Hey guys—I split the first chapter into two. The third chapter is brand-new, though!
The next morning he's awoken by the twins running into his room. Cameron, Rocco on her hip, runs right after them. "Girls," she admonishes, trying to push Claire and then Sophie toward the door, "don't wake Kutner."
"Nope, I'm up," he says, rising. "Hey, girls," he scoops one under each arm as they cheer. They're adorable, they smile all the time, they think he's fantastic. He loves them.
"Kutner," Cameron says, smiling, "you should sleep."
"Nah," he says, swinging one onto each hip. He's Kutner, the coolest non-uncle in the universe. "Nah, I'm good. What do you two want for breakfast?"
"Peanut butter chocolate chip pancakes," they scream.
"What?" he asks, stumped. He wants to say the hell but knows Cameron will punch him.
"Don't ask, it's this thing they came up with with Chase," she says, sashaying ahead of them to the kitchen. "Girls, we have Eggos or cereal."
"Cereal," they both scream, and Lizzy runs down and the three of them start fighting for his attention, and Chase materializes and starts pouring cereal and Cameron is still tending to Rocco and it's wonderfully chaotic. Somehow everyone eats a breakfast and Chase and Cameron play rock-paper-scissors to determine who has to walk the girls to the bus stop. Cameron loses, but pulls the feeding and the working-today trump cards, so Chase grabs backpacks and straightens socks and readjusts ponytails until all three are set, and then they all hug Kutner and dash out the kitchen door. Cameron has, of course, finished feeding Rocco, and Kutner insists on holding him.
"He's gotten big," he observes. The kid has downy blond hair and big, observant blue eyes. One day he will look exactly like Chase.
"He was about 9.5 pounds at Christmas; now he's 15.5. 25 inches long too," she says proudly. Somehow she's already dressed for work, now she putters around preparing her own food. "Do you want anything to eat?"
"Yeah, just some coffee, some cereal," he replies, bouncing the baby a little. "I can't believe you still haven't caved on the nanny thing."
"I've said a million times, I don't want my kids raised by a stranger. It's hard enough having a babysitter pick up the girls after school." Her tone is good-natured. "So the dance recital is tonight at 7 and then we have to go to a matinee encore tomorrow, but we figured you would probably just want to go tonight," she puts a bowl of cereal and a mug of coffee in front of him. "How're you doing?"
"I'm good," he manages, concentrating on swallowing the cereal. He hasn't decided if he's secretly wanted to be cornered by Cameron or not. "As well as can be expected."
"Rob—mentioned you were sort-of seeing someone?" Of course Chase told Cameron. She probably was worrying about why he showed up early.
"Yeah, sort of. It's nothing serious," he says.
"You like her?" she asks, biting her lower lip.
He shrugs. "She's—young."
"How young? This isn't illegal, is it?" she jokes.
He shakes his head. "No, she's 29. She pulled a trapezius playing tennis, I met her at the clinic."
"She nice?"
"Yeah, I guess. Big Indian family. Asks a lot of questions."
"Well, if she's worth it, she'll wait till you're ready to answer," Cameron tries, taking the baby back as Chase walks in.
"And another morning is done," he says, slumping into a chair. "Al, love, can you pass the cereal?"
"Yeah, sure," she says, scooting it down the length of the table as Rocco pulls on her necklace. "I'm going to head in—you still good watching Rocco this morning? I can call the daycare and see if there's room."
"No, we got him. We'll do manly things together," Chase replies.
"I knew I was right when I thought you wanted a son." She leans over to kiss him.
"Healthy kids, that's all the ever matters," he swears, taking Rocco from her.
"I'll remind you of that when we have to sit through the same dance recital twice this weekend," she says. "Do you want to stop by the hospital at all today, Kutner? If Cuddy sees you she'll try to lure you back, I have to warn you," Cameron's smile is tentative.
Kutner shrugs and spoons some more cereal into his mouth. "We'll see," he promises.
"Alright, I'm out," she says. "I hate to rain on the manliness parade, but Rob, there's a grocery list on the fridge and you have to bake brownies because we're bringing some for Elizabeth's dance class. The mix is in the pantry. Two eggs, oil. It is not difficult. Do not get the eggshells in the batter." Kutner laughs, because Cameron is not the planet's best baker, either.
"Got it," he says, and Cameron kisses him quickly, before grabbing her purse and Longchamps tote and stuffing a million smaller things into the bags before dashing out.
"Told you—exciting mornings," Chase says, getting up with the baby. "It's much better than when the twins were babies and Lizzy was a toddler. God, those years were hell."
"At least you make beautiful kids."
"All Allison," Chase laughs. "She's also the reason they have clothes and are enrolled in, you know, school. Come on, let's make these brownies before we forget and there are tears. Lots of tears. Possibly some violence."
"Please, Cameron wouldn't be that mad."
Chase looked at him skeptically. "Oh, god, she would be. And that's not even factoring in Lizzy's reaction."
"She's eight."
"House has her convinced that biting is still an appropriate reaction to anger."
"Dude, you should have never introduced him to your kids."
"Please. You know that he started stealing Elizabeth out of daycare when she was six weeks old. Once he figured out how impressionable she was, it was all over. She told me not to be an asshat the other day." Chase carefully pours the brownie mix into a glass bowl and rummages in the pantry for a measuring cup.
"So you took the day off?"
"Someone had to make the brownies. Allison has a board meeting that won't be ending until 6:30, this thing starts at seven. Don't worry, though, Rocco's going into the daycare at one and then we can … do whatever."
"Until school pickup," Kutner chortles. It's nice, this haven, this glimpse of what a family is. After his parents died, he had an extremely normal childhood, but it's been bachelorhood or Remy since then, and the baby-and-sunny-kitchen thing throws him, reminds him. It's familiar, optimistic even, without being smothering. He's always been good at watching, and watching a complete family makes him feel complete. Cameron and Chase themselves are still fairly damaged, but they hide it for the girls and they're moving past their pasts simply by focusing on the future, and he's a little envious.
"I need to go to Wegman's, I have some video games and stuff if you want to hang around the house," Chase offers.
"No way, I love Wegman's. I'll just get ready," Kutner says.
So they do Wegman's and it's easy to pretend to be this normal. He plays with Rocco as Chase puts away the groceries. Kutner actually always did want kids, but falling in love had interrupted those plans. Remy had never been allowed to consider if she wanted kids, and he refused to look past her, even though she tried to make him do so several times. Even now, when he knows that he could, even should, start considering those things again, it is too painful, even on the days when he only misses her and doesn't suspect his presence. But Rocco is a cool kid. Kutner waves the blocks in front of his face and watches him laugh.
Chase pops his head in. "Hey, I know that we didn't need to go to the hospital until one to drop Rocco off, but House just called me in for a consult. I'll take Rocco. You can stay here and chill if you want. It shouldn't take too long."
"Ah, no, not a prob. I'll come in."
"You want to see House?"
"Please, like he and Cuddy won't pop by sometime by Sunday?" Kutner knows Cuddy, at least, can't stay away. "Lemme just grab my shoes."
Twenty minutes later they're striding in House's office, Chase confidently carrying Rocco and announcing, "I brought extra reinforcements."
"Chase, your kid's not that smart yet. Lizzy might be able to help us out," House throws back. "Oh, Kutner, he met you. Done hiding out in Baltimore? Ready to come back home?"
"Nope, just back for the weekend," he tries for cool and level and thinks he makes it. "What do you got?"
The youngest fellow, a brunette woman barely out of medical school (like all House's women) hands them her copy of the case file. "Yeah, you really need an intensivist surgeon and a physiotherapist for this," Chase grumbles, bouncing the baby on his lap.
Soon they're lobbing diseases back and forth, and House dismisses the latest crop to run tests, and he starts arguing with Chase, pointedly ignoring Kutner. Cameron appears, rolls her eyes, and lifts Rocco from his father's lap.
"You want to grab lunch, Kutner?" she asks. "These two will be arguing for a while."
"Sure," he says, deciding that now is as good a time as any to get the Cameron thing over with. "Since when has House been consulting with Chase?" he asks as they walk down to the cafeteria.
"A few months ago—I think he's grooming him to take over one day but Chase's in denial," Cameron said, pulling her hair out of Rocco's hands. "He calls him in at least twice a week for a consult, the fellows have started using him as a screen so House doesn't yell at them as much."
"How are you liking heading research?" he asks, because Cameron's recently received an expansion of duties.
"Great. Paperwork is fascinating," she says lightly, and Kutner knows that she actually does like it. They grab sandwiches and head outside. Cameron has, weirdly, packed a picnic blanket in her bag, and he spreads it and they sit before she asks, "So the girl? The job?"
He laughs, tries to deflect. "What's new with you?"
"I've been taking care of kids, husband, job, House, Wilson, me, basically in the order, for the past eight years. The only thing that changes is the size of the kids," she replies. "Your turn." Sitting there, Indian-style with the baby in her lap and her locks (still long and blonde, again) flowing over her shoulders and the hint of crow's feet tugging at her eyes, Cameron looks, suddenly, incredibly wise. She's sort of a Mother Goddess, like the foreign sketches in the Hinduism for Dummies textbook he purchased when he was going through a self-identification phase in his 20s.
"Ok. So, job's good," he says. "They do a lot more cutting-edge stuff in terms of physical rehabilitation, we're working a lot on combination therapy for accident victims, for victims of genetic diseases—" he can't continue from there.
"Tell me about Natesa," she says. "Or we can talk about Remy." He flinches at the name; Cameron always called her Thirteen, except to her face. "It had to come up," she says, gently touching his forearm. He knows it; if he had really wanted, he could have avoided Cameron, and this conversation, all weekend, but he willingly agreed to lunch and implicitly to this conversation.
"Natesa's good," he says. "She's happy. It's a reminder that, you know, a relationship is not always a Shakespearean tragedy."
"I'm sure she's got a dark side buried somewhere," Cameron remarks, chewing on a carrot.
"I'm not really sure she does," he replies.
"I thought Chase was an ass who bedded nurses as a hobby for almost a year," she points out.
"True," he says, "but she talks so much—in the good way, the way I used to share random things—and she doesn't seem to be … that way."
"Kutner, did you ever think that maybe you talked about the mundane things to avoid the bigger stuff as, you know, a way of coping? I'm not saying she has a twin who died of leukemia when she was 15, but give the girl a chance."
He sighs; he's not articulating this well. "I'm not saying that I require her to have an awful past—God knows that I have enough for four or five people—but I don't want to bring her in, if she can't handle it, and I don't want to test whether or not she can handle it. Plus," he tugs at a clump of weeds until it loosens, "the anniversary, the time—I don't know what I want, or when, and being in Baltimore doesn't help." He moved there for a clean break, and instead it just makes him feel like he's living a stranger's life every morning.
"It really, really sucks," she says softly, and he can't help but notice that she's got one eye on Rocco still. "And—there's no appropriate time length; you know that. But don't let it get to the point where you're just punishing yourself by trying to remember. That's when you get to let go. Continually punishing yourself just makes it even harder when you're well past time to move on."
She reaches out to rub his forearm, and he can't look her in the eye. He and Cameron—and Wilson—are a club, the Significant Other Survivorship Club, and while he's always questioned the legitimacy of both their claims (Wilson's especially; that relationship was nebulous and the death was unexpected and quick), now that he's in the club, too, their meager months of relationships are the only thing he has (besides his membership, with House and Chase, in the Tough and Tragic Childhood Club). He suspects their joint membership fed into Cameron's desire to make him talk; she obviously can't talk about continued processing of her dead husband with her live one.
"I expected to roll on much easier," he finally admits, and it feels awful. He's always been upward, always been able to get over things. "It's the way it always works. You put it in a box, you put on the good face, you remind yourself that you like to be on the outside. You live in that moment and that one alone. And she'd been so damn explicit that I was to move on, and live in the new moment. And I told her I would, and now I'm suddenly unable to." He'd just started working again this January; he'd had seven months to grieve. He still felt dull, the compulsion to preserve her and her memory overwhelming him, filling him up and giving him a headache not even codeine could deaden. He aches and he misses her, but he isn't sad, exactly, and he's confused.
"I remember the two of you at the twins' first birthday," Cameron suddenly recalls, changing tack. "It was October, but it was hot, and it wasn't one of Thirteen's best days; she was pissed about it. And you just … you fed her, her legs were in your lap, you got her to laugh, to hold Sophie—she was always so scared of getting close to the girls—and just the way you two looked at each other—Kutner, there's no way that you could just smoothly compartmentalize that. And it was so rational, the way she …so you feel a little awful, because in hindsight you feel a little angry at yourself for putting yourself through the agony, you wonder sometimes how worth it all this leftover pain is, when you already knew how it would end long before it started. And so you just bury it more and it twists."
She's exactly right, and he averts his eyes. He had even more of a warning, had an even slower descent than Cameron, had three times that Remy told him to leave her, trying to protect him from this sucker-punch of hurt that doesn't leave. "You have no idea how long it took me to be able to say that out loud without feeling guilty," she says.
"Yeah," he says, "but it's been a year, and I still don't know what I want. You keep going for one direction for so long, and suddenly you're there and you have to … regroup. I'm not mourning, really, I just don't know what to do anymore. And I don't want to … move on." He never talks this much, especially about his feelings, or uses sentences so long, but he supposes it's necessary. He can't tell if he's thinking magically anymore or not, and it's a near-crucial step now.
"Do you want the kids-family thing, though you can't have them with her?" Cameron's much blunter than House gives her credit for. She's just as nosy as he says she is, though.
He stares at Rocco. "I honestly don't know. I always said it depended on the person." He would want them with Remy. That's actually all he really wants, but he can't have that. That's what it boils down to, not if he misses her or still feels her or has or doesn't have roots in Baltimore.
"Then there's nothing wrong with giving yourself options. Look," she starts fluffing Rocco's hair, "I once smacked my sister for saying, 'it's what he would have wanted,' but Thirteen was paranoid for her last five years that she was depriving you of your happiness. And while she wasn't at the time, don't turn yourself into a martyr. Honestly? It's not worth it. It just makes it harder. You don't need to have to decide to make Natesa carry those children, but you can to commit yourself to being okay and finding a direction and moving toward it. The scary, sucky, awful, borderline-betrayal moment isn't when you sleep with another person, or even start a relationship with another person—it's when you let yourself set goals in your personal life again.
"And for me, that came," she pauses to calculate, "about 14 months after Robert and I started dating, which was three months after we started sleeping together regularly, which was a year and a half after we slept together for the first time. Which was over a year after I knew he wanted to sleep with me. Which was seven years after my husband died. You get the picture?"
He does: A couple with all the time in the world to mess up, and break up, and make up. And suddenly that possibility is open to him, and that scares him. "Yeah," he says, "and I shouldn't be this any more, but I … I am. I don't like it much."
"Are you spinning out of guilt, or grief? Be honest," she says. She's getting at feeling/missing, he can tell, in her own way.
"Guilt is grief," he retorts.
"Do you need to tell yourself it's OK to feel OK, or do you need to tell yourself you're OK?"
"I want it to be the second," he finally answers, "but mostly it's the first, combined with just missing her."
"There's no pace, and it's going to affect you for a while," she repeats herself after a long second, "but I don't want you to be in pain any longer than necessary. Don't let that year of magical thinking become a decade. I did it, and I just hurt me, hurt Robert … And I don't want you to do that to yourself. Or even Natesa. It's going to be hard no matter what. Punishing yourself only makes it worse. It's OK to feel good sometimes. You spend all your time taking care of people. Take care of yourself, right now," she tilts her head and scrutinizes him. "You know, I think you are OK. You can miss her so much it hurts and still be OK."
He laughs. "I worked for House for three years. Nobody's OK if they agree to that and then tough it out."
She laughs, too, and moves to stand. She shifts Rocco onto her hip. "I should get him to the daycare," she muses.
"Is there a … plan for this afternoon?" he feels like he should defer to whatever works for Chase, Cameron, and the kids. He folds the blanket and hands it to her.
"Sort of. This one is going into daycare so Chase can get the girls ready for their recital with minimum distractions. They get picked up at 3:15 and need to eat before being at PHS—sorry, the recital hall—at 5:30. Then he gets to run and pick up Rocco from the daycare and take him to the babysitter's," she says. "And then I'm out of my meeting by 6:30, so help me god, and the thing starts at seven and should be done by 10, if the dress rehearsals are to be believed."
"How are you not constantly exhausted?" he asks.
"Coffee. I cannot wait for the day when all of them are too big to be picked up and have cars," she says. He knows she both loves them and thinks it's ironic that she's boring, married, possibly happy. "You should go somewhere this afternoon. See other friends."
"You mean House?"
"I mean whoever you want," she replies.
