~~~~~ A/N: Omgwows. I haven't updated/written anything fanfic-wise in waaaay too long, and I've missed it! Seriously. It's a nice escape, isn't it?
Anyways, I've stopped watching Haus, Medical Doktors almost entirely, although I occasionally like to check in on jic the veteran ducks happen to pop in… which is too rare for me. ): It's not that I don't like the new team (Well, actually, I don't. I like them individually, rather than together. They're so boring together.), it's just that the show isn't what I thought it used to be.
Btw I can't wait until they pull an Amber on Cuddy omgomg go away plz & take care of your baby you don't love~
Yeah so, THIS FIC TAKES PLACE IN SEASONS 1-3 (not really any specific period of time) AND IS MILDLY AU. Just an A/N warning for those of you who hate AU's, lol. But I promise, there's only one change; the old ducklings are still quacking away (season 1-3!fic, remember? No newbies.). You'll find out what it is. ;)
Read. Review. Enjoy~
HOUSEMDHOUSEMDHOUSEMDHOUSEMDHOUSEMDHOUSEMD
He plunked across the carpet, slowly.
Cameron watched with a sheepish smile that creased the skin where the concave slope of her cheeks overlapped the slight foreshadowing of laugh lines. Chase scratched at the bridge of his nose.
A lackadaisical Foreman hunched over the glass surface of the table, shoulders gathered against his neck, mouth tight, face pressed into the assembled reverse of his hands. He resembled the Thinker, cursing that he had been carved out of stone.
The familiar hiss of a running coffee pot cued Cameron to pour it. She rose from her seat as he entered the room, and glanced over at him, a simple, embryonic pleasure that often occurred thoughtlessly and grew to a habitual level.
He held her glance long enough to signal "Not yet," with a small, dissuading nod, and she pursued her lips into a fine, spuriously pained line so as to appear dejectedly understanding rather than nonchalant. She didn't want to appear careless.
A slight, piercing clank followed the pot's swift movement back into its apparatus, and she returned to the chair.
She watched him furrow his brow as she leaned into the metal plate.
Worst case scenario, he was wildly depressed. Best case, he was mildly unfocused on medicine, and therefore mischievous. Either way, things would ultimately summarize into what ironically became known as, diagnostically-wise, "nicely", but Cameron figured his current disposition hovered somewhere inbetween.
House conjectured, with slight sarcasm, how horribly he would suffer today, and made a mental note to pinch her ass before the end of it. He excused it as animalistic therapy.
First, he would be forced to sift through several hours of clinic duty and simultaneously, "smile, goddamnit. The patients ease up when you look less like a grizzly bear and more like a tame, shaved one", as Cuddy had tastefully put it. At least he made the effort to do so… sometimes, but rather out of his own characteristic volatility than tendency to comply.
But that might've been pushing it; even Cuddy could hold only so tight a leash on him when it was purely fact that House worked best when the collar was completely off.
Today, he would try to grin and bear it, but he couldn't deny the possibility of reneging any promises to keep his façade of quiet satisfaction from buckling under the sporadic bipolarity that would wipe it away with far more ease than it required to maintain. Especially on today of all days.
Clinic duty. That was the last chore he felt like whining through.
A good lot of the time, he would start off introductions either in the bowels of the clinic or, on the rarest of occasions, at a patient's bedside, by answering the most prevalent and likely question that rudimentary crassness ultimately stimulated them to ask, before they had the chance to ask it. Whether out of morbid curiosity or the curse of being calculated to refer to human gaucheness to poorly remedy sudden discomfort, many patients wanted to ask, knew that they shouldn't, and did anyway.
He'd grip the rubber handles of the crutches, expertly swing his leg so that it extended past his body and pulled his waist forward in turn, and hoist his upper torso so as to trigger his arms to transitorily waver and guide the crutches across the floor. He had created this sort of idiosyncratic, exaggerated movement, for patients alone, in order to appear as equally noticeable if he were mentally crippled as well. God forbid he should bore his victims after subsequently frightening the shit out of them with what the crutches supported.
"War vet," he would say, grinning humbly, after they had their moment to stare.
But now, his mind was far away: nowhere near contemplating how to conjure a specious smile for faces that wouldn't remember it, or clocking into diagnostic mode.
Fogging the thoughts in his head, House saw the forgotten figure of a man ten years younger, walking straight-legged into his office, both pant legs crinkling with the rhythmic, clockwork expertise of having the muscles, tendons, and bone inside them doing what they were supposed to be doing. With such ease.
He scowled, then looking down at where two feet should have been looking up at him.
"Something wrong?" Chase inquired. He was watching House's shifting expression, although, penniless for his thoughts, an expression of genuine interest was prevalent in neither Chase's tone nor on his face.
House didn't answer, but seemed to be inwardly struggling to release something in a deliberate manner, slowly conjecturing how to go about it.
He manipulated the crutches to turn on their axes and maneuvered his body so as to face the window and avoid the faces of his team.
Looking outside the venetian blinds, he watched as overcast clouds smuggled sunlight behind thick blankets of swelling rain; their pockets were loosening as droplets began to seep from thin, weakening crevices that hung over the parched fields just beyond the hospital. His eyes darted across the gray folds, expecting the fog-veiled ceiling to cave in at random, releasing its restrained torrents of a storm anxiously biding its time.
He had to let it out. He didn't want to, be he had to.
They'd all find out eventually, anyway, and swarm him with questions and faux-concern (well, Cameron's wouldn't be, at least). It had taken three years, but House had finally figured out that even when it wasn't he sifting through the debris of chatter and smearing it behind unknowing, but otherwise curious ears, word in a hospital traveled fast.
Getting it over with now would save building up a didactic novella of excuses and words meant to turn his team off to the subject. It would save him his breath, time, and forced time with each of the three doctors, and ultimately, Cuddy. All but the onslaught of the unpleasant series of events that was sure to follow.
"Ducklings," he beseeched, too cheerfully for the usual staleness of the diagnostic suite.
The fixed necks and static heads of f each doctor refused to budge, as eyes traveling to adjacent faces met, quizzical. House didn't need to see their expressions to know they were twisting uncomfortably.
He leaned, straining against one crutch and waving his free hand in the air as if trying to grasp the right words that wavered just beyond his reach.
House betrayed his persona and let out a worldly sigh, although it didn't unearth the existence of a burden marked by depression, grief, or apprehension.
"What do you know about…" he cut himself off, and from the team's perspective, was still parading the tailcoat of his jacket. His gaze resided at the floor.
"About what?" Foreman pressed, mildly insistent. He and Cameron responded physically simultaneously, he straightening his angular posture and she perking the crown of her head upward, both involuntarily and out of sudden inquisitiveness.
The unmasked fear in Cameron's voice matched the dread in her disquieted eyes. Their wideness drew overstated angles across her face. "House?" she asked, begging herself not to lose firmness in her tone. She made to stand again but her movement against the metal chair stimulated the seat and legs to slide past one another in screeching, creaking unison.
House did not turn around to prevent her from nearing him. He struggled to keep from rolling his eyes, but this was a priceless gem of an occasion where he felt the didacticism of constraint, his conscience nudging to be appropriate. He simply raised his hand as a signal for her to stay where she was.
Once they heard it, he knew they would realize that they were overreacting and would wipe their brows, relieved (again, Cameron would, at least), but still; the necessity to say anything without a double entendre, his barriers completely shattered, acted as a mighty blow against his insecurity in informing them, anyone so openly about a personal matter.
But it was too late now to avoid it now.
House, disgustedly rubbed the rigid edge of the end root of his right leg where it would have met the meat of a thigh, and turned to face them.
"Prosthetic limbs."
( ~ )
TBC.
