It was almost a week before he turned up again. Lara opened the door and he stared at her for a moment. Lara thought he looked confused, as if he'd accidentally knocked on the wrong door; wasn't even sure why he was there. The moment passed and he walked in without invitation, carrying a canvas grocery bag. From it, he lifted a large bottle of Glenmorangie.
"This is for me," he said, putting the bottle down on to the table with a thud. "But if you're very good, I might just let you have some." He gave her a stern frown.
"Uh, thanks," Lara said, still standing at the door, marvelling at how he was able to walk straight into her home and completely take it over in just seconds.
"These are for you." He reached into the bag again and withdrew a box of extra-large, extra-soft tissues.
"Ri-i-i-ight," Lara said hesitantly. She closed the door and went back to her position on the sofa, wondering why he was giving her tissues. Was he planning on making her cry? She remembered, of course, what had happened last time he'd visited.
"If you start crying again, I'm going to hand you this box. And that's all. If you don't stop crying within what I consider to be a reasonable amount of time, I'm leaving. These are my terms."
He stood there, looking like a grumpy teacher forced to discipline a rowdy student. Her heart ached for him, for herself, for the both of them, but she figured it might be testing him just a little too much to cry right then.
Lara wondered how long it had taken him to come up with this idea. Clearly he was uncomfortable with her distress. This was his way of telling her he couldn't deal with it, and yet at the same time that he recognised it was more than likely going to happen again. Why he'd decided to come back again was a larger mystery that Lara didn't feel able to even begin thinking about.
"Okay," she said quietly.
After that he began to drop around regularly, every couple of days or so. Sometimes he'd stay for an hour, sometimes for the whole evening. There was no routine, no pre-warning, sometimes he ate dinner with her, sometimes he didn't. Mostly they talked about his day at work, or Lara told him what she'd managed to do that day; often they talked about what they watched on television.
Late one afternoon he turned up, a couple of weeks after his visits had begun, requested a coffee and lay down on the sofa. Before Lara had returned from the kitchen with a cup he was asleep. He slept for two hours before waking with a start and looking around, disoriented and confused. Lara, who'd curled up in the armchair to read and to just sit and listen to his steady breathing, looked up and gave him a gentle smile. Perhaps it was because he was still half-asleep, but when he smiled back she saw his naked face for the first time: vulnerable, sweet, sad. He covered it quickly, checked his watch, got up hurriedly and left. He told her later that he'd had a big case on and hadn't slept for almost two days.
Larissa still came around to visit every day and Janet appeared every few days to restock the fridge, write a shopping list, and occasionally do some of the more physical housework that she told Lara she shouldn't be doing yet. But it was House's visits by which Lara measured her progress. Perhaps because he wasn't there every day. Or perhaps because he was a new set of eyes to see herself through. All Lara knew was that things were changing. She was changing. Time, it appeared, did help, just as everyone had said. She was nowhere near her old self and, in fact, she wondered if she ever would be. Now she could sometimes go an hour or so before she'd remember again what had happened. At first that had made her cry, thinking that she was forgetting, forgetting Grace, but after a while she realised it was probably the natural way of things; it was how things were going to be from now on.
--
One night, a couple of months after Grace's death, Lara answered the door to House and it was late, almost ten. She'd been about to turn off the TV and go to bed, but heard the noise of his motorcycle pulling up outside. She showed him in and he shrugged off his leather jacket, tossing it and his helmet carelessly into a corner. He smelt sweaty, nothing offensive, perhaps it was just a result of the fact that it had been a warm day, or simply that he'd been working hard, and his eyes flashed with an emotion or an energy that Lara couldn't identify.
"Whisky," he said, settling himself down in the arm chair that he'd somehow claimed as his own.
Lara was used to his one word commands now and had given up adding "please" like an exasperated mother. "Whisky coming up," she said. She poured them both a shot and sat down next to him. Some instinct compelled her to bring the bottle with her, and sure enough, he downed the drink she'd handed him and reached out to pour himself another.
"You okay?" she asked.
"Crap day at work," he muttered. "Anything good on TV?"
"Re-runs of Stargate?" Lara suggested. It had been what she had been watching.
"I said anything good," he muttered, but made no attempt to change the channel, instead pouring himself another whisky. It wasn't until much later that Lara would eventually find out what had happened to him that day. The clinic patient whose prenatal care and delivery he'd done in order to scam time in the OB lounge had brought the child in to show him. She seemed to have some deluded belief that House would want to see her vile offspring. She made him hold the baby girl so she could take a photo and, just as he'd been posing – figuring it would be easier to do it and get her out of there – his team had come back to the office. He'd had to endure some guffaws from Foreman and Chase about how awkward and wrong he looked holding a baby, while Cameron just stood there looking all gooey-eyed. The whole incident had left him disturbed, but angry at himself for feeling that way.
That night the two of them sat together on the sofa for another couple of hours, watching television in virtual silence, only speaking to make occasional comments about the plot. Eventually, yawning, Lara got up.
"I have to go to bed. You've had too much to drink to drive home." She went into her bedroom and returned with a pillow and a quilt. "Here. Turn off the TV when you're done."
Despite her tiredness, Lara still hadn't fallen asleep almost an hour later when she heard him in the bathroom, followed by the rustle of the quilt being laid out. Finally the television was turned off, the apartment was silent, and Lara slept.
She woke with a start sometime later when she felt her bed dip and the unmistakable sensation of someone crawling into bed with her.
"What?" She wasn't scared, just startled.
"Your couch is ridiculously uncomfortable. I can't sleep on it."
"Oh." Lara was suddenly wide awake. Somehow, she now realised, in all the times that House had been visiting her over the past few weeks, she'd never thought about this, never considered that they might find themselves in bed together again. Even accidentally. The haze that had encompassed her since Grace hadn't allowed her to think of much more than getting out of bed each day, eating something and living through the day until it was time to go back to bed again. She rolled onto her back, staring up at the dark ceiling. He was doing the same, and she could tell from the tense way he held himself that he was wide awake too.
"Tell me about your pregnancy," he asked, suddenly.
"What?" Lara couldn't have been more surprised if he'd announced he was an alien. "Why?" she asked, simply to stall, she figured he had every right to ask, she just wasn't sure how to answer him.
"Because, if you'll recall, I wasn't there." The sarcasm in his voice was sharp enough to make Lara flinch.
"I know," she said softly.
They were both quiet again for a moment.
"So?" he asked, and Lara knew he wasn't going to give up. She sighed and rolled on to her side to face him.
"Well, I was in Singapore when I found out. I realised that my period was late, but I'd been in a gazillion time zones in three weeks by then and I've never been a 'like clockwork' kind of girl anyway. But then the author I was working with said something. She'd written this book on parenthood – had six kids herself. We were in a television studio, she was doing an interview for a breakfast TV show, and I'd been to the bathroom about five times that day already – I'd figured I just needed to cut back on the coffee. When I came back she jokingly said that if she didn't know better she'd think I was pregnant – she said that it was always the multiple trips to the bathroom that had tipped her off in her own pregnancies."
Lara laughed softly. "I wish I could have seen the look on my face. I must have looked like I was going to faint, because all of a sudden there were people around me, fanning me, offering me water, making me sit down. Later, she skipped one of her interviews to go with me to a drug store to buy a test. We sat in her hotel room the next morning before our flight to Sydney and watched the little lines appear on the stick."
He was still staring up at the ceiling and in the darkness Lara couldn't read the subtleties of the impassive expression on his face. She wasn't sure she wanted to, anyway.
"When I got back, Larissa went with me to the doctor. I did the blood test, got confirmation and then came back here and sat and stared at the wall for a few hours. I was . . . in shock."
"I bet," House muttered.
"At first I was going to have a termination, I never really wanted kids. But then . . . I don't know. I'm thirty-nine years old, what are the chances of it happening like that, after one night? I felt superstitious, like it was meant to be. I thought it was probably my only chance, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it on my own and I had no idea if you . . ." She paused and took a deep breath. How could she explain it to him when she barely understood it herself? "I was engaged—"
House twisted his head to look at her, frowning.
"Not when I met you," she hurriedly added. "It broke up before that. But I thought he was it. And he wasn't. I didn't trust my own judgement because I'd just made such a huge mistake. I couldn't decide what to do about calling you, or about the . . . baby or . . . anything really." Lara tried hard to cover the break in her voice; she was determined not to cry. "Eventually I put off making the decision long enough that there was no longer any decision to make."
"Were you planning to tell me? Ever?" She didn't miss the way the muscle in his jaw twitched when he spoke.
"Yes. No. I don't know." Lara was angry with herself when she felt the tears well. She flipped onto her back and blinked hard for a moment. "Yes. I would have. I just don't know when. It was another decision I . . . put off."
"So what, I might have received an invitation to her fucking college graduation? Or a bill for back-paid child support when things got tough?" His voice was low, his anger plain. She could feel the tension radiating from his body, and absently wondered if he might hit her. She thought if he did, that it would probably be fair.
"It wasn't about money," Lara protested weakly.
"Really? Well then how about the fact that I had a daughter and if I hadn't been roped into helping out in the ER that day, I might never have known she existed?"
At hearing him say the word "daughter", the dark thing in chains in the cave in the back of Lara's mind stirred and stretched. It hadn't been let out for a good sob in a while now, and she knew that meant it had been back there, resting and gathering strength. She was even more afraid of it now than she had been when she'd first discovered it existed.
Lara tuned everything out and focussed instead on her breathing, in and out, slowly, methodically. The ache at the back of her throat, the one that threatened those agonising sobs that made her fear her crying would never cease, slowly abated. So far his tissue-box conditions of visitation had ruled. Lara had only cried in his presence a couple of times and each time it had been shallow and brief. She knew if she gave in this time it wouldn't be. It would be the kind of tears that lasted until dawn, that wrenched her body and left her unable to do anything but lie in bed for the day. It would be a clear contravention of the terms he had set, and he would leave. She didn't want that.
Once she felt she had herself under control she took a deep breath and said the words she'd been trying to say to him for weeks. Months.
"I'm sorry."
"Hmph." He muttered something under his breath and shifted in the bed, but the tension seemed to drain from him, she could feel his anger fall away. They lay together in dark silence for a long time, both still awake, neither saying anything.
"And what about your sonograms?" he asked finally. "What did the ultrasounds show?"
Lara was surprised, she'd figured the subject was closed and had started to doze off. "Uh, the usual, I guess. I didn't find out the sex, I wanted that to be a surprise. Larissa came with me," she added, unsure what he wanted to know.
"No, about the heart," he said, exasperated.
"Oh that! Nothing, she was fine. They never said anything about . . ." She trailed off, wondering why he was asking about that.
"What were you doing when you went into labour?"
Lara took in a breath and let it out in a hiss. That was a day she tried hard not to remember. "I was here. I woke up not feeling well, so I called my office and said I'd work from home. I drank some tea to try to settle my stomach and I lay down to try to ease the contractions. Eventually I decided I should get checked out, so I called a cab and went to the hospital." She figured she didn't need to go any further than that. A sudden thought stopped her in her tracks. She sat up abruptly, staring down at his stony face. "Why? Do you think I did something wrong? Was it something I did that caused it?"
"No, it's not that, nothing like that would have made a difference." He sighed, not looking at her. "It doesn't make sense," he muttered under his breath.
Lara flopped back against the pillows. "What doesn't?"
He snorted. "Any of it."
"No, it doesn't."
They both fell silent again and after a while Lara drifted off to sleep. When she woke up in the morning, he was gone.
--
A/N: Don't forget to leave me love!
