She was smiling. And laughing.

Wilson had some strange, unnatural power over women. It was disturbing. But he was smiling too, laughing with her. What in the hell was going on? How on earth could she be remotely happy whilst in the amount of pain she had to be in? Damnit, what gave her the right to smile through her ordeal?

House stopped glancing between his best friend and the deviant woman. Instead, he started to pull faces through the glass, knowing there was only so long that Wilson could ignore him. Right on schedule, the oncologist disengaged from conversation with Weir and headed across the room to meet him, looking rather unimpressed.

"You're fraternizing with the enemy."

Wilson slid the door shut behind him. "What?"

"Cuddy likes her."

"Cuddy treats her. I, however, like her. It's refreshing to find someone capable of separating life from pain."

"Oh," House pretended to see the light. "I get it. You're studying her as a way of studying me. You're using her. Shouldn't you tell her? Break it to her gently and all."

A long suffering sigh preceded, "Why are you here?"

"Looking for you."

"Here?" Wilson raised his eyebrows.

A shrug and House replied, "Why not here?"

Wilson glanced back into the room, where Elizabeth seemed to have fallen asleep. He wondered if she was faking it. "You're interested in her." When he caught the expression on House's face, he shook his head and grimaced. "Not like that."

"Why should I be interested in her? Why should I give any more of a damn about her than any of the other patients who plague me? Conspiracy theories, Wilson. Suspicion...not a good colour on you."

"You lingered whilst she was unconscious. You're trying to figure her out. Cuddy's told you to stay away, which means more than anything."

"You'd rather I didn't work out why her body's defective?" House headed off. "And Cuddy tells me to stay away from a lot of people. Then if she can find me sitting on my ass she can haul me down to the Clinic."

"You're trying to figure her out. You are interested. You're interested because she's you. She has the potential to be you. Except she has a soul," Wilson stated.

House barely paused. "A soul doesn't get you as far as you think." He raised his voice. "Well, are you going to let my patient die or are you going to follow me like a good little doctor?"


Only three days of being helped every time that she absolutely had to move anywhere and Elizabeth was already more frustrated that she could ever immediately recall being. Having people run around after her had never been her idea of a good time, hell, even a reasonable time. She needed to be busy. She liked being busy. Now the drugs were knocking her out just when she 

didn't want to be and none of the hospital staff had ever got back to her on getting some decent reading material. Her mother had been contacted, but, since both mother and daughter disliked hospitals to the point of avoiding them completely, Elizabeth hoped she wouldn't visit. Not since her father. It had been several years and still...it never felt it.

She needed something to do. Her team had briefly contacted the hospital to let her know how the negotiations had panned out, but they'd held back important details and given the bare minimum of information. As they should have, she supposed, but it was irritating to be out of the loop when she had been an integral part of the talks. They were sparing her the stress. She lived on stress! Thrived on it! Now her body had turned on her and she was stuck in a hospital bed.

Well. They hadn't told her not to move. She had opted not to. Nobody had said she mustn't try and get back on her feet.

She concentrated on disconnecting her drip in the least dramatic fashion possible, wondering if she would be screaming to be hooked back up in the next few minutes. Throwing herself into 'mind over matter' territory, Elizabeth yanked back the bedcovers and steeled herself to move. One, swift, movement and a rush of pain later and she was sitting on the edge of the bed, legs over the side. Slowly breathing out, she glanced around the room as if seeing it for the first time. That hadn't been so bad. Not nearly as bad as she had been expecting. Confidence growing, Elizabeth eased herself to experimentally set her feet on the ground. Pushing off from the bed, she let her full weight rest on her legs...

..And fell to the floor in a flash of agony so shockingly fierce that she didn't even think to cry out.

As the initial pain faded, her surroundings flickered back in around her. The floor was cold; she was sprawled across it in a most undignified manner...and there was somebody staring down at her from the other side of the glass wall.

House tapped the base of the wall with his cane as he peered down at her. When she looked up, Elizabeth expected to find him smirking, or with some triumphant smile fixed in place. There was no smile. Unblinking, he watched her as she struggled to sit up. By the time she looked up at him again, he was gone. What kind of doctor left a patient on the floor?

Ambling deliberately slowly towards the nearest Nurses' Station, House leaned against the desk units and checked his watch.

"Can I help you?"

"Not me. And not for a couple of minutes. At least."

As used to his moods as anyone could ever get, the nurse before him frowned. "What have you done?"

"Why do you always assume it's me?" House pretended to be hurt.

"Because it's always you," she stated.

He kept his eyes on his watch. "Give it a while." He wondered if Elizabeth was howling or crying by now, through the pain or sheer indignity. "If you go down the hall, you're going to find a severely pissed off diplomat on the floor because she ripped out her drip and decided that the damage to her legs really shouldn't impede her walking."

Attracting one of her colleague's attention, the nurse headed off. "Did she fall or was she pushed?" she shouted back over her shoulder.

"Hey, I just left her there. Ask humpty dumpty herself. If she's not forthcoming, interrogate the king's horses. They've always looked suspicious, I tell you." House gazed down the corridor as 

three nurses approached the room with the occupant he refused to admit he was fascinated with. He was sure he heard a stubborn shout of 'no!' during the time in which the door was open. She was strong, that one. Knowing his curiosity to ascertain whether or not she was refusing to be helped back to her feet was too intense, House forced himself away from the Nurses' Station and to the nearest elevator.

Besides, wasn't it about time she came off that drip?


"I want her off the morphine."

She had learned to steel herself against the familiar crash of her office door flying open. "Who?" Cuddy asked, her attention still focused on the file laid out on her desk.

"Weir," House stated.

Now she did look up. "You didn't..." she began.

"Didn't what?"

"You have patients of your own to harass. Leave mine alone."

"You clearly haven't been paying enough attention. I want her off the drip," he repeated.

"And I want a skinny latte to taste as good as a regular one. Can't all get what we want." Cuddy closed the file and folded her hands in her lap. "I won't take Weir off the drip when I know the pain she'll be in, as do you."

"That's why I want the drip gone."

"Why are you so fixated on this woman? I'd say that I get that you empathise, but that would mean you had a heart. What is this? Payback? For me? You think I caused your pain, so you're determined to cause a similar case of mine the same sort of-"

"Keep her drugged up in that bed, she'll have no reason to think she has to make progress," he interrupted. "She'll think the pain will go and that's why we're giving her the drugs for now. We don't know if it will. Get her off the morphine and on her feet and she'll have to deal. You want me to list the other reasons? Depression, muscle atrophy-"

"And when she can't deal and we've broken her before we've even begun?" she demanded. "What then? You're a fine one to talk of getting on with things. You evade, you don't confront, you don't face anything."

"Come out from behind that desk with some more rousing speeches like that and we'll see exactly what I can 'confront'," House shot back. "For god's sake, you just defeated your own logic. I evade things, fine, and I'm me. So what harm is there in getting Weir to face her probable future?"

Thinking beyond the morphine, out of the blue, Cuddy asked, "You want her case?"

House seemed to rear back. "Why would I-"

"You want to tell me how to treat her; you take her case. If she's one of yours, perhaps you'll avoid her as much as you do the others. Wilson says-"

"Wilson knows nothing. Wilson would tell you I was fixated on the second floor bathrooms if I used them more than once a day."

A slow smile and Cuddy leaned forward. "Wilson says she's been trying to walk."

Trying to cover his mistake, House continued, "If I take her case, we do things my way."

"As long as you aren't having vicodin get-togethers and she isn't writhing in agony, then fine. But I'm watching you. And Wilson...well, Wilson's always watching you."

He smirked. "What about having agony get-togethers and writhing in vicodin?"

"Get out."

House turned to leave. "You sound just like her, you know."

"You disobeyed me!" Cuddy's eyes widened and she shouted after him.

"Oh, don't act surprised."


For the second time in so many days, Elizabeth woke to find a scruffy-looking doctor at the end of her bed. She blinked a few times and sat up a little, peering at him through narrowed eyes. "Doctor House," she greeted.

"I never told you my name," he mumbled, eyes on her chart.

"Doctor Wilson-"

House sighed. "Wilson always ruins my fun."

"What happened to 'amateur dramatics'?" Elizabeth nodded towards the cane resting against the foot of her bed.

"I'm a dedicated performer. I'm that good," he responded. Abandoning the chart, he mimicked her expression as he studied her. "And so are you, it would seem."

"No offense, Doctor House, but seeing as you're not my doctor, I'd rather you-"

"I am your doctor. As of today." House managed to keep the smile from his face as he delighted in the fact that she seemed to have blanched a shade paler. "Which means I can get the tests I want done and get you off that drip."

Elizabeth watched him limp across to unlock the case the morphine pump was kept in and heard the bleeping as he lowered the dose. Expecting him to slowly lower the amount over time, she automatically snatched her hand back when he reached for her. "What are you-"

One hand round her wrist, House disconnected the drip line and released her. "In an hour or so, we'll start you on gabapentin." He kept quiet about any vicodin involved. If she didn't know she was likely to need it, she wouldn't wonder where it was. He knew gabapentin wasn't going to give her as much pain relief as she needed, but she didn't know what he did. If she thought that was all she would get then... Well, who knew what she could convince her body not to feel.

Lack of medical knowledge left her with nothing to do but stare as he sat in the chair beside her bed and overplayed relaxing. Elizabeth tried to make a reasonable calculation of when withdrawal would set in.

"It'll work on the nerve damage and stop you seizing," House breathed, gazing up at the ceiling.

"You think I'm going to have more seizures?"

"Anything's possible."

As quick as it was, Elizabeth followed the path of two pills from his pocket to his mouth. "Not amateur dramatics."

"You're a smart one," he muttered.

She was waiting for him to leave. Tugging the bedclothes higher in some defensive gesture, she exhaled slowly and decided not to form a just as sarcastic reply. "Pardon my ignorance, but don't you have other patients?"

"Yep."

"And don't they need-"

"Nope."

Elizabeth wanted him gone. If she was going to end up fighting the urge to scream and wanting to throw things around the room, she wanted to do it in as much privacy as a glass-walled room with flimsy blinds permitted. Admitting pain to an apparently somewhat insane doctor who already irritated her more and more by the moment wasn't something she relished the prospect of.

"I'm sure there are people in his hospital far more deserving of your attention than me," she said, calmly.

"You're probably right," House answered. "They're also more trouble and greatly boring."

She raised an eyebrow. "You're here because I entertain you?"

"I'm here because I know how to get you to walk again."

"You intend on damaging my pride so greatly that I walk just to prove you wrong? Perhaps reverse psychology?"

He sat up straighter. "Well damn, all my evil plans have been thwarted," he drawled.

"I've stared down much more important people with much more power than you." Her voice grew stronger. "I'm not frightened of you."

House soberly met her gaze for a good while, waiting for her to back down. When she didn't, he glanced away for a moment and shifted in his chair. In that moment, her mask slipped a little and his blue eyes narrowed, the only evidence of his concern. "...You should be," he murmured.


He left long before her withdrawal kicked in, right as the pain began to seep into her facial features and she was having trouble finishing sentences with the words in the correct order and without shoving them down his throat. The few hours spent with Elizabeth - avoiding being assigned more patients under the guise of 'work' – only confirmed what he knew all along. Gabapentin wasn't going to do it. She was probably shaking and having cold flushes by now.

House trailed a hand across the keys of the piano, stopping to strike out a tune he made up on the spot. He would have savaged Cuddy if she had put him though what he was forcing Weir to endure. Perhaps the hot-tempered dean of medicine had already interrupted his plans and put her back on the morphine. As he downed more vicodin, he half-hoped that she had. Part of him told him that he needed to break Weir before he put her back together. It would be more interesting if she fought back, however.

Would he have taken the case so readily; lingered to converse with the woman, if he thought she would be broken so easily?

How long would be pretend he could figure out what had shredded her knee? Any number of common theories he could draw on could be the answer. Were Cuddy and Wilson humouring him?

Maybe he wanted to prove his reaction to chronic pain wasn't unique to him. Was that it? Was he studying her to prove a point? He could have studied her from afar and never spoken a word to her. What in the hell was going on?

...Did she have the soul he wanted?

Ludicrous.

House struck out another melody, louder and more forcefully until the music filled his apartment and flooded his senses.


The next morning, after waiting an amount of time that he believed would project that he didn't give a damn, he dropped by to check on Elizabeth's 'progress'.

She was sweating and blinking rapidly. House suspected that the death-look she shot him as soon as she set eyes on him had sent various politicians running for their mothers. Elizabeth didn't speak, as if already expecting a smart remark on his part, but he could make out the fist her left hand had formed beneath the bedcovers. That at least meant that the drugs were having some effect on her damaged nerves. He debated throwing a muscle-relaxant into the mix and dismissed the idea almost immediately. He needed her as coherent as possible.

"Wilson come visit?" House questioned.

Elizabeth nodded.

"He offer to hook you back up?"

"Yes."

"And?"

"I refused."

The defiance in her tone and eyes drew an unexpected smile from him.