009 - SAY HELLO TO SMURF MD.

[the_house_rules]

[Public video.]

[House is sitting in the infirmary at a desk. He looks very blue.

This is not a metaphor, House is physically electric-fucking-blue.

And he's so pissed. But he's at that point just beyond pissed where the situation is so ridiculous that it seems marginally funny.

Elaborate, childish metaphors are his thing, so while much of this seems

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Spam! (This tag is silly, I refuse to edit it, but this flood is silly, so there we are.)

[the_house_rules]

Snape was not alone in his acute awareness of his gastrointestinal tract. On cue, House experienced the same sensations, at the same times. If the motion and sensations weren't enough to make this clear, Snape's looks of disbelief and horror punctuated the nauseous dance and it clicked. House had heard an announcement, but he had been in the middle of scanning himself for a fifth time after Data had left, and hadn't been wholly paying attention. It seemed clear that this was like the singing, only with more Snape and without any singing at all.

As soon as House put two and two together and figured out that it seemed they had to stay close or a peristaltic chain reaction would have them both bent double, his thoughts turned to ways to use this to punish Snape.

Snape was a very formidable foe, and not just because he had the advantage of magic. He was intelligent, clever, and ruthless. They were not poorly matched, really, save for the magic, and it would be difficult to determine which was the more intelligent or clever, as their proficiencies lay in such different realms.

House had one great advantage on Snape, however, and that was that he was used to living in constant pain and discomfort. He was not a stranger to nausea, nor to puking. He was also a runner, and had been, these last few weeks, running several miles a day.

It was for these reasons that he responded to Snape's resounding No with a dark, sinister grin.

House turned and sprinted quickly down the hall a few feet before stopping to spew up the rest of his lunch. He planned to ruin Snape's day by forcing him to run, and forcing him to throw up violently if he resisted. House was confident in his ability to bring the harshness.

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[emptyyourself]

Snape saw it coming. He saw it in House's eyes, and shook his head warningly before managing to say, "Don't you -"

And then House was off. Snape was after him - and not particularly a stranger to pain and running, either, but still lagging behind and stopping to dry heave every few yards.

When a person is bent double, succumbing to the reversal of their digestive process, it's very hard to think. It was for this reason that Snape followed House all the way to the end of the corridor before remembering he owned a wand, said wand was in his pocket, get the wand, use the wand, stop House, you're a wizard, aren't you?

He drew and aimed as well he could while running and trying not to be violently ill, then shouted something that really ought to have been, "Petrificus totalus," but wasn't, as it was interrupted by another surge of dry heaves.

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[the_house_rules]

Clearly, Snape's spell had come out more like "Galapagos Tortoilus," because running barfing blue House stopped running and changed. With a sickening whoosh of unfortunate magic, House shrank and fell forwards with a loud, heavy thud, because while he was getting smaller he was getting heavier. His back curved alarmingly, and grew hard. His hands, feet, and neck scaled and there was a brief moment where he looked like a shriveled blue old man.

And then, he was very clearly a blue, barfing Galapagos Giant Tortoise. No longer running, but still too far from Snape, House the Unfortunate Blue Reptile was dry heaving and making sounds that clearly came right from nightmares about your grandparents that haunt your dreams forever.

House was still House, in his mind. He was still hating Snape with every fiber of his being, except now, all of those fibers were tortoise fibers. Truth be told, at this point, he wasn't entirely sure he wasn't high. And assuming he was high, this was awesome. If forcing Snape to run or puke wasn't great enough, now he was a fucking tortoise. He was aware of what he'd become by craning his neck to inspect his tortoisey feet.

He was also aware he was blocking the hall.

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[emptyyourself]

Under normal circumstances, botching a spell was not particularly professional, and rarely happened to adults in the wizarding community. It was embarrassing to make this sort of mistake. However, under these circumstances, Snape felt House deserved it. House deserved to be a turtle. A giant, blue turtle.

Upon finally catching up to this new monstrosity, he had very little energy to do anything more than lean against the wall, panting and thanking Merlin he'd at least stopped House from running away. Of course, he'd have to fix this...but for now, Snape's new enemy could stay just the way he was. Tortoises couldn't run.

"I should give you to Paddy for stew," he threatened angrily.

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[the_house_rules]

House was still moving. Tortoises can't run, but they aren't immobile. He was slothing his way away from Snape, indignantly furious or certain that he was high and none of this was real, or perhaps he wasn't aware he was a turtle. The fact that House hadn't stopped escaping made it hard to tell, because you couldn't really get a response from him.

His mind was formulating responses but this was something like aphasia. The words were there, but his tortoise mouth was emitting a strange, discordant series of strange hisses and grunts. His mind, however, was saying, "SNAPE, I'M GOING TO KILL YOU IF IT'S THE LAST THING I DO. I AM GOING TO BITE YOUR FACE OFF AND SHIT IN YOUR ROOM AND EAT EVERYTHING YOU LOVE."

House was making an effort to uphold his wordless threat, and turned his head towards Snape with the kind of slow exaggeration only the extremely sarcastic and the ancient reptiles possess, and opened his blue turtle mouth wide. It was clear he was trying to bite Snape, who was too far away to be bitten, but that didn't mean he wasn't trying.

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[emptyyourself]

"Oh, no you don't." Snape took a step toward House to keep him from moving too far away, but then realized the open-mouth thing was an effort to bite him. His jaw dropped slightly for a moment, then he bared his teeth angrily.

He leveled his wand at House half-tempted to ignore his discussion with Martha and just kill the tortoise quickly and quietly right here in the corridor. His fist tightened around the wand as he wrestled with his own conscience; enough had happened to him in the past four months to throw it all away on this most brilliant opportunity...but House would just come back, like they all did, and Snape would be an inmate.

Finally, he lowered his arm.

"I'll get help," he said stiffly.

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[the_house_rules]

House felt like he should be in some greater state of disbelief over this. He was, at this point, somewhat used to the barge having all manner of people, some of them characters he recognized, though Snape was his first encounter with magic. He had believed Snape was the real Snape and not some actor in garb, but there was something about being physically transformed into a turtle that erased whatever doubt might have remained. That said, the experience wasn't entirely convincing, considering he'd hallucinated far less unusual ones. So he was still quite torn between believing what his senses told him was true, and opting to believe that he was imagining everything.

House stared up at Snape, who had leveled his wand at him, and was aware that Snape was considering killing him. "Do it. I fucking dare you. I'd probably just come back as myself through the death toll." It would be doing him a favor.

But instead, he didn't follow through. Wand lowered, he said he would get "help," which was not comforting. It meant that he would continue to be a turtle and also that Snape couldn't reverse the situation on his own. Or that he didn't want to. House wasn't stupid; it was easier to wait out the flood with a tortoise than with House as a human tearing through the halls, using the flood as a weapon.

While Snape stood around summoning help from the corners of this fucking ship on his journal, House inched closer in slow, eerily silent reptilian steps. Snape looked like a tool, standing there texting on his journal, like some overgrown emo kid with a smart phone.

House waited until the moment was perfect, until he'd snuck close enough that he wouldn't botch this. When he was in position, he stretched out his neck like a slo-mo replay and bit Snape's leg through his pants.

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[emptyyourself]

Snape should have been paying attention. He'd seen House threaten to bite him once already; he ought to have been keeping half an eye on the tortoise and maintaining a safe distance. Instead, he was caught up in his conversation with Martha Jones, which said all sorts of things about his priorities. Things he would not particularly want to consider later, when he was berating himself for letting a turtle bite him.

When he felt House's jaws clamp down on his thigh, he shouted - a wordless, surprised cry that was both pain and indignation - dropped his journal, and instinctively punched the vile, blue monstrosity on the head.

Certainly the most rational of responses.

"Have you lost your mind?" he seethed.

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[the_house_rules]

When Snape punched him in the head, a sound came from the tortoise not unlike a sad, painful groan played back more slowly than it was recorded. The reptilian eyes closed instinctively to protect himself from harm.

As it happened, he followed through with the self-preservation measure and withdrew completely into his shell. Feet. Front feet. Head. Tail.

And from inside, House stared out at Snape's feet, loathing him.

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[emptyyourself]

Snape glared at House with utter and complete hatred, then did something no one would have ever imagined him doing. Perhaps in the nightmares of Harry Potter fans and Harry Potter himself, or in the throes of an hallucination.

Snape picked up his journal with vehemence and then sat on House's shell.

"If you bite me again, I'll use your shell for a new pensieve." He peered over in the direction of House's hidden head. "They won't find the rest of you."

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[the_house_rules]

House was aware that Snape was sitting on his shell. He was also aware that there was no sensation of discomfort from it. It was like House was sitting under a table and Snape was on top of it. He was aware he was there, but it was nothing like being sat on.

House remained where he was, hating Snape with every ounce of his being. He was actively plotting revenge, trying to think of the best retaliation for these grievances. It seemed clear that theft was in order. Burdening Snape with things that didn't entrap him could probably be cleared away with a wave of his wand, so he would have to steal it. He would have to work the details out, but it was going to happen.

House made an effort to threaten Snape by snapping his jaws, but was disappointed that this made no sound.