Hide and Seek
House/Cuddy – Cuddy has a moment of weakness, and House lets her keep it.
Sometimes, House's leg will hurt him, and he will need to take an extra vicodin or three to help him function. Sometimes, House will find himself banned from the MRI machines, or assigned to extra clinic hours, and he will clutch his cane much tighter than necessary.
Like he always does, House lets himself into Cuddy's office, not bothering to check in with the secretary on the rare occasions that Cuddy will havea secretary. Except this time, Cuddy will not be in her office.
Clinic hours being irrelevant, House decides to wait for her. It will make her cranky, and give him a chance to finally sit down. So he eases himself onto the couch, wincing as he props his bad leg up on the table and messes up her meticulously arranged stack of medical journals and catalogs, notebooks and other fun reading materials.
While he waits, he will drum his fingers on his left thigh and make muted sounds with his mouth that add to the rhythm. The beat will eventually be forgotten, and he will pull himself up, limp across the carpet and examine the contents of her shelves. At that moment, he wants Cuddy to walk in, at that exact moment, knowing for sure that it will bug her.
House will want to see her face when she walks in on him breaching her privacy, wants to see her open her mouth and scrunch up her eyes. While he rummages through her things, his face will twitch and he will have heard a sound that is unmistakably human, a sound that does not come from him.
It sounds a little like a whimper, and a little like snot caught in someone's nostrils as they try to breathe.
Curious as ever, he will limp behind the desk and find Cuddy, crouching below. Her arms will be wrapped around her knees and her face will be buried in the folds of her skirt. Her shoulders will shake, from the silent crying that she has already mastered.
House will never say that she looks tiny, hurt, and pathetic.
He says her name abruptly, although he cannot imagine her still being unaware of his presence. Hadn't she heard him breathing, walking around?
Clinging to the hopes that House will be standing on the other side of the desk, the side from where he won't see her, she will not say anything.
"I can see you," House says apologetically, and she tenses before looking up at him with the red-rimmed eyes of a wounded animal, terrified. Ashamed.
"House…"
"It's just hormones," he says quickly, so she will not be able to say anything else, "needles in the ass making you cranky."
"You don't understand."
House feels a twinge of sympathy, which he mistakes for excess vicodin in his system. He peers down at her. "I get the feeling no one's counting to 100."
"Yeah, no one's looking for me," she shrugs dismissively; "Go away, House."
But he won't go away. Damnit, he will stand in that very place, will continue to stare down at her like she is in a zoo, until she realizes how pathetic she's being.
"I wanted to ask you about my patient, but seeing as how busy you are under there,"
Cuddy cuts him off. "Since when do you care if I give you the ok on anything?"
"That would be since you became the dean of medicine."
"Liar," she mutters. He's never respected her authority, not once since she so graciously gave him a job.
House taps his cane against the floor and re-grips the handle. "You're right, I don't care what you think of the way I make people better."
"So why are you here?"
"Easy, there. The answers will come in good time. I think there are bigger issues to be discussed, things that are much more important than me telling a lie."
Cuddy wipes her left eye with her sleeve, smudging the pristine pink fabric with mascara. "Yeah? Like what?" Her tone makes it clear that she doesn't care what House has to say; she's not even looking at him.
"Like what you're doing, hiding under your desk."
She sniffles, picks at the hem of her sleeve. "Go back to work, House," she says, and sounds defeated and tired.
"The kids are running tests," he says. "There's no work to do."
At this, she whirled around to face House, glaring with bewilderment. "Then go do clinic hours!" She snaps, suddenly furious. "Just get out of here."
But House doesn't miss the hurt behind the rage, and slowly, carefully, bracing himself with one hand on the desk and the other on Cuddy's chair, he eases himself down to the floor with all the grace of a cement truck, delicately stretching his right leg out in front of him.
"You either have a problem with running tests," he says plainly, "or a problem with kids."
"Fuck you."
"I'm going to go with the second option," House continues.
Cuddy leans her head against the side of the desk, eyes closed. Neither of them speaks for some time, until House breaks the silence.
"It's not working." It is not a question, but an observation of the obvious. Cuddy bites her lip and shakes her head weakly. House notices her hands, clenched into tight fists in her lap.
"Because I don't deserve it to work."
House continues to stare at her. "Um… okay?"
"I want this for all the wrong reasons, and that's why it isn't working."
"If you're planning on selling your baby to human trafficking, then I don't know what to tell you."
"I don't deserve it," she says resolutely.
House, never any good at consoling his own patients, let alone his boss, simply offers a hand to Cuddy, who regards it with suspicion.
"Get up," he says, pressing on when she shakes her head again. "Today would be nice; they're going to think something's going on under here."
"They?"
"Rubberneckers. Come on."
Cuddy shrinks further into the depths of the desk, if it is at all possible to do so. "No."
House blinks at her, expectantly. "They can't see me," Cuddy reasons. "If they can't see me, they won't know I'm here… that I'm hiding."
For being dumb enough to hide under her desk, like that was any kind of adequate escape from reality, Cuddy certainly had thought this through, and House could not deny it. "Fair enough."
"I want to stay here!" She says, her voice rising in pitch. "I can have anything I want but a baby."
The last part comes off as far more forceful than House expects of someone who claims that they are trying to hide.
She is breathing heavily, trying to manage her emotions, but the outburst has set off a deluge of fresh tears. "I'm not… no one can love me," she says finally, and lets herself cry. She doesn't care about House. "I'm going to be alone."
He reaches out and takes a lock of her hair between his fingers, twisting it around his thumb and being so careful, like he's cutting into a heart. Cuddy doesn't seem to notice, since she does not try to slap his hand away. But she does close her eyes, blinking a tear out of each, and draws a long, shuddering breath.
She can feel House's breath on her neck, that's how close he is. In that moment, she doesn't mind that even though she crawled under her desk to be alone, House is there with her. It feels nice, having a hand in her hair, lightly brushing through her curls.
And then House had to talk; "What's so special about squeezing a mini-person out of your vagina, anyway?"
Cuddy grins despite herself. "Please tell me you're being rhetorical," Because from his tone, she can't really tell.
"But really, there has to be a better reason why you would want one that badly than just not wanting to be alone."
"Because," Cuddy says, gently removing House's hand from her hair. "People shouldn't be ruled by reasons. After all, you don't need reasons to make everyone around you miserable."
"It's for the good of mankind."
"Alright," Cuddy says, not buying a word of it.
"So, are you going to come out?"
Cuddy shakes her head. The phone on her desk rings once, twice, but she makes no move to get it. "Well," House says, also ignoring the phone, "I'm getting up. Lives to save, misery to spread."
Always, Cuddy thinks to herself, and watches House grab onto the top of her desk with one hand, his leg with the other, and pull himself up to his feet, the action looking so hard for him to achieve.
She can hear him limp halfway across the room before he stops and comes back, adding as an afterthought, "Oh, and I'm still banned from the MRI machine."
"And I'm still under the desk," she smiles sweetly and shuts her eyes, looking a little more at peace than when House first spotted her. In a surprisingly and uncharacteristically obedient gesture, House doesn't challenge her or anything. From what she can hear, all he does is walk out, although for all she knows, he could have been flipping her the bird while doing so.
Cuddy will stay under her desk for only another minute, quickly popping into her chair as if she had been there all day, as if she ate, slept and lived in that chair, that's how inconspicuous she will be.
One floor up, House will make his way into a chair of his own with plans to ignore his minions and catch up on some sleep. He will not have a patient to deal with, and he will not have needed to use the MRI at all, thus he will have had no reason to go see Cuddy at all.
Thus he would have lied in order to chat with her. Which will not be anything new.