Hey-O. This is just a little ditty, a sort of missing-scenes thing from S6 Episode "Known Unknowns." Enjoy!
Wilson's warming little chuckle had the triple-fold effect of making both Cuddy and Rachel smile, but also of finally casting off the last, uncomfortable dregs of a conversation way too somber for such a nice, mild autumn afternoon.
"So, he really said all that to you?" he asked, still grinning, and Cuddy sighed when she knew he wasn't trying to backtrack.
"Yep. Had never even seen the guy before. I don't think he knew my name by then, and he just…rattles off my entire psychosis, just by glancing at my class schedule!"
Wilson broke into slightly louder snickers, brown eyes creasing with mirth, and it struck Cuddy how very infrequent that look had been in the last few years. She felt sad she hadn't noticed it until then, and wondered what that said about her priorities. Rachel's soft cooing floating up just then on the gentle breeze seemed like answer enough.
"Sounds just like House."
Cuddy nodded, smiling fondly, if a touch remorsefully, and bounced Rachel slightly in her lap. "He was…not nice, necessarily. But he wasn't unkind; mostly just teasing. He didn't really take any notice of me. I didn't follow him around; plenty of other undergrad groupies doing that. I just…cleverly contrived it so we were in the same hallways together, or at the same parties. He thought he orchestrated the whole thing; didn't know I'd been planning on cornering into a conversation since I met him."
Another, softer laugh, and Wilson sighed. "Yeah. The most successful way to get House to do anything is to let him think it's his idea."
Ain't that the truth, she though wryly, thinking back on countless manipulations for paperwork, patient cases, clinic hours. She glanced back up at Wilson, and they shared the same thought: The first Vicodin detox.
They both smirked at each other, mutual grim amusement at the ironies of life.
"So," she said suddenly, not wanting the conversation to derail back into depressing matters, "how did you meet House?"
Which could, depending on definition, be considered a depressing matter.
Wilson blinked, as though the idea of meeting House for the first time was a foreign one.
Must have been a while ago, then.
"When did I meet him?" he asked, befuddled.
"Yeah," Cuddy said breezily. "Everyone in the hospital knows you two are friends, though no one knows why," and he snorted again in amusement. "But I don't think anyone's ever found out how you first met. It just seems like you guys have always known each other."
Wilson grins a bit mischievously, eyes watching some conference-goer move about behind Cuddy's chair. "No, there's definitely a 'Before House' era in my life, though it's kind of hard to remember much of the details."
Cuddy smiled, and Rachel gurgled happily, reaching a chubby hand up to pull playfully at a stray strand of hair.
"It was…actually, it was at a medical conference," he started, eyes widening, as though the connection hadn't occurred to him yet. "In New Orleans, some years ago. I was just out of med school and had barely snagged a residency in Baltimore. I'd also just been served the papers by my first wife."
He gave her a look and a bleak sort of grin, and she had the decency to wince in sympathy. It's usually in bad taste to talk to other women about habits of infidelity, but she knew James, and she knew it was something he'd never forgiven himself for, and never had found amusing, like some assholes do.
"I carried them around with me," he went on, "the papers, in the envelope they came in. I didn't open it. I knew what they were, but I just carried it around with me the whole day after I got it. Well, the last panel got done around four, and I figured it was as good a time as any to start drinking my sorrows away. So I walked into some random bar in the French Quarter, where I figured there wouldn't be a whole lot of people from the convention, because I really didn't want to talk about anything to anyone, and I just started hitting the bottle. I'd probably been there an hour, and the whole time, there was this guy in the corner of the room at a jukebox, playing the same. Damn. Billy Joel song. For an hour."
Cuddy laughed, seeing how even now the mere memory of it made him shudder in irritation. He grinned a little, then went slightly pink, rubbing the back of his neck and possibly even shuffling a foot; hard to tell, with the deck table between them. Cuddy couldn't help but smile; he'd always been slightly too cute when he was bashful.
"And I…well, I guess it was a lot of things: the convention, the alcohol, the divorce papers, the everything. I snapped. I walked up to the guy, told him to knock it off, and he said something, I don't even remember, but I lost it. Grabbed the nearest glass and flung it at the wall behind him, right into an antique mirror. Then of course a brawl breaks out, and the whole place erupts in chaos, and before I know it the police have been called and I'm being cuffed, processed, and charged for damage to private property, inciting a riot, and assault. The assault charge was bogus, but before I even had a chance to argue it, I was in a holding cell with some biker guy who, according to his bicep, was named Thunder."
Cuddy laughed outright at that, quickly moving her hand over her mouth when she realized how loud she'd been, but unable to stop vibrating with it for a few minutes. Rachel squealed with delight, waving her hands around, and Cuddy couldn't get the image of jail-bird Wilson to match up with the embarrassed and mildly chagrined man averting his eyes in front of her. It was utterly hysterical!
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" she chanted as she tried to catch her breath. "It's just…you? Got arrested?!" And she fell out again for a few minutes, the redness quickly enveloping James' face only adding to the hilarity.
"Yeah, well…" he muttered, but really had nothing to say in his defense.
When she finally thought she had herself under control, Cuddy sighed and said, "I'm sorry, really. That was just…God!" Pause to snicker a few times, reel her self-control back in. "So, I take it the guy at the jukebox was House?"
Wilson grinned a private, knowing grin. Apparently someone had asked that before.
"Nope. He was the random stranger who turned up at the police station about an hour later and bailed me out."
Cuddy's mirth died remarkably fast. And she wasn't sure why. She smiled, and made a noise of surprise, and Wilson kept on with the story, whatever was left to be heard, but Cuddy wasn't listening much anymore. She wasn't sure why hearing that had filled her with such a weird sense of futility. Of inevitability.
Didn't know why it should affect her at all, much less so dramatically. Didn't know why it should have anything to do with anything. Why hearing that House – of all people – had willingly parted with money for a stranger struck her. Why he had singled Wilson out, out of an entire bar full of people, an entire conference full of people, to take interest in. Why a nondescript, barely thirty-year-old resident from Baltimore, instigating a bar fight had drawn House's attention more completely than her little staged battle with the endocrinology professor had.
Why, after only knowing each other for a weekend, at most, House made more effort to stay in contact with a brown-eyed, brown-haired, soon-to-be-divorced something-stranger. From Baltimore.
They'd hung out, talked, spent time with each other, and then slept together, all of which lasted maybe three weeks, to a month, and…he hadn't even called. Never sent her a line, never told her what happened. House said he'd always been interested, and Wilson would undoubtedly break his back to point out it only meant House cared about her and her opinion so much he couldn't bring himself to tell her he'd been expelled. And it may be true, it may not, but it didn't really matter now, because she had Rachel, and Lucas, and she'd decided long ago that House wasn't what she needed.
She knew all this. She was happy, she'd made all the right decisions, and she didn't really have any regrets.
But it still hurt to look at this man in front of her, this unassuming, handsomely-bland oncologist, and know that even if she'd never adopted Rachel, had never met Lucas, had never dated Lucas, she still, in all truth and honesty, never would have gotten what she wanted.