Notes: Set 5 years after season 7 and ignores everything after "After Hours." Reviews are welcome. Thanks for reading.
Heartstrings
The crowded elevator, an impromptu rendezvous.
She can feel him watching her, one motionless stare on the outskirts of her periphery. Cuddy fights the urge to look back immediately but on the next floor three people step out and the curious stranger is beside her as much as behind her. He leans heavy on a cane and her heart flits arrhythmic at the hope. On the next floor she gets off, never turning confrontational. The man says nothing and, just like before, she doesn't look back.
trial and error
After settling in at Boston Children's following an interim of maternity leave, Cuddy practiced endocrinology a while, basking in the bracketed shifts with fewer hours and the long overdue return to medicine. At the end of two years though, she was bored. She loved the time at home she had, making dinner for her daughters, the certainty of holidays off and all that came with the 9 to 5 routine. But the more patients she saw, the accumulation of charts she signed and filed away only reminded her why she sought to be Dean to begin with and it seemed a small concession to move again when she was offered a Director position at New York Mercy.
Maybe she was trying to prove her ambition never faded. Maybe the brightness of motherhood had dissolved into a lackluster banality. Maybe she liked the idea of being within driving distance of Princeton. She was pining for so much and regretting even more.
Out of the din of the hospital, phones ringing, patients wailing, EKGs beeping and elevators chiming, she hears his voice. She hears him holler, distant but distinct, impatient for a nurse.
Cuddy rushes toward the voice, unsure what it means. It could be residual guilt or cruel coincidence. She steps into an unlit room. He's there but different. The beard is thick and overgrown so that she almost doesn't recognize him. She turns the light on to quell her disbelief and her heart cringes at the intense reality of seeing him after so long.
His eyes flash up at her, that unforgiving cobalt blue. His wide brow, with its ten thousand plots and plans, has narrowed; he's aged from within. Yet there are no casual furrows of worry, no self pity for the lonely man in the hospital bed, just a drawn asceticism from some silent self-set struggle, or a long illness.
"House? What are you doing here?"
He looks down at his right arm.
"Wristband says I'm a patient."
"Whose?"
"Dr. Ross,' they're running tests to see if I qualify for a clinical trial."
"A clinical trial for what?"
Cuddy's train of thought collides with a brick wall. She knows the hospital is only performing two right now. One is for ALS, the other terminal cancer. She picks up his chart.
"New cancer medication."
"What? How long–– House, how long have you been sick?"
"Five years."
He watches the shock filling Cuddy's face turn to disgust.
"The tumors that were excised from my thigh? That a precursor. It took about four months, the paraneoplastic syndrome came. By then the cancer had spread. Wilson's cocktail of drugs worked for a while. Then it didn't anymore. He recommended this trial."
"How long have you been here?"
"Checked in yesterday. What about you?"
"I've been Director here almost three years."
A nurse hovering in the doorway interrupts.
"We have to take you to radiology now, Mr. House."
He nods as the nurse brings in a wheelchair.
"We'll catch up later," he tells Cuddy. "You know where to find me."
Cuddy's left standing at the bottom of his empty hospital bed feeling the worst hypocrite. She left him when he needed her, citing that same flaw in him. It all seems so insignificant now. He said he could do better and she never let him try. She left out of fear, the expectation of his failure.
Tonight when she goes home and tucks her two daughters into bed, she wonders what's been denied them, how their lives might have been moulded if he'd remained in them and the faintest hope of how they still might be.
The next day she goes to him as early as her schedule allows. House isn't awake yet but she can't leave. Her silhouette is staring at him from the bottom of the bed when he opens his eyes. I thought I lost you, she thinks. And he can read her that way because his glance says yesterday you found me. The chaos theory of their lives is circular. Michigan, Princeton. This is just déjà vu again.
"You are officially in the trial," she tells him.
"But they told me I wasn't an ideal candidate, that my tests were borderline. I was supposed to go onto a waiting list."
"You're in. A nurse will be up soon to escort you to begin the first phase of treatment."
Cuddy reaches out and brushes his hand in an impersonal farewell. It's transparent though, how afraid she is of getting too close too late. She turns and starts always.
"Cuddy," he shouts. He means to say thank you but his stolid veneer can only manage, "Wish me luck."
"Good luck, House."
a safe return (to the way things were)
Late the next day she finds him in his bed stabbing a baked potato through to the cafeteria tray.
"How's the trial going?" She asks, expecting some complaint or a jibe back about it only being his second day.
"You tell me," he replies instead. He knows she's spent the last two days researching it.
"Ross had a lot of success with the first round of patients. And he's made improvements to the compound so we're expecting unprecedented results."
She sighs, feeling like she's just read a tagline for the pharmaceutical.
"You should thank Wilson for suggesting it."
"I really didn't know you would be here," he admits, stepping on her lines. As if knowing and showing up anyway would have been the worst offense.
Cuddy's silent a beat. She know it's the truth, knows that it doesn't really matter. Her heart is breaking for all of it and watching him eat the travesty the kitchen makes of a TV dinner exacerbates her remorse.
"You've got to be sick of hospital food. Why don't you have dinner with me tonight?"
House cants his head, pretending not to be blindsided by the offer.
"I'll order takeout," she gestures toward the tiny TV in the corner of the ceiling, "You can watch a real TV."
He hesitates. He knows what's happening. The want's come out of remission. He can't fight it, it's her.
Cuddy, the undertow he'll always be caught in.
House nods finally and for the first time since he's arrived, Cuddy smiles.
It takes him a while to dress. They meet outside her office. She stops by her favorite Thai place and they drive about twenty minutes outside the city to a massive brownstone on the corner of a picturesque suburban block.
They almost feel like a couple again, staggering together through the threshold of the door into the familiar ember warmth of her foyer. The girls are asleep by now. Cuddy thanks the babysitter and locks the door.
Then she goes into the kitchen to get silverware and plates but House doesn't follow. He stands stuck a minute in the hall, at some kind of crossroads. A light fringe of snow has settled like a cape on the shoulders of his coat.
When she comes back to the living room, she finds and hands him the remote and he sits on the couch opposite the chair she's sunk into. He half props his leg on a pillow and reaches for the bag of takeout.
Cuddy has no idea what to say. She never anticipated this being so difficult. The television flickers, audible but not loud. House gnaws on plain rice noodles. He's not really hungry. He's not really watching the TV. He's examining the framed family portraits, Rachel's yearbook picture, how she's grown and––
"What's her name?" He asks, motioning his head to a photo of what he's deduced to be Rachel's sister.
"Lucy."
"She in kindergarten yet?"
"Next year."
House nods solemnly. The low volume of what they're not watching seems to accentuate their mutual fear of this moment. Tense, Cuddy wants him to put the pieces together but he can't bear any more bad news this week. There are too many questions he doesn't want the answers to. He tells himself it won't make a difference and deflects.
"You seeing anybody?"
"No," she mumbles with a full mouth and content not to elaborate.
"What about you? You were married when I left."
"The honeymoon was over before… Well, we actually didn't have a honeymoon so I guess that idiom doesn't fit. It was a stupid ploy. I was just trying to hurt you. Since you fled, I assume it worked."
"I didn't leave because you married a hooker."
"No. It was because I called you in the middle of the night with my mangled leg bleeding out in a bathtub. I was trying to kill the pain and I was killing myself in the process. You couldn't stand to watch it anymore and I was too stubborn to stop."
"There's more to it than that, House. I was scared. I should never have left. You––I, I thought uprooting would solve everything and by the time it was clear that it couldn't, it was too late to go back."
"You were running away," he tells her softly. "Are you happy now?"
Their eyes meet then; her mouth opens aplogetic. He knows she can't answer. There's a sorrowful devotion in the way she's here for him now. He's grateful and resentful and confused.
"We should be getting back," comes out casually on the exhalation as he reaches for his cane, trying to hide how out of breath he is.
"Don't," she chokes out the syllable. "I mean you can stay here tonight."
For a long time there has been this uneasy premonition in the back of her mind, like a reoccurring nightmare. It always ends with him dying in a hospital bed.
Cuddy stands and carries the dirty dishes into the kitchen. When she comes back he's standing at the bottom of the staircase and not wearing his coat.
"You can sleep in my bed," she looks back to tell him, starting upstairs.
"I'll take the couch."
She feels stupid saying the words but she knows she's not going to sleep regardless. And he's pale, practically moribund with exhaustion. She waits for him to refuse, dissect her intentions. He only follows her quietly.
In her bedroom he stumbles, sighing at his discomfiture. Cuddy turns down the comforter as he sits on the edge of the mattress to step out of his sneakers. When she reaches for a spare pillow to take with her, he catches her wrist. There's love in the stillness of it and she leans to press her lips to his temple. After a long moment, his grip relents and she turns the lamp light out, lying down next to him. All at once House realizes he's wanted nothing more than a warm body next to him, her body his again.
Morning comes abrupt with her neck stiff from perching on the slant of his shoulder all night. She watches him sleep. He's hollow now compared to how he used to be. She wants to tell him to shave the beard but she's afraid of how sunken his cheeks are underneath.
There's never enough time; it telescopes misleading, all of it a lie. She doesn't know how much he has, how much they have together and tries to block the desolate thought as she slips out of bed.
The girls hear her up and they're up and so is he. When Cuddy comes back in, House turns on his side and watches her dress. It's not much but she's soft now in places where he remembers her being taut. Her breasts are a cup size bigger and he wants to break the silence to compliment the physiology of motherhood that has become her. It's always aroused him to think it, but to know now that he did that to her, even if he wasn't there for it, almost validates that small part of his psyche that wanted this then but could never admit it.
Before lunch, Cuddy makes a trip to oncology to ask the question she's terrified to know the answer to.
"I have to talk to you about the trial," she tells Dr. Ross.
Ross stands, conspicuously nervous in her presence.
"What is it?"
"One of the patients. Greg House."
"House," he repeats, sifting through his filing cabinet. He pulls out a folder.
"Yes, House."
He skims the page.
"How bad is he?"
A pause as Ross reads.
"I don't know how he got into the trial. He's been sick a long time. The cancer metastasized to his lungs more than a month ago. He's got six, maybe eight weeks."
"Even if the trial's a success?"
"Definitely. The medication is designed to accelerate the suicide of cancer cells before they're at this late a stage. I really don't know how he got into the trial."
"What would his odds be if he got a new lung?"
"Better. If the trial's effective for him and there are no complications with the transplant it could give him a few more years, maybe five. But the odds of a patient his age with his medical history getting approved for a lung ––"
Cuddy's gone. In her office she ignores calls and misses meetings, scrolling through the donor database. They only added House to the transplant list ten days before he got here. He's a five digit number at the bottom of the registry. She feels like she might vomit. There's panic and pain and she has to make this happen for him.
Hours later, when the sun has set and snowflakes are falling, Cuddy is too restless to keep looking through the tristate listings. She's about to call it all a waste of time but goes to see him instead. There's so much she has to tell him.
Scarcely composed when she comes in his room, she starts with his name.
"House."
One word at a time.
"Why didn't you tell me you needed a lung?"
"They're making me leave the trial." It's not even a question.
"No. They're not. But––"
He can see the light reflecting off of tears in the corners of her eyes.
"There's something you need to know, something I should have told you five years ago."
"I know," he interrupts. "I didn't know when you broke up with me but I knew when you left. It was the only excuse that made any sense."
"What? Why didn't you stop me, confront me?"
"I wanted you to tell me. Or maybe I didn't. You left because you didn't want me to be a part of it. You were afraid I'd ruin it, that I'd never be there."
A sob holds stagnant in her throat; she feels like she's suffocating.
"I was never opposed to being just a donor," his words echo hindsight.
"I only wish you'd asked me sooner."
"This was never how I wanted this to end," she tells him, wiping away tears blinding her because she refuses to blink, to break another promise or look away.
"I'm going to get you a new lung." She takes his cold hand in hers.
"You still love me." There's a tinge of surprise in his voice.
"Don't," he says, shaking his head. "It's only going to make this harder."
"How much harder can this get?"
"Are you really that naïve? How do you think this is going to end? Either I get better long enough for us to come together and fall apart and move on, again. Or I don't and you're left coping with the one time you couldn't save me from myself. I will––"
His mouth is dry, the lightheadedness back.
"I will never not be in love with you. But twenty-five years is a long time to clean up my messes and hold my hand. You were right to leave. You are better off without me."
"House, that's not true. I've wanted you here. I've wanted you here from the beginning. It took this long for me to realize it but I need you, we need you in our lives.
I should have known this was never going to be perfect and it was never going to be easy and I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't stay. But I can do better now.
I'm going to find you a lung and you're going to come out of this clinical trial cancer free."
Cuddy unweaves her fingers from his and leaves feigning optimism. She hurries to the clinic to make sure he's not getting a placebo in the trial. Then she pulls up a patient list, more specifically people in ICU, the coma ward, organ donors who have been rejected. She knows she has to find a lung before the trial progresses farther. He's going to get weaker before he gets stronger.
The next three days it's the same fight. Him calling her irrational and idealistic and Cuddy reminding him of how many times he's beaten the odds. House endures the trial, the side effects, the guise of guinea pig he's taken on. She narrows down every list, waiting for somebody to die.
And they do: an old man with emphysema, an HIV patient with pneumonia, two children, one of which is old enough to donate but whose parents won't consent.
This is time running out, she thinks, unlocking the door as they get home late. She's getting too used to him beside her again. Except that's not what's tearing her apart.
In the middle of the night she gets out of bed, goes to Lucy's room and, staring down at the girl, wonders why she never considered someday this would be all she has left of House.
It isn't fair for either of them. Lucy's been asleep every night when they come home and Cuddy's torn. There's the instinct to protect her from the loss of growing close to somebody who is only going to go away. But she doesn't want to deny her either. House deserves to know his own daughter.
The possibility of reunion, however imperfect, of taking back what she said, admitting the truth, has tiptoed along a balance beam in her mind since she left. She thought it was going to be a matter of time before they made it right, not a matter of keeping him alive.
platonic
The week draws to an end and they've been together constantly. The morning drive in, at the hospital and every evening, always in a sort of wistful hush, as if they know that any minute the spell will break. They might lose each other forever.
One night when he can't resist, when the need outweighs the logic and hopelessness, when they're lying in bed with his body curled behind and into the warmth of hers, his dry lips descend on her neck, initiating.
His hand, the one that's been pressed to her hip for an hour, inches up the edge of her cotton tank. A thumbnail traces the swell of one breast. His teeth sink into her shoulder as he grinds against her, spurring her to touch him.
It always happens like this. The temptation, trysts and renunciations. He comes to her scared and empty and wounded and invulnerable. They fight it for as long as they can but it's quicksand.
Cuddy turns and he touches her moist open mouth with the utmost piety, tiny sips, nothing salacious. It feels like their first kiss, tentative, forlorn. The thought passes fleeting and transluscent: she doesn't know what a life without this man, this arrogant, brilliant, broken man would be like. She'd give anything to never find out.
All she can do now is let his palm drift down her stomach and feel the horizontal line he draws over the c-section scar he doesn't need to see to know is there.
She isn't bothered by the beard as it etches along her jaw and reddens her nape. She squirms when his other arm tightens around her, bringing her close enough to feel him half hard against the dip of her spine. She's not sure where this is leading, if it's just heavy foreplay or if despite the cancer and all its treatments he can still do this. She lets him lead, lets him do what he needs.
House nestles his mouth against her ear but it's no diversion. Beneath the covers his wandering hand is winding her too tight. Her mind floods sensory with the memory of how many times he's undone her with a touch, a thrust, effortless.
The backs of her thighs are buttery soft. He smoothes his knuckles and pushes his way between them into the heat and the pressure. Leaning until his face is buried in the abundance of her dark hair, he whispers an appeal that gets lost in her sharp gasp.
The angle of his hand shifts, pressing into trembling tendons as they constrict around his fingers. The tips of two find that spot, all swollen and texture, and edge around it, taunting her. Her muscles flutter and though the door is closed, she holds back anything above the muted sound of a whimper.
His hand stills, fingers embedded and motionless. His lips are on her throat again. She can feel him, the subtle throb in the damp space between their bodies. She wants to kiss him. She cranes her neck to try but their lips only brush.
The impatient sway of her body drives his fingers in deeper and he pivots, eager for the friction. Then it's just quick shifts and short pushes until he's found the perfect angle, unrelenting and oblique. He can feel the first faint contractions of her impending orgasm, the definitive and fluid motion of her hips.
He slows, pulling his fingers out. He leans to brace himself above her and kiss her, all tender reminiscence.
He wants to believe they could stay this way close, enclosed, alone together. House holds his breath. He waits for that deceptive sense of well being to pass. More than anything he wants to be inside her. If he tries he knows he won't make it. His leg or his lungs might allow five or six thrusts before the weakness or the pain render him an invalid.
So he rolls onto his side, pulling her in front of him, spooning innocent as if his hand hasn't returned and his fingers aren't bending precision inside her, drawing spirals then pressing then circling again, without pattern and without stopping.
Lost in the thought of how much he's missed her, missed this, he starts to stroke faster, desperate. His head is hung over her shoulder, his mouth pressed to her upper lip. He watches it, surreal when she stiffens, jerks once, twice and comes so hard he's certain she's not been with anyone since him.
The tremors wane and as her arched back muscles relax, she turns. Her tongue follows a rivulet of sweat along his neck. His pulse is racing. She presses a gentle kiss to his closed lips and there's a distance. She can feel a poignant chaos welling within him.
He breathes in the smell of her sheets, the reality of being here and tries to hold onto it.. With her hand splayed over his chest he falls asleep spent and at home.
Cuddy lies awake contemplative.
What they have––impossible, convoluted as condemned, is making her consider that myth. The one Plato posited that held that humanity came to being as hermaphrodites until God split them in two and that everybody is wandering the world in search of our lost half. It's a romantic idea, she knows. For her and House it feels like it's happened in reverse. They started separate, on opposite sides of the world, him a military brat in the Philippines and her the brainy younger sister in Midwestern American suburbia. They found each other in Michigan, and again.
She doesn't believe in fate but it all has her heartstrings too tangled to be coincidence. Now he's here and they're closer than ever so that she feels that is he dies, she won't live. Some part of herself will go with him.
She knows she can't let that happen.