatever largesse the government of the USA distributes to the large masses of unemployed, and then one of the others, a short man in his mid-forties who looks more like a bookkeeper than a labourer comes back to him and holds out a hand to hoist him up.

"Look, I'm sorry. We didn't realise that Jason has ... problems. Do you need someone to see to your nose?" He tips his head back towards the hospital entrance.

No, he doesn't. Going in there as a patient is the surest way to alert Lisa to his presence here; she's bound to gossip with the nurses when she comes, and knowing Lisa, she'll be wondering whether he'll dare turn up. He's seldom met anyone who is so privy to his little subterfuges.

"It's fine," he mumbles.

Jason is moving off, turning round to flip him the bird, and uttering curses and imprecations at him and at his former boss once he's at a safe distance.

"No loss," says the other man, who has been taciturn till now.

"You need help here?" Pete offers.

Both remaining men look him over dubiously. "You got a problem with that leg?" the older man says.

"I got a problem with my finances," he returns.

"You know how to set up a table the right way?"

"Worked in major restaurants for years." A slight exaggeration, but perfectly valid as a rhetorical device. "Setting a table isn't rocket science."

The bookkeeper type tips his head towards the hospital. "Come along."

"Don't you have to ask your boss before you give strangers a job?"

"I am the boss," the bookkeeper says drily. Now Pete looks him up and down. The bookkeeper/boss shrugs. "I got a problem with my staff," he says, "and I've got a major do here in three hours. You in?"

He nods.

Two hours later he has been promoted from setting tables to supervising the catering staff, which suits him just fine. He can't believe his luck, for it's the ideal cover for hanging around the hospital. The gala dinner is to take place in the lobby, a light glass structure rising up over several floors surrounded by a gallery on the second floor. The room is now set out with round tables with a seating capacity of eight persons each. A small stage has been set up near the entrance doors - an odd place for it, but the choice was obviously dictated by technical considerations: the wall above the doors is covered with a white screen on which technicians are now projecting pictures of the hospital over the past century or so. The catering service has been assigned two meeting rooms branching off the gallery on the second floor for their supplies, because there are no suitable rooms on the first floor within easy distance of the lobby. One room harbours all the silverware, crockery and glassware that isn't needed at present and big basins for dirty dishes; in the other the food that was delivered a few minutes ago in steel basins is being kept warm, while crate upon crate of champagne, wine and beer are stacked along one of the walls.

The downside of belonging to the catering staff is running around in a get-up that makes him look like an anorexic penguin; the upside is that he can observe everything without being seen himself. He has discovered that the medical staff doesn't take any notice of all these strangers bustling around in their territory. This is what slaves in Ancient Rome must have felt like - indispensable, but ignored completely. If the president turned up over here he probably wouldn't be noticed provided he stood behind the bar dressed in a white shirt and black pants dispensing champagne. Furthermore, the gallery on the second floor gives him an ideal vantage point. He can observe most of the tables and he has an excellent view of the entrance while he himself will be practically invisible to the people sitting below. He'll actually be able to keep an eye on Lisa without attracting her attention.

At the moment he is being treated to the sight of some administrator, the dean's PA judging by his age and his general air of incompetence, having a meltdown because the audio system is not working. A tall greying man in a tux enters from somewhere downstage left. The effect is instantaneous - a whole crowd, technical and medical staff all mixed, immediately converges on him, jabbering wildly, pointing in different directions, yelling each other down. The patriarch raises both hands in a gesture akin to a blessing while taking a step backwards. Then he picks out supplicants one after the other, gives them instructions or placates them - it's difficult to tell from a distance - and sends them on their way. Soon he has reduced the crowd around him to a small group dressed in tuxedos or evening dresses themselves - leading staff members, one assumes. These he gathers around him like a prophet his disciples; he gestures, points, and calls their attention to a sheet of paper that he has on a clipboard. The group around him nods at every point he makes and peers over his shoulder at what is probably an agenda for the evening; every now and then there's a question; then, as the sound system springs back to life with a deafening screech, the group below disperse to their various posts. The dean, for such he probably is, takes up a post close to the entrance. Behind him is a table set out with champagne glasses; beside him is one of the disciples, a woman in her mid-thirties with dark hair, stunningly dressed in a long red gown. Real eye candy, that woman - it's no wonder she got chosen for that task.

In the room behind him his new boss, Rick, is shouting at one of the waiters. The waiters all seem to be students from the university, hired at minimum wages and too bright to know a fork from a knife. "This is what the plate is supposed to look like. You arrange the food like this, not in wild heaps all over the plate. The meat here; the vegetables down here. You garnish with two of these and one of those; you do not smother the whole plate with lettuce!"

He turns around to watch. Is Rick really letting those Bright Young Things arrange the food on the plates? He should have hired a few competent housewives - just as cheap and a lot more efficient. Who needs calculus to feed the hungry masses? Then he sees the food arrangement that Rick has created as a template to be copied by those arranging the food on the plates, and he abandons his post. It's a wonder Rick got the contract for this evening's gala dinner, the way he runs his company. He moves up behind Rick and plucks the plate out of his hands, tipping its contents into the garbage bin for leftovers. He does the same with the plate with the starter.

"That was crap," he says conversationally to Rick, who is gaping. "This," he says to the student, "is how you will arrange the food." And he proceeds to rearrange starter, main course and dessert according to an image in his mind of what the end product should look like.

It's swill, but by the time he's done, it's appetising swill, the geometric arrangement of the different forms and the colour contrasts offered by the garnishing a balm to the eye of the beholder. "Don't overload the plate, count everything! Three leaves of arugula with two cherry tomato wedges in the middle," he adds as a parting instruction. "You can count, can't you?"

The student nods dumbly; Rick huffs ambiguously. "What?" Pete asks him challengingly.

"Nothing," Rick says, throwing up his hands. He turns to go. "Gotta make sure there's enough champagne down there. When I give you a sign, send someone with another ten bottles."

Watching the event unfold from his vantage point is edifying; it looks unplanned and informal, but in reality it's all carefully choreographed. The arriving guests are greeted by the couple at the door, the patriarchal dean and his mind-blowing sidekick, and then passed on to one of the other staff members. There's a clear ranking there: the important ones get more of the dean's time on arrival and are handed over to more senior staff members, men and women who are characterised by an air of confidence and self-assurance, who then seat the persons in question at tables of honour near the temporary stage. Less important guests get passed on quickly and unceremoniously to junior staff members. He wiles away the time playing a guessing game: he observes how long the dean and his brunette assistant talk with each arriving guest and then guesses where that guest will be seated. He's got it down to a T when Lisa and James arrive.

Their body language is a dead give-away. Lisa is striding rapidly, aggressively, so that James can barely keep up. She's got a poker face, but James's face, even from that distance, is somewhat chagrined, and he's lagging just slightly behind her. She must have told him, then, about their agreement that she shouldn't see him anymore. He can't help feeling pleased; some part of him was afraid that she'd let it slide in the hope that he'd never find out that she was still seeing James. Lisa is dressed conservatively in black and at first glance she's nowhere near as eye-catching as some of the other birds swirling around the lobby, but she draws his gaze magically by the sheer dynamic of her movements and her energy. He can feel his lips tug into a little smile as he watches her enter, and he wonders whether she'll be very mad at him when she finds out he's here. Because seeing her, he realises that he wants to leave with her, not alone, and spend the night with her. He'll take a break later and pin a note to the windshield of her car telling her to wait for him.

When Lisa comes up to the dean, she draws herself up a further couple of inches. She's still way smaller than he is, but what she lacks in height, she makes up in determination. The awkwardness is undeniable - Pete has been observing the dean for over half an hour now and can tell that his normally relaxed posture has become noticeably stiffer. He probably feels like a newly-wed whose mother-in-law is coming on an inspection of the family home. He passes Lisa on quickly to the woman next to him, whose greeting is considerably warmer. Lisa spends a long time chatting to her - he's prepared to bet that she knows all about the 'talking time is proportional to the importance of the guest' rule and is deliberately holding up the queue forming behind them - before being handed over to a fairly junior staff member, whom she promptly abandons in order to greet a much more senior staff member who is passing by. Within no time at all Lisa is hobnobbing with a sizeable group of doctors in the centre of the lobby where they can't but be noticed. Atta girl, he thinks with something akin to parental pride. You show them!

James gets more quality time from his (former) dean and a warm hug from the woman in red. Pete has no idea whether James is still officially a staff member - he's still on the hospital's homepage as head of oncology, but that may just mean that HR has better things to do than update their staff pages. He, too, is soon surrounded by well-wishers, and that with no visible effort on his part; he's undeniably a popular person at the hospital. How he does it is a mystery to Pete; how the hell does someone who almost killed his boss, brought his hospital into disrepute and then drank himself into oblivion, manage to retain such unconditional acceptance among his peers and subordinates?

Once the lobby has filled and everyone is in their assigned seats - Lisa, he notes, is seated with James at a table that is ambiguously situated in the middle of the room - the dean opens the gala dinner with a speech. It's the usual trite stuff about the progress the hospital has made over the years, with a special focus on its importance today and in the future, a thinly veiled appeal to donors to keep the dough coming. Whatever his other qualities may be, the dean is no Cicero, so it's a blessing that he keeps it succinct. He is followed by the chairman of the board and a few others, notably the mayor of Princeton and the chairman of New Jersey's medical board, which is unfortunate for the guests, who won't get a bite to eat until all the speeches are over, but of little consequence to Pete, who can and does help himself to the supplies lodged behind him.

He's kept busy the next half-hour or so, checking every plate that goes down to ensure that what's on the plate is what's supposed to be on it, not some art student's weird Still Life du Jour. Once the dessert is out, there isn't much left for him to do - keeping the booze flowing doesn't require any of his mad skillz. So he goes back to his vantage point, a bottle of beer dangling loosely between his fingers.

When the dean announces that now the heads of departments will briefly introduce their specialities, the guests get restless; a steady migration to the bar ensues, and people start drifting from table to table to talk to other guests. Lisa takes the opportunity to network some more under cover of going to the bar to replenish her drink and James's soda; he counts a total of eight tables she stops at on the way there and back to exchange a few words, touch an arm or even hug someone in greeting. Pete now understands why Lisa and James are seated where they are: at the next table, one of the prominent ones, the Important Woman in Red is seated, so close that she barely needs to lean over to talk to James. She's too polite to do so while her colleagues sweat it out on the stage, but she glances over often enough, smiles, and does just about everything but jump the poor guy - although, in all honesty, James doesn't seem to mind. Every time he gives his bow tie a nervous little tug, one can be sure that a moment later he'll lean over to the next table and whisper a few words. The tugs are getting more frequent. One can only hope that the walls of the lady's house are sturdier than Lisa's were.

The department résumés are mind-numbingly boring; personally, he's just waiting for oncology to see how James's successor ships around the giant iceberg sitting smack in his line of vision. Watching Lisa ward off the advances of a tipsy overweight guest of honour (a donor, probably) is far more amusing; the covert way she manages to put a chair between him and herself even as she continues talking amiably with him speaks of years of practice. It spares him the bother of bribing one of the waiters to spill a glass of red wine over the creep's starched shirt. On second thought, why deny himself one of the simple pleasures of life? He's digging in his pocket to check for a bill of an appropriate denomination when the Lady in Red mounts the stage. She makes a good figure standing on the stage behind the microphone, one leg slightly angled so that her hip is clearly delineated under her clinging dress. Still, he wouldn't bother to listen if Lisa hadn't just swivelled around in her chair to give the woman her full attention instead of the fraction that her multi-tasking habits allotted to the previous speakers.

"Good evening. My name is Allison Cameron and today is not only a special day for PPTH, but also for my department, the Department of Diagnostic Medicine. We're small tonnage compared to our mighty mother ship, but this year Diagnostics celebrates its twentieth birthday."

There's polite applause. James's attention, like Lisa's is also all on the speaker, but in his case it's difficult to say whether it's the contents that interest him or the packaging. A blond man in his mid-thirties has approached Lisa's table, taking up a post close to her. Two more, an Afro-American of about the same age as the blond one, and a short balding man about ten years older, slide into seats left destitute by guests who have moved to the bar.

Dr Cameron presents the department's statistics, while the screen behind her lights up with appropriate pictures of laboratories, smiling staff members and grateful patients. "Our department, which in recent years has grown to encompass seven fellows and five residents, now has its own ward in the Woburn Wing of the hospital. We are able to offer our patients excellent care even as we fulfil our duty to educating future professionals by offering rotations to students affiliated to the hospital."

There's a staff picture shot outside on the grounds on a sunny spring day, then a quick switch to a corridor with a nurses' desk in front and a glass-fronted room behind, in which a patient lies in a bed surrounded by about ten people pretending to be studying his charts and monitoring his equipment.

Lisa, who is frowning, leans over to the balding man to ask him something. He shrugs and grimaces, saying something that makes both the blond man and the black newcomer guffaw. James gives them an irritated glance, but nods in agreement to something Lisa says to him. They all study the statistics that Dr Cameron is now elucidating: the department, so it seems, treated a total of over six hundred patients last year. The graph shows that patient intake has increased more than tenfold over the past five years, for which Dr Cameron thanks generous donors, as also for the high-tech state-of-the-art lab donated by Princeton Pharmaceuticals (photo montage of shiny equipment that would do a space ship honour). At this point Lisa's disapproval could cut through steel, it's so sharp and honed. What is her problem with donors, he can't help wondering. It seems unlikely that she ran this hospital without resorting to resources donated by wealthy benefactors with an axe of their own to grind. But now even James is looking somewhat thoughtful, while the blond charmer is in agreement with whatever Lisa is muttering to him with pursed lips.

"We're not the only Department of Diagnostics in this country any more, but we're still the leading department with the greatest patient intake, the biggest budget, and above all, the cleverest heads in the country. Who would have thought that we'd ever enjoy more than a sheltered existence in a tiny niche when the department opened up twenty years ago with only a single staff member, its head? When I joined the department about twelve years ago, it had expanded to encompass a breath-taking number of three fellows!"

There's an appreciative laugh as a picture of three young doctors in lab coats is projected behind her, all of them seated around a conference table staring hard at a whiteboard. Dr Cameron is very recognizable, as is the black doctor now sitting at Lisa's table. The third one could be the blond man standing next to Lisa's chair. If it is, then he has lost a lot of his boyish charm in the intervening years, but his present haircut is a definite improvement.

"I'm glad to be able to greet the other two original fellows today: Dr Chase is still at the hospital, one of our leading surgeons, and Dr Foreman, head of Diagnostics at Seattle Metropolitan, has come expressly to celebrate this double anniversary with us." She nods towards Lisa's table, and both men there lift an acknowledging hand to polite applause. "We've still got the whiteboard," Dr Cameron says, earning another laugh from the audience, "because some methods, no matter how antiquated they may seem, don't lose their efficacy over the years. Dr House, unfortunately, can't be with us today. Although he was a very controversial figure in his day, both as a physician and as a private person, the department is deeply indebted to him. Since then ...,"

He ceases to listen, immersed in his own thoughts. House? Rachel's House, the purveyor of the pirate cartoon? Lisa's other ex, whom she won't talk about? He was a physician at PPTH too? Only now does he take a closer look at the figure in the background standing next to the whiteboard, a marker in one gesticulating hand, a cane in the other. No lab coat, a somewhat scruffy appearance, a scowl on a face that has deep lines etched into it ...

There's a crash from the table right below him, but it hardly registers as he tries to get a final glimpse of the man's face before the next picture is projected onto the screen. His face. For there's no doubt about it - that man whose face looks both younger and older than his, unshaven, with a lot more hair than he has now, that man is he. House. Gimp-legged Bad-Egg House, his brain sings in a mad refrain.

There's a slight turbulence below, and he becomes aware of faces staring up at him. Something's wrong. Damn, his beer bottle! His enervated fingers have dropped his beer bottle, and it must have fallen directly onto the table beneath him. He knows he's been spotted, although in that lighting it is doubtful that anyone recognises him. He hastily takes a few steps backwards and looks around him, panic beginning to rise in him. The only way down that he knows is via the elevator into the lobby, which isn't really an option. If he roams around long enough, he's bound to find a stairwell, but in view of his total lack of orientation there's no knowing where he'll end up, and he doubts that any of the side entrances are open at this time of day. There's probably some sort of exit to the park deck, but he's damned if he knows how to find it. He opts for the elevator - one or two floors up, and then he'll have to try his luck at finding another exit - but he has tarried for too long. As he presses the 'up' button the doors on one side slide open and Lisa and James come storming out.

A/N: You may need to give me a day to take care of comments and reviews. Doesn't mean you shouldn't review - far the opposite. But I also happen to have a real life ...