Cameron winced, Chase smirked. Neither was stupid enough yet to ask what had happened with Cuddy, though they'd get closer before they got farther.
"This isn't even my job…" Chase groaned, scraping himself off the tabletop where he desperately would have preferred to lean his cheek on the cool glass and fall hard into sleep.
Cameron squeezed his shoulder briefly but sympathetically. They had done the DDX dance for nearly two hours and what was, with them, usually a perfectly timed minuet, had lost all grace days before and wound up as the Electric Slide at a junior high.
Chase's finger throbbed and that, at least, had enough of a hook in his brain to tug him back to the light. It also had the effect of reminding him with a trace of guilt of Tammany Hall herself.
The girl was truly very sick, and had been for some time, though it had been growing insidiously in hidden parts of her brain and probably elsewhere in her body until now. Dramatic symptoms like sudden blindness or crippling headaches got all the glory for brain problems, but it was not always so obvious as that, and lacking such red flags, what thirteen-year-old would really notice when studying became just slightly less effective or their vision a touch blurred?
At least Tammany's parents had been good sports about the apparent spinning of wheels by the diagnostic department. An elusive diagnosis would have been compounded a thousandfold by anxious or demanding parents hovering over them every step. These two, however, continued to accept the news of incremental progress with good grace, taking turns visiting their daughter, and bringing her younger brother and a good many relatives to eat the promised turkey sandwiches on Thanksgiving evening. Kutner had been perplexed at Chase and Cameron's sudden urgent need to be in other wings of the building for several hours that night, but covered for them as best he could in front of the cluster of aunts and uncles.
Thanksgiving had long gone by now, not that any of them had noticed. Tammany's symptoms refused to combine themselves in any meaningful way to the three younger doctors, House remained fractious and aloof, and every minute that passed was another brain cell dimmed in their exhausted brains.
Kutner had stretched out across three chairs, one elbow crooked across his eyes to block out the light and covering a face that was now grey beneath the tan. Cameron and Chase suffered too, drawn in against their will and now paying the price. Chase's eyes were streaked with the bloodshot feathering usually reserved for the truly drunk or the deeply crazed. He slurred his words more thickly than usual and had twice called someone "mate." Cameron's face, like Kutner's, was ashen, every nerve in her body trembling from a diet consisting now solely of caffeine. Not a single lab coat was in evidence, and they all wore scrubs because somewhere around hour thirty they had all been forced to march down in shifts to the showers to wash two days of wretchedness from their skin and let icy water pound a few moments of clarity into their leaden brains.
They had all but memorized the casefiles that sat open in front of them nonetheless. Kutner's was facedown over his chest because he could see the words on the insides of his eyelids no matter what he did to erase them. Cameron was re-reading test results with such painful slowness the others couldn't watch, and Chase had been staring at the flyleaf with the girl's name printed on it for half an hour, until it had assumed that existentially odd appearance any English word does if examined long enough. The letters irritated his throbbing brain until he could take it no longer.
"Tammany Hall. What a damned stupid name, can't you lot use real names anymore?" He burst out, venting on foreigners what he could not blame on an inanimate medical chart.
"We can't all be named Robert," Kutner deadpanned from beneath his arm.
Chase couldn't see him at that angle but glared in his general direction with eyes so bloodshot they looked faintly violet, and was about to make some retort about how he felt about people named Lawrence when House's graveled voice interrupted.
"Don't blame all the Yanks, Chase, just the Irish. Tammany Hall was Ellis Island territory, remember."
"Must have skipped class the day we covered that in Victoria territ'ry history," Chase ground out acidly, naming his home state in Australia and betraying his bad temper in an accent so thick House was forced to ignore him.
"Is she even really Irish?" Kutner mumbled. He didn't much care either way, but his brain had lost the power to make his mouth stop talking.
"Must be, or the parents are history buffs," Cameron sighed.
"Which is it?" House said sharply, a sudden stiffness in his lank posture. He was greeted by four dead gazes in four blank faces.
"Oh come on, this girl's been dying upstairs for three days and Cameron hasn't talked to the parents? Pigs will fly 747's first. Are they Irish or aren't they?"
"They're from New York…" came the helpless answer. "Hall's not an Irish name and they don't have accents."
"Do they look like university professors?" House, now that he had an idea, was unsympathetic to her listless tone.
"If they don't, does that mean they are Irish or they aren't?" Kutner again, no real interest evident in either the patient or the Irish, but then his voice usually lacked affect anyhow.
"Are. Either one of them teaches history and got their nerdy little rocks off naming a kid Tammany Hall, or they're Irish. Last name is meaningless, there's thirty million people of Irish descent in the United States. At that rate we're going to have to fumigate."
"Whatever happened to the idea that either the girl or the parents are insane?" Kutner mumbled from beneath the table. No one answered him because no one else could string enough words together.
"Fifty bucks says their name used to be Houlihan. Or O'Halloran. Go, find out."
"Find out if their name was Houlihan." Cameron repeated him without making it a question because she couldn't quite believe he had actually instructed her to do it.
"Well they won't be able to understand Chase," House replied as if this were only reasonable.
A heavy sigh from the young female doctor, and Kutner's hand shot up with a five dollar bill in it from beneath the edge of the table where he still lay on the chairs.
"Four sugars."
It was well understood by this point that whoever left the room must return with coffee or die.
One more chapter left!
