the nature of happiness, a house, m.d. fanfic

Disclaimer: I do not own House M. D. Life is tragic enough without that sort of horrifying mistake happening unto the world.

The Nature of Happiness

They don't look at all alike, and that is how she tells herself that she's not pretending.

It takes her three weeks and a private detective to track him down. He dropped the lease on his apartment and left no forwarding address. A little surprising -- not something she considered -- but not too much for anyone who's worked for House, and who knows his tactic of attacking on the homefront when the guard is down.

She visits in the evening, after every decent practice's hours. The lights are burning in his window, but he's still dressed for work when he opens the door.

"Princeton-Plainsboro can and will offer more than whatever you're being paid right now at your current job," she says, matter-of-factly and without preamble.

"How much more," he says dryly, but he isn't taking her seriously. Absently, his fingers unknot the tie at his throat; she tracks the motion, only half-aware that she's doing so. His hands are not graceful nor slim, but there's an unlikely beauty anyway in how simple and precise each motion is. "How did you track me down?"

Shaking away the impression of his hands and ignoring his question, she names a sum. He arches his brows.

"That much," he says. "Huh." They wait on his doorstep together for a heartbeat. He exhales and adds reluctantly, "Would you like to come in?"

The decor is neat, sparse and precise, with prints of famous paintings interspersed on the bare walls in dashes of tasteful color. They sit on opposing sofas in the living room. The cushions are stiffly graceful and not at all yielding. Even the chairs in the hospital's waiting room are more comfortable than these.

"Princeton-Plainsboro has House," he says before she can offer something else. "Not to mention you offered all of this weeks before I quit, and I still went."

"I thought that it might have given you enough time to see it more clearly," she lies. She might have tracked him down and followed him to his apartment, but she's damned if she'll tell him about the inefficiency in the system that took so long to get her there.

He smiles shortly, unkindly, the corners of his mouth turning up and flattening in the next instant. "I don't want to be House," he starts, voice low.

Cuddy leans against the hard back. "And you think that running away from his shadow is going to make a difference? He's the best diagnostician in the country. You can still learn from him."

"He's a--" He breaks off with a violent, inexplicit noise. "Never mind. But I meant it. I don't want to go back."

She bites down the words that rise to mind -- as if it makes a difference whether he's halfway across the country or in the same building if House will always go on as House has before. He doesn't want to hear it, and it won't help her persuade him. "My offer still stands," Cuddy says instead. "Your own department of diagnostics and assistants. Pay accordingly. Free rein in treatment, answerable only to me."

He doesn't answer. She waits for a little while, then rises, smoothing her skirt. "Call me if you change your mind," she says, and closes the door behind her.

Five days and five complaints about House from his interviewees later, Foreman calls.

"I'll take it," he says, and Cuddy looks down at the desk, unable to suppress a smile.

Over the next few weeks, as Foreman finalises arrangements and she has the departments shuffled around to accomodate their newest arrival, Cuddy keeps a weather eye on her door, expecting it to slam open in a shatter of glass and House to stride dramatically in, shouting in outrage. Which isn't really his style, come to think of it, but it seems inevitable that he should complain. He's territorial.

"I get first dibs on all the really interesting patients, and he can have all my clinic hours," House says, which seems to be the end of it.

Foreman turns up in the line behind her at the only decent coffee shop within walking distance of the hospital. She runs through the list of options (House forgetting his place and sending his ex-underlings to hound her until she gives in to the latest insane tactic to diagnose a patient, House trying to indirectly spoil a date, House possessing Foreman's body and arriving to creep her out with his supernatural powers) before deciding on Occam's Razor. It's an excellent cafe; they're both doctors, meaning they have the work schedule from hell; Foreman's not stupid, and likes good coffee.

Not everything in her life has to involve House, anyway. She smiles at Foreman, a precise professional smile.

"So," Foreman says after a moment. "Come here often?"

It sounds like a cheap pick-up line. Cuddy is only briefly gratified to see that he realises it -- several seconds after it's been spoken. "It's okay," she says. Her voice is drier than she remembers ever trying to have it be. She clears her throat. "We're outside hospital boundaries. Nothing in your contract says that you have to make small talk with your boss to get paid."

Foreman chuckles and shakes his head. "I might have just been trying to be considerate."

"By figuring out my schedule?"

He raises an eyebrow. "It's just that the hospital kind of... cuts into everything, you know? And I don't want to keep stumbling into this place if it's how you get away. You deserve it," he adds, before she can answer. "Dealing with House all day."

"I don't come here much," Cuddy says. She turns to smile at the clerk and place her order before glancing back at Foreman. "The coffee's great, but you know -- hospitals." She shrugs. "You're free to drop by whenever you like."

"Okay," Foreman says, then hesitates. "If you want me to bring you a coffee... you know, if you can't get out here..."

The offer surprises her, and she's startled enough to give him a smile. "That would be great," Cuddy says, eyes slipping continuously back to his face. Kindness is a question, and needs an answer, but she only sees politeness in his face -- politeness, and something she can't identify. "Thank you."

The cashier arrives to pass her her coffee, which she accepts with grace. Paying, she nods to Foreman and walks out of the shop, oddly bemused.

On some days, he does bring her coffee and a brief moment of caffeinated peace while all the world (most loudly, House) shouts about marijuana and the treatments thereof.

And things go back to normal.

Only there are times when she thinks that normal isn't good enough, when her bones ache with the imaginary heaviness of a carried child and drop, hollow, to her sides. She hates self-pity, hates it, and it takes her a while to realise that she apparently hates the report in her hands, too.

She's busy gathering each torn piece together when Foreman arrives, bearing routine and coffee. He stops to stare at the mess. "Testing a new shredder?"

"An accident," she lies, holding out a hand for the coffee. She's careful not to raise her eyes -- the red eyes that follow crying can be seen for two to three hours after the event, and the last thing she needs is to give more fodder to the gossip already circulating the hospital. House's last contribution had the nurses eyeing her office for the secret passageway to her secret bondage chamber for months.

"An accident that happened..." Foreman counts. "Seventy-eight times?"

"Surprised me too," Cuddy snaps. She lifts her head and snatches the coffee. "Thank you," she adds, mouth twisting. "I needed this."

She can hear the shrug in his voice. "Sure," he says, and after years of House, someone who isn't curious, who doesn't ask, is a welcome surprise.

So she asks.

When first she tells Wilson, he gives her a hard stare.

"What," Cuddy says, staring back. "What?"

"Dating a sarcastic, jaded diagnostician," Wilson says to the ceiling. "Where have I heard this one before?"

Cuddy rolls her eyes and makes three paces around the room. "I'm not compensating because I can't date House."

"I..." Wilson gestures vaguely, "didn't say you were."

"You implied it."

"I did not imply it. It's just..." He searches for words; she waits. Finally, he says, "I really didn't expect you to date Foreman. I would have expected -- oh, Cameron! before I would have thought of Foreman."

"Cameron's gone," Cuddy says, although she has her plans for that, too. One down, two to go. "And, as hot a fantasy as that would be for House, Foreman's a good guy."

Wilson's doubtful look chases her all the way back to her office.

House barges into her office an hour later, possibly because he and Wilson are secretly teenage girls and spend a lot more time gossiping about her life than she'd previously suspected.

"So!" House takes a long glance around the office, as if he expects it to be decorated in enormous pink-framed pictures of Foreman, "All those years of hardcore chemistry -- were just because you really wanted in on some hot department head action." His mouth curls at the word 'head'.

"If I'd been desperate," Cuddy says, typing professionally and taking care to look disinterested, "I had one right in the building fantasizing about me every day in the shower. Don't you have a case?"

"I have a patient with lupus," House corrects her. "Boring! So how long were you planning on dating Foreman before you made it official?"

Cuddy stares. "I'm sorry it inconvenienced you," she says. "Next time I find someone I like, I'll be sure to make an announcement over the P.A. Satisfied?"

"No," House says, "but then, I didn't have a shower this morning." He flashes a grin before striding back out. At the door, he stops. "Tell your new boyfriend to watch out," he says over his shoulder. "I'll be copyrighting the 'cranky diagnostician' position soon. He'll have to find another stereotype to fill."

"Don't let the door rattle your brain too hard on your way out," Cuddy advises. House makes a horrible face at her and leaves. She sits back in her chair, wondering distantly about it -- the forthcoming date, the expression on his face -- before she recalls herself and bends back to the papers.

The first date goes well, mostly because they leave a few hours before work ends and go off into the city, where it becomes much more difficult for House to track them down. From there on, the entire evening is a formal, comfortable blur of art galleries and clinking dinnerware, of jokes over wine, of Foreman looking more relaxed than she has ever seen him.

She doesn't know him at all, she realises halfway through, but the epiphany is not unpleasant. The stranger she is discovering doesn't mind if she slips into hospital anecdotes, if things go a little wrong. He knows, too; it's all right.

So she talks about the early years of running the hospital, about cases she loved and cases she lost, and listens to his quiet voice rise and fall about his mother, university and patients and more.

"Are you free for coffee on Saturday?" he asks at the end of the night, standing on her doorstep with the faint smile that she's learning means contentment.

He rocks back a bit on his heels, and shadows snake up his face, contorting the edges of his lips into a sneer, a smirk, a bitter look. A blink -- the impressions vanish again, dragged back into the dark.

She hesitates only a few seconds more before accepting.

It's convenient. They like each other. There's no reason not to let it escalate.

So, over a series of hours, days, weeks, she does.

They go on more dates when their hours allow it, to museums and art shows and elegantly conventional theaters. None of them are outlandishly interrupted. Each is, in fact, so comfortably quiet that she starts to suspect that House is planning an enormous interruption for an important occasion just when she lets her guard drop. For the most part, though, they're good. Foreman is good.

He kisses carefully, mapping out the boundaries of what's permitted and what is not, always restrained and nearly demure with caution. The awkwardness of sex slides into routine, and that's good, too. It's what she's needed all along: someone reliable who understands about the hospital, who doesn't mind if she works late and who still brings her coffee the next day.

She keeps expecting him to bite back with a vicious word when she teases too hard, or do something stupid like fill her pillow with jello, and she doesn't know why. Not that she minds -- she's grateful that he doesn't. And she's not stupid enough to jeopardize a good relationship by asking her significant other, "Why aren't you being an ass to me?"

She never asks him to stay the night, and he never offers. They're sure of each other, sure of where they stand, and that should be enough.

"You're going to have trouble getting a kid out of Foreman," House says from her chair, smirking. "He has intimacy issues."

She cocks her head and narrows her eyes. "Shut up, House," she says, and maybe there's finally enough of an edge in her voice that he lets the subject go.

Even so, it echoes in her head enough that she doesn't bring it up during their dinners, in those moments of the aftermath before he rolls out and starts to dress. She's old enough to know better anyway, she tells herself, and spends a weekend alone, folding small clothes and shutting them in boxes in the basement.

"And you're... happy," Wilson says. Which is a ridiculous thing to doubt. Foreman's sweet, works late when she does, and doesn't complicate things with awkward talks about intimacy. Of course she's happy.

Still, something always descends upon her in the middle of yelling at House, of arguing with sponsors and lawsuits, that there's something wrong with their relationship, something that echoes like a nightmare but can't be found. Like a riddle, but she has no time for riddles. Princeton-Plainsboro is doing better than ever it has before, the annual rate of complaints (and ensuing lawsuits) about House are decreasing.

Cuddy's happy.

She's sure of it.

-

end

note: criticism always welcome.