Part 1
She hadn't seen him in eight years.
Not since that evening in Detroit when he'd called her from an airport bar, a drunken and emotional mess. They'd spent that night in a hotel and she'd helped him pick up the pieces and put him back together. They'd just slept, holding one another, and he'd returned to North Carolina the following day.
"I just left," he'd said in the middle of the night, as they lay together, waiting for sleep to come. "I didn't even know where I was going until I was on the plane. I just…"
"… came to where you knew you'd be loved," she'd finished for him.
He'd smiled at her in the shadows at that, the expression a tender one. His fingers had skimmed her cheek as he whispered, "Yeah."
He'd asked if he could kiss her and she'd said "yes." And they had kissed soft and slow, a few times, enough to stir feelings and desires but not let them take the wheel.
They'd slept then and she'd dropped him at the airport the next morning to catch a flight. They'd hugged goodbye, exchanged kisses on the cheek, and dared a gentle pressing of lips before she'd returned to Ann Arbor to finish her degree and enter medical school.
That was the last time she'd seen him until a little over a year ago, when she'd stepped out of the elevator in the employee parking garage at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital — her domain as Dean of Medicine.
He'd been there, his motorcycle parked by her car, wearing a leather jacket and jeans, his sunglasses hanging from the neck of a worn Motley Crue tee. He hadn't been looking up, so she'd taken a moment to catch her breath and calm her heart while simultaneously trying to absorb the sheer male beauty of him. He'd looked great, fit.
But not carefree. He'd been worried and afraid.
He'd asked her for a job. He'd had nowhere else to go, no favors to call in from colleagues. His medical career had been over to all intents and purposes. He'd been blackballed by previous employers. His pride had been obliterated and he'd been utterly defeated. She'd heard it in his voice as they sat in her car and talked.
"I've got nowhere else to go, Cuddy," he'd said, looking down in shame then up at her, desperation filling in his eyes. "I need your help."
She'd been his last hope. Secretly, she'd wished she had been his first, as she had been his first in other ways — and he hers. But things had changed for them both and he hadn't come to Princeton alone.
He'd brought a girlfriend — a constitutional lawyer named Stacy. The tall brunette had looked good with him and Cuddy had seen their love for each other. That had hurt, but she'd understood. It had been a long time and no one pined forever.
And yet she had, in the recesses of her heart, and still did.
Stacy sat with him now, in the ICU of Cuddy's hospital, hovering over him as he lay in debilitating pain, on the verge of dying. She was nice, and good to him. At the moment, she was pleading with him to choose a course of treatment that would save his life.
It was Cuddy's idea, a compromise between what he adamantly refused and what would certainly mean an agonizing death.
It was difficult to stand by and witness the exchange. Cuddy knew a part of him wanted death. She'd seen that damned darkness in his eyes — the one that seemed to dictate that he hurt himself. She'd seen it when he'd rejected the treatment option when she'd presented it to him a while ago. And she'd seen it before, when she'd gone to get him at Princeton General.
Pride had made him go there instead of coming to PPTH, where he worked as an attending. Her staff diagnostics attending — a job she'd created just for him.
They'd treated him appallingly there, mistaking him for a drug-seeking addict instead of a patient in the early stages of a severe medical crisis. An infarction. A random, unforeseeable blood clot in an otherwise healthy, physically fit man that was now going to cost him a leg in some form. Or his life.
Stacy had called her after the staff at Princeton General had catheterized him without anesthetic, which was tantamount to torture. Livid, Cuddy had wasted no time in getting there. She'd commandeered EMTs and an ambulance and gone to get him herself.
She'd ripped the attending on duty a new one as she gave House a shot of morphine herself, drawn from the ambulance drug box. Then she'd verbally eviscerated the hospital's chief of staff, shouting across the gurney at the burly, balding man as they headed out of the building.
"Are you really going to quote your policy to me? This has nothing to do with policy. The fact is that you let your idiot doctors torture a patient … my chief of diagnostics … because they thought he might be drug-seeking. A dose of lidocaine isn't a prescription for Vicodin or a shot of morphine. It's humane and ethical. What your staff did was not. And you know it."
The man had backed off and she'd glared at anyone from the Princeton General's staff who'd even looked like they might try touching the gurney. She'd trusted only her people to handle House, who'd looked at her with a healthy measure of pride when she'd sat next to him in the ambulance, a stethoscope around her neck.
"Gonna fire me for going to the enemy?" he'd asked, his voice muffled from the mask giving him oxygen. It covered his nose and mouth and fogged a little with his breath.
"You're not that lucky," she'd said, her voice miraculously steady. "I'm not through making your life hell with my bureaucratic demands."
"Lisa," Stacy had chided, too emotionally on edge to appreciate the humor.
But House had. Cuddy had seen amusement peak through the pain that made his eyes red-rimmed and glassy with tears. She'd been unable to suppress the little smile that had risen at seeing it, but she had been able to corral it enough to give Stacy a sympathetic look and offer what reassurances she could.
"We're going to do everything we can."