CHAPTER TWELVE

House burst into the lab and surveyed his Team. Hadley and Taub were bent over a urine specimen, checking it through the microscope for any foreign objects. Foreman was once again looking at the results of the MRI while Kutner played with tubes of blood.

"We missed the story," House proclaimed like it was groundbreaking news.

"Huh?" Kutner put a vial back on the rack and stared at his boss, mouth hung open slightly.

"The story? The progression!" He stared at his team, trying to mentally push the right answer into their heads. "There is a storyline to her illness." He gave up. "You people have no imagination." He walked over to Foreman and pulled the Sharpie out of the younger man's pocket then hobbled over to the white wall at the far end of the room.

He started writing on the wall. "She started with a sore throat." He wrote sore throat on the wall. Looked at it carefully, the wrote 'once upon a time there was a' before it. "That throat was so sore she took medicine for it." He wrote the long, complicated name of the medication given to her by her family doctor under 'sore throat'. "Only after taking that medication, she began to get a rash." He drew a weird amoeba shaped blob and wrote 'rash' inside it. "Not long after the rash, she stopped talking and her parents brought her here. So, what do we know from that?" He put the cap on his sharpie and turned to look at his team.

"It all started with a sore throat?" Kutner ventured a guess.

"Yeah…and…"

"The other symptoms resulted from treatments for the sore throat." Taub added.

"Ding ding, give that boy a prize…but nothing too expensive. It was kind of an obvious answer. In fact, instead of giving him a prize, you should all be punished for not thinking of it first. So, spankings all around." He looked directly at Hadley and held up his cane.

"So, we're treating a sore throat?" Hadley ignored his little barb and carried on.

"We would have been, had she come to us when she only had a sore throat."

"An infection?" Kutner asked.

"What kind of infection?" House tried to pull it out of someone.

"A bad one," Kutner said simply.

"Right, so, let's treat her for a bad infection…"

"It's not an allergy. We ran all the tests…" Hadley informed him.

"No, it's not. But the condition she had was aggravated by the drugs she took for the sore throat." House was glad he had to do all the work himself. It was distracting him from other things.

"Hypothyroidism." Hadley had gone over all the symptoms sorting them between before and after the medication.

"She's not depressed." House countered.

"Depression is a mental effect. She could be faking." Kutner tried to help his colleague.

"She's faking not being depressed?" Taub wasn't buying it.

"It's not Hypothyroidism," Foreman said, his arms folded over his chest as he watched the children play.

House lost himself in diagnosing. It was the one thing that could take his mind off Cuddy. It was his sanctuary.

Cuddy had no such sanctuary. She tried to lose herself in her work, but everything she did reminded her of House. She called the Medical Review Board and apologized for House's little joke. She explained that it was a prank and asked to meet with a different member of the Board on Tuesday of next week. An appointment was made and she hung up.

Her next task was to organize her drawers back to the way she liked them. Maintenance had tried to put things in the right spot, but they didn't know how she liked to have the photo of her climbing Mt. Washington facing slightly toward her desk so when she felt like she wasn't going to complete a project, she could look at that picture for inspiration. They had no idea that the small globe she kept at the corner of her desk near her monitor was a gift from her father before he passed away. It was the last gift he'd ever given her, and she liked to leave it where she could always see it.

As she went through the material evidence of her life on this Earth she stumbled across something that reminded her of House. She dropped onto the sofa and flipped through the pages of a dusty Sherlock Holmes anthology. He had given it to her for her birthday almost twenty years ago.

When he gave it to her, he explained why it was so meaningful, how Sherlock Holmes was his idol, and he liked to think that diseases were his Moriarty, and he would spend the rest of his life triumphing over them. He had been a lot more romantic then, not in the hearts and flowers sense, but in the poetic, old soul sense that made her want to spend every moment of every day listening to him talk about everything or nothing at all.

Flipping through the pages she found an old, flattened, now colorless iris. It was part of a corsage he had given her when they attended the formal dance at the University. She had forced him to go, threatening to stop sleeping with him. They both knew she wouldn't follow through on the threat, but he took her anyway, content with the ability to blame her the whole night if he didn't have fun.

She smiled as a tear rolled down her cheek. He was a hard ass, even then, but he had still been able to open up. They shared their hopes and dreams, or at least he sat attentively and listened to her hopes and dreams and successfully evaded most of her questions about his future.

She remembered being sad that he had nothing to hope for. He laughed and said he hoped to see her naked again, but she knew he was hiding some deep feeling of hopelessness. She would have done anything to change that, but it was who he was, and it was who she fell in love with.

She put the book away with a sniffle, in its special spot behind a statue of Nefertiti she'd bought on her first trip to Egypt. Her finger slid down the spine one last time as she locked the nostalgia away where it belonged. Then she set out to find the man who had given her that thoughtful gift. She knew he was there somewhere.

The first place she looked was his office. It seemed the logical choice, but it was empty. It seemed emptier now than it had before she'd moved in. It felt wrong not seeing her things pressed up against his, invading his space. She had enjoyed invading his space, making what was his now hers. She liked that she could, that it was her right as head of the hospital to take over his office. She could have thrown him out if she'd wanted to, but that wouldn't have been as fun.

When she couldn't find him there, or in the adjoining meeting room, she checked in with Wilson. He hadn't seen House in a couple hours. He wanted to talk, she could see it in his body language, but she didn't, so she left.

She then headed down to Carly Peterson's room. It was a crazy thought, but maybe House was actually with his patient.

Carly was sitting up, trying valiantly to gulp down some vanilla pudding. "Hi." She looked up to greet the raven haired woman.

"Hi, Carly, I'm Dr. Cuddy. I run the hospital. I just wanted to see how you were doing?" Cuddy had no idea that Carly would know who she was.

"You're Dr. House's Dr. Cuddy." Carly grinned from ear to ear. It was an odd sight on a face so thin and pale. Cuddy feared for a moment that the girl might break in two and the top of her head would roll back onto the floor.

"I am?" Cuddy wasn't sure what to make of that.

"Oh My God!" Carly exclaimed in her best Valley Girl impersonation, which wasn't really an impersonation so much as just the way that she spoke when she said those words. "He won't shut up about you. Dr. Cuddy is sooooo smart, Dr. Cuddy is soooo beautiful…."

"Now I know you're lying," Cuddy said with a warm smile.

"Am not. That man adores you." Carly knew she was speaking out of turn, but she didn't care. Life in a hospital, tied to a stiff, uncomfortable Craftmatic bed was tedious and boring for a usually vibrant, energetic teenage girl. She needed some diversion from the feeling that death was breathing down her neck and getting closer every night when she wasn't looking. House and Cuddy had become that diversion.

From the first day House came to see her she knew he was haunted by something. It drew her romantic teenage heart into his world. He was like Heathcliff or Mr. Darcy or any of the brooding heroes of the historic romance novels she devoured. She decided to make it her goal to unite him with his heroin, and now, here she was, standing at the foot of Carly's bed, looking like a vision from Carly's dreams.

Though Cuddy was not the way Carly had envisioned her. She pictured a younger, blonder woman, perhaps a bit more like herself. When she'd ask House to describe Cuddy, he usually just used words like hot or a cold, heartless bitch. Carly could tell when House was having a bad day based on Cuddy's description.

"He told me about your date," Carly said, wading deeper into a pool she had no business in.

"Did he?" The arched eyebrow made Carly slightly nervous. Perhaps she shouldn't have told her that.

"He's afraid you hate him now." Carly was very frank. She had been given a lot of leeway as a child, and it didn't occur to her to keep things private.

"He is?" Cuddy was intrigued. This girl was telling her more about House than House had told her in the entire time they'd known each other. This was an opportunity too good to pass up.

"Dr. Cuddy, I know I'm butting into things that aren't my business, but I like Dr. House and you seem pretty nice too, and I think it's silly for two people who clearly like each other to keep making up reasons not to tell each other. Don't you?" She was innocently challenging.

Cuddy looked down at her hands. Yes, it was silly, but it was just the way it was. "I suppose."

"You do like him don't you?" Carly looked pleadingly at the hospital administrator, hoping the woman would not shatter all her romantic dreams.

Cuddy narrowed her eyes as she began to see what was going on here. "Did he ask you to ask me that?"

Carly dropped her head into her pillow as she rolled her eyes. For a moment Cuddy thought she had passed out she was so still, but then Carly spoke. "I thought when people got older they grew up." She stared accusingly at Cuddy.

Cuddy smiled with humor. "You thought wrong. People don't grow up, their problems just get bigger."

"Oh please! This is the same problem my best friend had when we were fourteen. She liked this guy Sam, but she didn't think he liked her so she wouldn't tell him she liked him. Turns out Sam liked her back, but was afraid she didn't like him so he asked Sarah to the Freshman Ball. Well, Sarah, once he got her hooks into Sam, wasn't about to let go and just added fuel to the insecurities until Molly, my friend, went out with Toby, the asshole." She shook her head and sat quiet for a moment. "I don't want to talk about that."

Cuddy understood and nodded.

"The point is, if one of you doesn't step up, someone is going to come along and split you for good. Both of you are too hot to stay available forever. And, yeah, no offense, but if you don't get married soon, it's probably never going to happen." Carly saw Cuddy look down. "Sorry."

"No, you're right. I do want to get married, and have a child." Cuddy didn't know why she was opening up to this girl, but something about Carly Peterson was so inviting. Carly reminded her of a young House, before the bitterness and pain sent him down the road of misery and self destruction. For a moment she imagined Carly going down that road, if whatever was killing her was irreversible, she could see Carly becoming bitter and angry at the world. She decided she would do whatever she could to prevent that. "But, those aren't the things House wants, so…" Cuddy shrugged. She thought she didn't have to go any further.

"So what?" Carly shrugged back. "You want some man and kid you've never met over the man you know and love?" It was so simple. Why couldn't these two grown people see what was right in front of them?

"I…" Cuddy had to think about that.

"Look, my father says I'm a bit of a dreamer but even I know you can't have everything. You have to make a choice. What do you want more? House, or the hope that you will meet someone else who wants to get married and have a baby? House is a sure thing…"

"House is most certainly not a sure thing." This girl didn't know him the way Cuddy did. There was nothing certain about House other than he was determined to remain miserable and he was addicted to his Vicodin. He was also brilliant and driven with a devilish sense of humor and a boyish charm hiding beneath the surface but… she had to stop thinking about him.

"Ugh! You two are driving me crazy." Carly pounded the bed in frustration. "Look, Dr. House is a wimp. He's not going to make the first move, but he does want you. He told me, and he has no reason to lie to me." Carly was a very trusting girl. She had led a nice, comfortable life up till. "Go talk to him, and be honest. Tell him what you want. He might surprise you."

"He often does," Cuddy mused, though she rarely found those surprises to be particularly good ones.

"Then go. What are you waiting for." Carly shooed her away with dreams of romance in her head. She hoped they would invite her to the wedding, if she was still alive by then.