Being good isn't always easy.
"The Order"
Foreman&House - existentialism, initiation, and rebellion.
CALIBAN: Prithee, my king, be quiet. Seest thou here,
This is the mouth of the cell; no noise, and enter.
The Tempest, act IV scene i
1º
"What I'm really interested in," he said, swinging his cane on to the desk; "what I'm really interested in is your other record. Spent some time in Juvy, huh? What for? Drugs? Carjacking? Holding up a 7-11? Don't worry, I won't tell anyone. Your secret's safe with me. Granted, this all was a very very long time ago, and you are of course entitled to move on with your life free of the stigma of crime. But like I always say, what's past is present."
He paused for breath. Sniffed, scrunched up his nose, tapped his fingers quickly against the desktop. "Well, do you have anything to say for yourself?"
"Yeah," Eric Foreman said. "Do I get the job?"
House gave him an almost appreciative smirk. "Nice. Sure, why not, take the job; I was sick of interviewing people anyway."
2º
He's been having those dreams again (when he does manage to fall asleep), the ones he had in grade school, the ones that only really start when he thinks he's woken up. Dreams-within-dreams. Not even nightmares, really, but that shifting-earth feeling when he realizes there's still something under the bed stays with him through daylight. Like he's still asleep, like all this is just another dream he's fallen into.
And in the conference room, all shining reflecting glass and uncomfortable chrome chairs, the almost imperceptible sounds of House's cane cutting through the air as he spins it, Cameron coughing gently to get someone's attention; here in this unforgiving department he knows that it is all exactly like a dream. Nothing makes sense here, not really. Not the diseases or the conversations or the politics or the looks they all give each other. Not House, not Cameron's obsession with House, not Chase's obsession with himself. Nothing.
He knows, now, half-listening to yet another symptom list, that he's spent the last two years with the floor falling out. Two years of thinking he's safe, only to remember - with that sudden lurching dream-vertigo - that he's still very much in danger. The monster's under the bed again.
Fingers burning, wrapped around his red mug (they all have one now, he wrote his initials on the bottom of his - E.F., black permanent marker) that's hot with freshly burnt coffee. The whole department smells like stale coffee and dry-erase markers and Chase's too-heavy cologne, Cameron's hair spray, the sick-sweet lingering wave of plastics and chemicals and sickness and blood.
He closes his eyes, tries to convince his body to accept the aspirin he took half an hour earlier. He's been having trouble concentrating lately - been having trouble sleeping lately - and if he ignores everything that doesn't matter he's wake up, snap out of it. Shake the feeling that they're all here as place-holders, representations; that when their beepers all go off at once to attend to a death none of them understand, or when they follow that death with a swift round of drinks or a swift one off the wrist, it doesn't really matter. Doesn't count.
These friendships that self-destruct, that are breaking down as they speak, little fragments of shared lives that scatter themselves in this clean clean glass room: it's okay, he thinks; it's okay because the neater cleaner better more truthful version of their lives is being lived out somewhere else. This, this is just a bad dream.
He woke up this morning at 5:30, and he's hoping that if he tries very hard - focuses on the heat-pain vibrating through his fingers - he'll wake up again.
3º
"Why'd you hire him?" Foreman asks; he can't figure out for the life of him a reason for the kid to still be here, other than House's continued inability to admit weakness.
House looks at him with that smirk he gets whenever he thinks he's about to say something clever. "I asked him what he thought of his dad's published works."
"And?"
"Said he hadn't read 'em."
"So?"
"Nice to see you've regressed to monosyllabism there, Dr. Caveman. So, he has daddy issues. That's interesting."
And on another occasion:
"What are you trying to prove?" Chase asked (voice cracking on the question mark) once they were alone after the afternoon's differential diagnosis session, after Foreman had focused his energy on shooting all of Chase's suggestions down.
"Same thing as you," Foreman said, and turned back to his laptop. But he couldn't remember what he'd been doing, not even with the spreadsheet open and self-explanatory, not even with the pile of scribbled notes balancing on top of his half-filled coffee mug. So he looked back up at Chase, who was sulking again, and then looked back down at his hands on the keyboard. And back up at Chase. Still sulking. For good reason, really, because he's recently succeeded in ruining whatever professional life he'd built up.
Judging from the looks Chase gave House when he thought no one was looking, Foreman would be willing to bet that it was more than job safety that Chase lost. First in line by virtue of chronology, and now kicked back down to third place, and if he's looking for a father figure he's screwed now. At least he did something on his own, something to write home about.
Something to prove, and he'd proved it. It's not hard to catch up to a man lying dead in the ground.
It's so easy to make him flinch without even touching him, because all Foreman has to do is yell or yank a paper from under Chase's hands to make him fold up, almost visibly. Like he'd been punched. He always looks like he's been punched, of course, walled-off and pouting and poking at his limp salad like someone just acting at eating.
He wonders where Chase will be when he finally gets that it's not so much that he's in his father's shadow, but that he uses his father's shadow in place of his own.
Foreman hasn't had anything to live up to since he graduated med school. He envies Chase, in a guilty sort of way. His parents are both still alive, of course; content to live gently in middle suburbia, retired with no regret from unambitious jobs. He never lived in a broken home, never slid buckets under leaks when it rained, never watched from the stairs while his parents whisper-yelled in the living room; and when he was a teenager, he did what all good boys do when they're bored: fuck up. Always with that same bland taste in his mouth, always moving in lines that seemed already paved over for him. Watching the tattoo needle sliding into skin that'd already been cut, or splintering through a door with a tire iron (crashing through into stale air) knowing exactly how everything was going to end up.
It's worked for him, really. His criminal record. Gets him the sympathy vote, gets him some attention in this industry where everyone wears the same white coat. College-entrance essays. Job interviews. House staring him down with those ridiculously blue eyes, asking why'd you do it, o Chief First-in-his-Class? And Foreman doesn't say: it was expected of me.
4º
Everyone here tries to communicate solely through innuendo. Stressing words, stressing syllables, stressing out and wishing they had half the courage needed for emotional clarity. "The patient's showing improvement" was never meant to carry so much meaning.
And Cameron, bless her heart, nervous little Cameron with her vests and barrettes and half-eaten yogurt cups, standing up for herself and for devotees of simplicity everywhere and saying things she almost halfway meant. Foreman's heart nearly broke when he realized that she'd bothered to say them to House, that fucked-up asshole who used complications and innuendo and trickery to cover the fact that there was really nothing there left to cover up.
God, House, you useless empty bastard.
"Oh, grow up," he sneers. That sneering trick, where you act like a dick so no one will no you're helpless and clueless, he learned that from House. "Please. This thing, whatever you think it is - "
"Oh, you grow up. All of you. Stunted little boys. Give me the God-damned credit for actually admitting what I wanted."
She's right, of course.
5º
(Mostly.)
6º
"The chalk was less than a dollar, House - " Wilson's the kind of guy who hates being given things, even when he doesn't need it.
"The extra ten's for Mr. and Mrs. Casey. Now, isn't this much more homey?" House gestures grandly to his brand-new slate chalkboard.
Foreman laughs, not stopping when House gives him a look. "Yeah, it's just like being back in the old schoolhouse. What's up first, spelling or math?"
"Geometry, I think," House says, and draws a lopsided square that grows into a fairly convincing caricature of Wilson.
Wilson tugs the knot of his tie tight to his neck and gives House an even tighter smile. "Gotta go," he says. "Mr. and Mrs. Casey await."
House tosses a wet sponge to Chase, who catches it and holds it away from his shoes. "Here, clean up."
7º
They both initialed off on paperwork that neither of them bothered to read, and he wouldn't have noticed it if he hadn't spilled coffee all over the cover page.
Wiping off whatever liquid hadn't soaked through, he runs a finger lightly over their handwriting: E.F., G.H. Their names line up, like they line up now, almost accidentally. House trusts him maybe more than he deserves, and that should be dangerous for both of them, but somehow it never quite goes as wrong as it could.
8º
Nothing leads up to this.
"Do you believe in fate?" House is asking, apropos of nothing. "Do you read your horoscope in the morning?"
"I think that the only time those things come true is when you go out expecting them to come true. Power of suggestion."
"Fate is what we make it, right? Was that Terminator, or Terminator 2? And how about names, carpenter boy? What terrible god of bad puns threw the worker in with the building?"
"Couldn't say."
House stares at him hard, like he's trying to impart some great wisdom through the angle of his eyebrows.
Foreman couldn't care less. There's nothing there he wants to understand, not really. House talks too much, says too little. And Foreman thinks maybe he's finally lost his patience.
So, he says: "Look, let's stop screwing around. Stop talking in non sequitors. I don't give a shit about puzzles unless they're in the newspaper or on a hospital bed. I'm here to do a job, not to climb a mountain for some quack to give me spiritual advice. Be honest or shut the hell up."
House smiles appreciatively. "You want honest?"
"Yeah."
House pauses, then swings himself upright and stalks past Foreman towards the door. "I want a beer, and I want to watch the Steelers game. C'mon, you're coming."
The elevator has better timing than either of them.
"You're a better man than me," House says quietly, flippantly, but it's the most honest thing he's said in months.
"Maybe," Foreman says. It feels like the wrong thing to say, but he doesn't bother taking it back.
The order of the title, besides being a bit of a pun, is a Masonic initiation rite, specifically the Adoniramite rite. No, I don't really know anything about it other than the names of each degree. For the record, and maybe some illumination, the degrees are as follows: Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, Master Mason, First Elu or Elu of the Nine, Second Elu (Called of Perignan), Third Elu (Called of the Fifteen), Minor Architect, and Grand Architect.