Title: Thursday
Author: cardiogod
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1726
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Summary: "She knows it's her fault." Post finale, companion piece to Monday, which you can find here: .net/s/5059612/1/Monday
Disclaimer: Not mine, David Shore's, blah blah.
Author's note: I'm not as happy with this one was I've been with the others. Proof that I should stick to one-shots, I think. Easier than chapter fic. Anyway, thanks for all of your positive feedback, it's really been a pleasure to get so much acknowledgement from my small body of work.
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She knows it's her fault.
As she makes the drive up north to Mayfield, she is bombarded by the knowledge that she is only driving 80 miles, using a quarter of a tank of gas, taking two hours of out of her day, watching him suffer through the treatment du jour because she didn't listen closely enough.
He had told her when she visited on Monday that, in his delusion, she hadn't walked out of her office after he'd called her daughter a bastard child. He had told her that he needed her, asked her for help, and she had turned around immediately and gone to him, without a second thought. When the words passed from his lips, tentative and almost fearful, she could hear the truth in them, and with it, the accusation.
Not that he was accusing her- if he truly thought this was her fault, he would have told her point blank and without any passive aggressive pretense- but she knew in that instant that she could've prevented it, that if she had heard his harsh words as a cry for help rather than another sharp barb meant to anger her, he wouldn't be here, poked and prodded and locked up like a monkey in a cage.
It had been different than his usual fare, his comment about Rachel. Harsher, meaner than any of the hundred things he says on a daily basis to get under her skin. The only time she could remember him being so deliberately hurtful was after the Tritter incident, in the heat of detox. She should have known.
So when she hastened out of his room at Mayfield after he confessed to her the nature of his delusions, barely able to conceal her tears, it had nothing to do with the fact that he said they'd slept together and everything to do with the fact that she could have saved him, but didn't. He hadn't been happy about it, according to Wilson, who visited every Tuesday and Friday and who she had grilled for information the second he walked into PPTH on Wednesday morning.
"Lay off, Cuddy," he told her, almost angry after several minutes of probing questions about House's condition, his reaction to her departure, whether or not he was still seeing Amber-shaped hallucinations, whether or not he was mad at her.
She stumbled over an apology, an explanation, an excuse, but Wilson, for once, didn't listen. "You told him you wouldn't leave, and you did. That's on you."
Feeling a fresh wave of guilt wash over her, she decided then, standing in Wilson's office in the same shirt she had worn the day House kissed her all those months ago, that she would forfeit Thursday's visit, give him time to cool off, to process, to forgive her for being human and fallible.
"Take exit #36B onto Lafayette Avenue," the way-too-perky voice on her GPS chirped, and she shakes her head a little, focusing on the road in front of her instead of her thoughts. She turns on her blinker and steers her Lexus off the highway and onto the road that will take her to him.
She isn't sure how she ended up here, three miles outside of Mayfield, when she had so clearly intended to go home, to feed her child, to drink a glass of wine or read a book or watch a movie or push paperwork or anything, really, to keep her mind off of him. But the book had been boring, the move too violent, and the paperwork too easily finished and by 6pm, Rachel was with Wilson, and she was at the Shell station, filling her tank with enough unleaded fuel to get her there and back.
She pulls into the parking lot, kills the engine, and is marching towards the front door as quickly as her probably-too-tight skirt will allow. The doctors and the security guards know her and they let her though without question and without hassle.
Two steps and she is in his room, looking at him and falling silent, forgetting all of the words that she had rehearsed in the car.
He breaks the silence, cold. "You're here."
She nods, not knowing what to say because she knows that nothing can make up for what she did, for walking out of the room when he needed her not once, but twice.
"Did you come back just so you could walk away again? Because you're getting really good at it. Pretty sure Monday qualifies you for an Olympic medal in sprinting."
She expected this, but it still manages to surprise her, and she wonders what Amber has told him in the two days since she's seen him, wonders how she's influenced his view of her.
"Are you done?" she asks patiently.
"Are you done, Cuddy?" he throws back at her. "Because I hear the guy down the hall hasn't seen his hooker since he got here, and I thought you-"
"I'm sorry." She interrupts him, and her words are so quiet she's not sure he could even hear her. But he does, stopping his taunting and looking at her as though she's grown a second head.
"You're sorry?" he scoffs. "Well that's just dandy. Do us all a favor next time, okay? Don't make promises you can't keep."
She wonders if "us" includes Amber, but she doesn't ask.
"Do you want to know why I left, House?" She offers him the only thing she has, the thing he prizes above all else, truth, and she hopes it will be enough.
"Don't bother. I think you made that loud and clear." For all of the time he spends not looking at her these days, looking beyond her or beside her or through her at someone that wasn't there, he keeps his eyes searing into hers for the entire conversation.
"I left because I felt guilty, because I shouldn't have walked away that night in my office." She takes a tentative step forward, and then another until she is beside him, lowering herself onto the bed next to him. She hangs her head, still ashamed of her reaction to his story, and she continues.
"I should have known that something was wrong. I should have heard you asking me for help." She looks at him, pleading with him to understand, even though she knows he never could because she doesn't think the way she does, because guilt doesn't even register with him 95% of the time.
"But I didn't ask-" he argues.
"You did. Maybe not in those words, but you did. And I'm sorry I didn't hear you, House. I'm sorry I didn't stay and listen."
She takes his hand in hers and squeezes it. The anger has melted from his eyes and he again looks like the sad, lost little boy that she's almost grown accustomed to.
She knows he's hearing voices again when his jaw clenches and he tightens his grip on her hand, looking off to her left. He wants to fight whatever it is that he's hearing, wants to deny, wants to mouth off like he always does when she denies him a procedure she thinks is too risky. She rubs her thumb across the back of his hand and he returns to her.
"What would you have done?" she barely catches the words that come tentatively from his lips, and she knows he is waiting for her rejection, for a replay of her "we don't have a personal relationship" speech.
"I would have done almost exactly what you said I did." She smiles at him, and she gets the feeling that this is all he's needed all along, to know that she is here for him, that he has someone to turn to.
"You would've made Starla or Twilight or whatever her name is watch the kid?"
"Twyla, and yes." She realizes after she says it that she is telling him that she chooses him over her child, and that isn't entirely accurate. But it isn't inaccurate either, so she leaves it be.
"I would have helped you detox. I would have hidden your drugs, flushed them down the toilet, dumped your scotch down the sink so you didn't go from one addiction to another."
"Not the scotch," he groans, but he is smiling.
"I would have held your hand and rubbed your back and gotten you ginger tea, although I would've known to put honey in it from the start. We would have gotten you through it, however many days or weeks it would have taken to get the Vicodin out of your system."
He drops his head, breaking the eye contact between them and she knows he is serious again. "And the other…?"
"I wouldn't have slept with you, House." She speaks the words she knows he is anticipating, even dreading. "I wouldn't have slept with you because you were detoxing, because sleeping with you would be taking advantage of that, because you probably would've tasted like puke, and because when we do finally sleep together, I want us both to be healthy."
He looks up at her, his face twisting into an expression she can't read. So she continues.
"No mourning the loss of something- of a baby, of Vicodin, no pain or sadness, no more endings."
"Beginnings," he mutters, filling in her thoughts like he always has. "Beginnings."
Moments pass as they both contemplate the new beginning resting on the bed between them, two hands clasped tightly in a promise or a threat or an assurance, she doesn't know which.
"Hey Cuddy," he says after a minute. "Did you really take my endocrinology class or were you just there because you wanted to jump my bones?"
She smiles, thinking for the first time in a while, that things would be okay.