Title: Two Hands Make a Pair
Spoilers: The Itch
Summary: When House reflects and Cuddy deflects.
Words: 274
Authors notes: Just one little, innocent experiment. This episode still affects me. Today I had chemistry, and the teacher was talking about chirality and said "Human hands are perhaps the most universally recognized example of chirality: The left hand is a non-superimposable mirror image of the right hand; no matter how the two hands are oriented, it is impossible for all the major features of both hands to coincide." And then, I stopped listening to her. My mind was all on this thought of mirror images. So, here we go.
Two hands make a pair
Identical and opposite; well shaped, long poetic fingers with the power of creation, action and reaction. They're specular, two expressions of the same gene. And they fit perfectly when they're near, open and united.
You watch them closely, your thumbs and index fingers telling you something, shaping the childish, shaky form of an heart. Two hands.
The band aid warns you. Similar and still dissimilar individuals.
Left hand seems softer, lighter at first sight. If you look intently, you can make out the ghost of an old injury you yourself caused, to avoid pain, to hurt and hurt somehow less. But, stubborn, it survived. It's still there, still faithful, still playing the chords you need it to play.
Your right hand is calloused and strongly tensed because of your cane; you can still recognize those little scars from that day on the lacrosse field; and, of course, there's the bite. That annoying, bugging, everlasting itch you can't seem to scratch without making it worse, harder to hide.
And soon you figure just how stupid and cowardly and rationally irrational you're being.
The impertinent little mosquito flies away, and so do you.
***
The roar of a motorcycle fades away in the cold night, disturbing the pacific silence of the neighborhood.
But Lisa Cuddy hardly hears it, as it was nothing more than a sigh in the breeze, nothing more than a distant echo.
She's non-reading a book, non-tasting the hot liquid of her tea. The buzzing of a little, annoying bug is driving her crazy. When the mosquito lands on her coffee table, she crushes it with her book, with one, steady move.
Silence. Finally.
Fin