"Liner Notes (Superheroes Who Never Had the Right Ego)"
by TehFuzzyPenguin

Disclaimer: Not mine. All to Fox and respective writers and producers.

At the bottom of Thirteen's jewelry box, there's a misshapen bracelet (from the family of the undecorated, pure old silver). It's too big for her wrist, so she never wears it, but every now and then, she'll take it out and try it on, as though in the past ten years, she's grown up a little.

But no, really—it never belonged to her mother.

The predictability of the whole thing—House's inappropriate Larry Craig joke, that stupid sticker on the wall, the irony, the threats, the test—it's something House would watch avidly on Oprah and then mock with glee.

(The reasons she'd give: being sick of being scared, being scared of being fired, being bored.

Or, what she never rationalizes, even as she's busy deconstructing everyone else's excuses: facing up to the truth—at least she's better than House at something.)

She finds her own vein and draws her own blood because as long as she can, it means she's still a doctor. And in a way, from her regressed fifteen-year-old sheltered mindset, it's still sort of cool. (And the best part hasn't even started yet.)

The only distractions: a dying woman in this building; the memory of Marissa's fingers stilling on her stomach and her heart beating as her answering machine in college relays a tired monotone.

She only says it out loud so that no one else will, like, "We should probably go see Amber before she bites it or something."

The hug is to say, "In a few hours, I'll know what you know, and one day, we could have gone out and gotten drunk to that, except you're kind of a bitch to me."

She remembers loading that machine with red ink her first week here; she'd gotten lost trying to find her way back from the supply closet. The little plastic cover had gotten smudged with her red-tinged fingerprints as she tried to figure out where to put the ink cartridge. The red's to make it easier to spot what's wrong, but either way, it's already been decided. The certainty—that's what scares her.

Thirteen sections off entire sections of the hospital from herself in order to avoid all potential contact. She borrows a quarter from Foreman before she goes back to the lab. It's the same principle as far as genetics go (she keeps telling herself that, because minimizing her anxiety is what she does best). Heads will be negative, and tails will be positive. Resting the quarter on her finger and thumb, she takes a deep breath. Her thumb flicks, and her eyes follow the rise and fall of the spinning coin.

"Heads," she whispers and catches it and turns it over on her wrist. "Heads, come on, heads."

Thirteen knows, in the deepest parts of her mind: it'll be positive. Life works out that way. The quarter warms beneath her palm until she can't feel it there anymore. She lifts her hand.

George Washington squints up at her downcast eyes, almost winking in cheeky optimism.

"Waiting up for anyone?" asks Foreman.

"No one," says Thirteen. She tilts her head back and blinks fast, lacing her fingers together to focus on something.

"You should go get sleep. We all should."

"I'm fine. You're right," and she's trying really hard, okay, not to cry about this. The crumpled sheet of paper falls to the floor and she only squeezes her fingers harder together. Foreman says:

"You know I'm the wrong person for this."

"I don't know—what—you're the wrong person for."

"I was just dropping by to check on House."

"House isn't even in this part of the hospital," says Thirteen, and Foreman leaves because this is true.

Things like this, they take up your mind if you don't resolve them soon enough, but people never tell you what comes next: it never feels any better.

Oh, fuck. What is there left to do? (She has to remember: she's not 21 anymore.)

What House would say, if he didn't need to sleep or think or feel:

"Well, why'd you go and do that?"

And Thirteen would say, "It was making me unprofessional." A white board would be marked up behind House; a boy named Sean is reacting adversely to things and other things, and Cuddy bribed House into it, besides.

"I don't care if you're unprofessional. I care if you're effective. If threatening to fire you gets you motivated, then that's what I'll use. Now you had to be all stupid and impulsive, and you just took my trump card." Then he'd look down and scratch at his hairline, and say, "So what are you going to do now, Unlucky Thirteen? Fill up your passport? Become a stunt driver? Go skydiving?"

Thirteen? She'd bow her head and think for a moment and then look up and say, "It's Angelman's. Uncontrolled laughter, inability to speak, seizures, it's all there," and it would be almost too easy to see through this lie.

There was once a time when gas was less than two dollars a gallon, and the majority of America didn't know who Barack Obama was. In New York, skyscrapers stood in relief with the Statue of Liberty, and no one cared what ground zero meant.

Remy had turned eighteen, and her father had said, "If you want to, then they'll let you know, you know."

"It wouldn't have made a difference anyway," says Foreman, and the way he states it, low like he did when he spoke about Amber, tells you what kind of person he is. Calm assertive staunch professional.

"You wouldn't know."

"No, I don't, but House isn't coming back any time soon," and he's the kind of person, yeah, who knows exactly how much he needs to say.

"Well, when he gets back, I'm resigning," says Thirteen, and when she wants, her voice can be low and controlled too, staunch and professional.

"It still won't change anything. Huntington's is just your cover. If it wasn't for that, you'd have other reasons. One life to live, you don't half-ass things, your brain has a high set point for stimulation, your dad always said take opportunities—something. Many different symptoms, one diagnosis."

"Oh, fuck." And Foreman blinks, and it's painfully obvious that that was the wrong metaphor.

If she could, Thirteen would stop time right now and just chew up the diagnostics conference room and swallow it all and hold it inside herself, all safe from her tired mind and her deteriorating motor skills so she can look back later and remember. It would taste like antiseptics and weak coffee, marker board, hope and talent and stupid, stupid dreams. She would lie on the break room couch like she is right now (pretending to sleep because exhaustion and dehydration are bad things), and all she'd ever have to do is lick her lips and everything would come back to her.

Foreman, sprawling on the couch across from her, drinks a cup of coffee and talks with a low rumble to (ostensibly) make her fall asleep. All she wants to do is to crawl inside him, all safe and protected, and stare out at her own body that doesn't know that it's slowly killing itself.

Sometimes, it's really clear: her father's voice crackling on speakerphone; Marissa's damp lips resting on her shoulder; her forehead wrinkling together; her brain descending into words like need to do laundry and check into plane tickets or train tickets and order up some orchids and is Dad drunk?

Most times, though, Thirteen naively wonders why people keep getting hurt like nothing happened here in this hospital, you can't see it because they disinfect everything, but it was here, so she spends time in the ER and sutures and feels like she's on a soap opera in a city far away from here.

After a while, the mind adapts to shocks and it's almost easy to say I was stupid, I'm not really going to resign, I was selfish and I'm back to myself now. In her dream, Chris Martin croons in the background and she does daring things that are hard to remember.

Her teeth feel too sharp. Her throat is dry. Thirteen wakes up, waiting for the tremors to start like she knows they will, and then she prays to someone else's god for someone else's salvation.

What House actually says (his eyes are rimmed red and she really doesn't want to, but in her head she's tallying up sleeplessness and tears. This is why Foreman can't ever leave):

"Well that's nice." He stares at her for too long and then asks, tongue moving stiffly as his Adam's apple bobs: "Is there anything else?"

Foreman says, "If you're trying to get House to fire you because you're too scared to actually resign, he's not going to."

Thirteen frowns and says, "I'm not," and the best part is: she's really not, and he already knows that.

"Knowing how you'll die doesn't make you a hero."

"I don't want to be a hero," says Thirteen.

"Or a martyr."

"Or a martyr." She picks up a pipette and digs it into a bacteria culture, releasing the plastic tip into a test tube. She turns to put the tray of test tubes in the incubator, and Foreman steps gracefully out of her way.

It's a compulsion that creeps up: she needs to call all her exes and her father and her grandmother in Wisconsin, and apologize for things she confronted a long time ago. She wishes someone had bothered to tell her, Yeah, that happens.

At some point, when she's used to daydreams about looking under her chair that night to find a slip of paper that said, Hey, this is the blood test printout, I was just fucking around, you don't really have Huntington's, Thirteen kind of forgets why she was so terrified to read that printout, since it's not that big of a deal anyway. (In retrospect, it seemed inevitable, and look; maybe she'll get hit by a bus before anything happens, except that getting hit by a bus is pretty bleak, too.)

And then Wilson subtly manipulates Taub to relay his messages, and Cuddy stops by more often to not complain, and Cameron stops by less often to complain; Foreman looks wrinkled inside his nice suits, and Kutner sighs too much, and Thirteen remembers that sometimes, sometimes, reality really fucking hurts.

What she should say to Wilson, except they're not really that close, and she's on the wrong side of the hospital, the wrong side of the cafeteria, the wrong side of the casket:

It never goes away, it never, ever does, and you'll find days when it's hard to do anything because you miss her so much, but here's the terrifying part: there will also be days when you don't think about her at all, and you forget why you were so fucking sad to begin with, and it will hurt.

The flowers are to say, "I don't know what put here, but these looked pretty, and besides, they're not really for you anyway. My mom just really liked orchids."

Things like this—and decaf and music from the 60s and running scared—they never belonged to her, but if she can pretend long enough, they almost will.

-end-

A/N: I suppose...everyone's writing post-finale fics still? Hmm. To clarify: while I did derive Marissa from Mischa Barton's character on The O.C., keep in mind that she's not Marissa Cooper. (To begin with, they're on the East coast.) She's just...a big deal. Mostly because of her timing.

Okay. Thanks for reading!