Terrified that he'd put too much strain on his leg and the pain would return, House took his time getting to the door.

Pulling it open just enough for him to see Cuddy standing in the hallway, he stuck his head out. She was wearing the pink suit, he notes immediately, ever the professional.

"Hi." She said, innocently enough; it put House on edge.

He flattened his palm against his side of the door so that if she tried to come in, he could easily slam it in her face.

"What do you want?"

"Is this how you treat all your guests?" Cuddy said, crossing her arms over her chest.

"Aren't guests usually invited over?"

"I came to check up on you."

"I get the feeling that this is all part of your master plan to get my sperm, or something." He drummed his fingers on the door, trying to read Cuddy as efficiently as a month-long absence allowed. "The search for baby's daddy continues."

She made a face, like she just sucked on the rinds of a lemon. "You haven't come by the hospital. I need to see how you're doing."

The perpetual twinges in his neck and stomach were the only reasons why he let her in. "Fine," he said gruffly, letting go of the door so that it slammed into her arm.

Cuddy noticed the limp right away, when he turned and walked away from her. Although it was nowhere near as pronounced as it had been before the ketamine, and his cane was nowhere she could see, she paid close attention to his leg.

It seemed that the limp was just House being careful, because when he turned around to see if Cuddy had come inside, his face was neither drawn nor wrinkled with any tension, meaning there was no pain to give him stress. And she noticed that his pockets weren't rattling.

So his pain free state was actually from the treatment and not from the drugs. But knowing that House would only deny it if she brought it up without the proper leverage, she didn't mention it.

"If you could let me look at—"

House had already begun unbuttoning his shirt. "This?" he asked, revealing a white bandage covering the site of what Cuddy envisioned being a twisted, half-healed scar, a mass of angry red and purple skin.

"Your leg," she told him, to distract herself before House could peel off the bandage.

"Why? Don't you care that I've been shot?"

"I trust my surgeons."

"Good thing I'm not a surgeon, then," House said dryly, reluctant hands working the drawstring of his pants. As standoffish as he might have been feeling, he was definitely scared about his leg. Even though it didn't presently hurt, it kept him up at night, kept him waiting for just the slightest twinge that would most likely send him into a panic, finally confirming that the treatment had not worked.

Despite all the assurance he was given, he never could fully accept that his leg might actually have healed. After all, it was only a 50 percent chance; House was used to working with shittier odds than that.

"Compared to freaky German science, bullet wounds are like…" Cuddy paused, searching her brain for a sufficient simile, "splinters."

"Splinters," House repeated with a touch of bewilderment and a whole lot more resentment. "If only you were there when they took me off the morphine."

He set his jaw and dropped his pants, holding back nasty comments as Cuddy knelt down in front of him to examine his leg.

"Nothing new going on down there," House assured her. "I've checked."

A gentle poke was Cuddy's only response. She struggled to remain focused, trying to dissociate herself with House, trying to separate the leg from the man attached to it. She had to force herself with all the willpower that she possessed to look past the horrible scar, the mangled thigh, and see it from the perspective of someone who was not ridden with guilt. Nietzsche would have been so proud; it was just a damn leg.

A defiant thought rose from the back of her mind and informed her that Stacy had said exactly that when tried convincing Cuddy to cut it off. She wanted to say she was sorry.

"Has there been any new pain?" She asked the muscle.

House replied with an impatient "no."

"What about side affects from the ketamine? Blackouts, hallucinations-"

"Still no."

Cuddy noticed that House was balancing his weight on both of his legs, probably without even realizing that he wasn't leaning to one side. When she was satisfied, she stood up and met House's impatient eyes with a smile.

House pulled up his pants hastily. "Is that all?"

"I'll look at the… other wounds, now." She couldn't bring herself to say bullet wounds; it was still a shock that someone had just waltzed into her hospital and shot one of her doctors. If she didn't think about bullets and guns, then she could pretend that House had been injured any other imaginable way (crashed his bike, fell, was attacked in some alley and not in her fucking hospital).

"I'm a doctor too, you know," he said stubbornly, swatting her hand away from his stomach. "Not yet!"

Carefully, he peeled the bandage off his stomach, wincing ever so slightly, so that Cuddy had to smile at his sensitivity. She considered mocking him about it, but the sight of the wound on his stomach kept her quiet and sympathetic, because it looked just as she had imagined it would.

House waited until she was fully satisfied before he kicked her out, claiming he needed his beauty sleep.

"It's scarring nice enough," Cuddy said as an afterthought, watching closely as House taped the bandage back over the wound. "Just, yeah you know what to do."

"I do," House said brightly, his words dripping with disdain. "Would you believe I went to medical school?"

Cuddy smiled despite herself. "I'll come back later in the week to check on you. So Saturday, could you please be here?'

"Yeah. Nowhere else to go."

"Thank you," she said genuinely, and left, closing the door behind her as she went.

---

So when, two hours later, a knock on the door revealed Cuddy, coming over to check up on House (for the first time since he was discharged, she said), House was seriously confused.

"Is this how you treat all your guests?" Cuddy said, letting herself in.

TBC