Fic: five birthdays she doesn't spend with gregory house (II)
Title: the world that is hers
or: five birthdays she doesn't spend with gregory house (part two)
Author:
ellixian
Characters: House, Cuddy, ...
Rating: PG
Summary: "Not easy tracking you down," he informs her, and out of nowhere comes a memory of the time he said those same words to her, in a tiny jazz pub miles away from campus, where she had gone to avoid the world.
Concrit: Absolutely.
Disclaimer: I don't make money off this, and all related characters don't belong to me.
A/N: Second in a five-part series, though each installment can safely be read on its own. Thanks to
ashley_west who read an earlier version. (Part one is here.)
- - - - -
The car shudders into silence, and she tries - fails - to rub the exhaustion from her eyes with the back of her right hand. She would have stayed later, if not for the worry folded into her mother's voice, honey, it's your birthday, go home, so here she is, ever the obedient daughter, home at seven-thirty and at a loss for what to do with the rest of the chill November evening.
She lets herself into the deathly quiet apartment that still smells faintly of its previous owner (catnip and tweed, if tweed had a smell). The painting in the foyer, the polished mahogany end-table, are all hers, of course - carefully chosen in the spare half-hours she had carved out between clinic duty, research, writing papers. But she can't help thinking, as she heads toward the kitchen, that the winter-black shadows bathing her floors should be familiar, should belong to her somehow, and yet she still feels like an intruder every time she opens the door.
It's been at least two weeks since her last Safeway run, so she knows that there won't be much in her fridge beyond expired yogurt and unopened packets of cheese that she had surely bought in a fit of ridiculous optimism.
Still, she can't help hoping, against hope and the laws of nature, that there might be something in there to help her take the edge off the past fifteen hours... hell, make that the past fifteen months.
Finally, towards the tail end of her search for something vaguely edible, she spots the pale green bottle nestled between a yellowed head of lettuce and some worryingly grey carrots. What possessed her to stash the bottle in the crisper she will never know, but she remembers now the moment, a few weeks ago now, when she had impulsively decided to buy the golden wine, believing against all reason and past experience that she would be able to take the day off just for her, just to relax.
She laughs to herself, at herself, as she digs the corkscrew out from the drawer by the sink, and fusses with the cork in the warm glow of light emanating from the open fridge.
Why bother with a glass, she decides recklessly, and asks the chair with mock gravity as she returns to the living room, who's to know if I become an alcoholic anyway? She takes a swig of wine straight from the bottle, and the sour, tart taste hits the back of her throat before it trails a path of buttery fire into her stomach.
As she takes a second swallow, the phone trills merrily, and she groans. She doesn't want to be recalled, not tonight, not at this hour, not ever. She just wants to draw a bubble bath, slide into the warm, welcoming water, sleep, dream.
But her sense of duty - her perverse sense of duty - never slides, nor sleeps, nor dreams. Again, she sighs, tests the weight of the bottle in her hand, and answers the call.
"Dr. Cuddy," she says automatically, and braces herself for the stentorian tones of whichever nurse is on duty, waits to be told that one of her team of doctors is ill or otherwise incapacitated and that she needs to urgently return to Princeton-Plainsboro.
"That would be Dr. Lisa Cuddy, I presume?" comes a familiar male voice, and she marvels that she recognises it through the years and everything else that has come between, "Wouldn't want to waste time that could be spent saving lives speaking to any other Dr. Cuddy."
"Dr. Gregory House," she half-laughs into the receiver, and trails the telephone cord after her as she settles down on the couch and throws the afghan her sister knitted for her last birthday over her legs. "What a surprise."
"Not easy tracking you down," he informs her, and out of nowhere comes a memory of the time he said those same words to her, in a tiny jazz pub miles away from campus, where she had gone to avoid the world. "Took me years to learn to read, and then to spell, and finally to use the Yellow Pages. And I'm darned if after all that effort there weren't ten Lisa Cuddys all living in the New Jersey area."
She does laugh, this time, and remembers the sharp blue of his eyes when he leans over to tell a joke he doesn't expect anyone else to get, the crease in his forehead when she studiously ignores yet another crack that she must have an extra Y chromosome for all the times she's beat him arm-wrestling. "You learnt to read for me?" she teases back, knowing that she is flirting barely five minutes into the conversation and almost thankful that she still remembers how. "I'm touched. The most I ever did for you was take part in that wet T-shirt contest in college."
"Literacy is a small price to pay for all the excellent dreams I've had about that one shining moment," he quips, and she smiles, takes another sip of wine. She's forgotten what it's like to talk to someone outside of what is now her world, someone who doesn't always want something from her, or need something from her, someone who knew her before the hospital became her life. Someone who knew she had a life, before the hospital.
"Well, since you've only just acquired the ability to read," she continues, "I now understand why you've never written, or even sent a card. But to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?"
She thinks back to the last time they met, maybe three years ago now, for a quick drink at Fleming's. He had been dressed as he had always dressed - in a scruffy T-shirt, stone-washed jeans from his university days, a motorcycle helmet painted a brilliant blue and orange at his elbow. They had traded stories of their housemanships over a couple of beers and a basket of chips, and he had smiled that sardonic smile of his after he'd pried an admission from her that there was still no one in her life, as he put it, celebrating the fact that you really are a woman after all. Good, he had informed her calmly, as he tilted his head back and dropped a chip in his mouth, proves I spoiled you for all other men and you'll never have a healthy, functional relationship again. She had thrown a chip in his face and, as maturely as she knew how, stuck her tongue out at him. Behaviour well befitting a future dean of medicine, he admonished her, and she remembered flushing at the compliment he never really gave her, because Gregory House had never really complimented anyone in his life.
"Just wanted to see how my little foal is getting on in the big, crazy world of professional doctoring," he replies, and clearing his throat, adds, "I read about your appointment as Dean of Medicine."
She's flushing again, fully aware that the warmth in her cheeks that is slipping down her neck and pooling in her belly has little to do with the wine in her system. It thrills her a little to think that he must still look out for her name in medical bulletins and journals, that, once in a while, he remembers being the bemused TA to a fiery nineteen-year-old hellbent on becoming the best female doctor America had ever seen. She had been so young then.
"You did, huh?" she asks, and knows that she is glowing. She doesn't need him to tell her she's doing well, she knows it's worth it, all the hard work, the stress, the fatigue, the fighting face she has to put on everyday as she deals with skeptics, men and women alike, who never believe she has the right or ability to be where she is now.
But sometimes it's harder to remember all that. Sometimes she wants to throw in every towel she's got, to hide in a corner in a world that doesn't constantly remind her of the expectations she has yet to surpass, of the glass ceilings she has yet to break through.
"You did good, Dr. Cuddy," he informs her now, more seriously than she has ever remembered him being, "I wanted to let you know that."
She blinks hard against the sudden swell of salt in her eyes, and is about to attempt a response through the lump in her throat, when he says, "Lisa, you know Stacy Hudson, don't you? You met at a benefit some years ago, and she says she's seen you on the conference circuit a couple times since."
Surprised, she pauses for a few moments before she says, tentatively, "I... yeah, I remember Stacy - she's a partner in that legal practice down by Fourth and..."
"Got it in one," he cuts her off, "let me pass the phone to her. She's the one who saw your name in the university gazette."
The sound of fumbling, whispers and a low laugh, and an unfamiliar voice cuts into her ear. "Lisa, I just had to call and congratulate you, but Greg wouldn't hear of it. He said he had to call you first, for old times' sake."
There is a quiet, confident joy in Stacy's voice that she hasn't heard before, not all the brief times they had met, not the one time they met for lunch and never discussed the fact that they both knew a man with impossibly blue eyes and rough hands lined with wistful, smoky jazz.
"Listen, we're on the way out so can't talk for much longer. But I'll call your assistant one day and we'll have lunch, okay?"
She barely has a chance to say anything more than thank you and that's nice of you (and not aloud, how long have you been with him), before Stacy disappears, and again it's his voice rumbling down the line.
"I know you, Lisa Cuddy," he tells her, before muffling his next words - I'll be right there - with his hand, "you're working sixty-hour days, saving the world, sticking it to the man, eating next to nothing. Don't kill yourself before I learn how to write."
It takes more of an effort than she thought it would to laugh through gritted teeth, but she does, and she dashes the itch from her eye before she chirps in as bright a voice as she can still find inside her, "I'll be fine. And breathlessly awaiting the day you can manage cursive."
"Perfect," he says, and she can tell he's grinning, even as Stacy runs her hand through his hair, or throws him his coat, or playfully tries to pry his fingers from the receiver. "I might actually write you a card some time, when I've figured out the intricacies involved in using a pen. Congratulations again, Dr. Cuddy. Chug a keg or two for me."
A click, the line dies, and she sighs.
The bottle of wine in her hand has gone warm, and the weight of the life she had chosen has returned, settled like a layer of fine dust over the furniture that is hers but never feels like hers. The world has moved on around her, she knows, and the world that is hers will still be there in the morning.
That night, she dreams of autumn leaves and Miles Davis and a sky the blue of her youth.
or: five birthdays she doesn't spend with gregory house (part two)
Author:
ellixian
Characters: House, Cuddy, ...
Rating: PG
Summary: "Not easy tracking you down," he informs her, and out of nowhere comes a memory of the time he said those same words to her, in a tiny jazz pub miles away from campus, where she had gone to avoid the world.
Concrit: Absolutely.
Disclaimer: I don't make money off this, and all related characters don't belong to me.
A/N: Second in a five-part series, though each installment can safely be read on its own. Thanks to
ashley_west who read an earlier version. (Part one is here.)
- - - - -
The car shudders into silence, and she tries - fails - to rub the exhaustion from her eyes with the back of her right hand. She would have stayed later, if not for the worry folded into her mother's voice, honey, it's your birthday, go home, so here she is, ever the obedient daughter, home at seven-thirty and at a loss for what to do with the rest of the chill November evening.
She lets herself into the deathly quiet apartment that still smells faintly of its previous owner (catnip and tweed, if tweed had a smell). The painting in the foyer, the polished mahogany end-table, are all hers, of course - carefully chosen in the spare half-hours she had carved out between clinic duty, research, writing papers. But she can't help thinking, as she heads toward the kitchen, that the winter-black shadows bathing her floors should be familiar, should belong to her somehow, and yet she still feels like an intruder every time she opens the door.
It's been at least two weeks since her last Safeway run, so she knows that there won't be much in her fridge beyond expired yogurt and unopened packets of cheese that she had surely bought in a fit of ridiculous optimism.
Still, she can't help hoping, against hope and the laws of nature, that there might be something in there to help her take the edge off the past fifteen hours... hell, make that the past fifteen months.
Finally, towards the tail end of her search for something vaguely edible, she spots the pale green bottle nestled between a yellowed head of lettuce and some worryingly grey carrots. What possessed her to stash the bottle in the crisper she will never know, but she remembers now the moment, a few weeks ago now, when she had impulsively decided to buy the golden wine, believing against all reason and past experience that she would be able to take the day off just for her, just to relax.
She laughs to herself, at herself, as she digs the corkscrew out from the drawer by the sink, and fusses with the cork in the warm glow of light emanating from the open fridge.
Why bother with a glass, she decides recklessly, and asks the chair with mock gravity as she returns to the living room, who's to know if I become an alcoholic anyway? She takes a swig of wine straight from the bottle, and the sour, tart taste hits the back of her throat before it trails a path of buttery fire into her stomach.
As she takes a second swallow, the phone trills merrily, and she groans. She doesn't want to be recalled, not tonight, not at this hour, not ever. She just wants to draw a bubble bath, slide into the warm, welcoming water, sleep, dream.
But her sense of duty - her perverse sense of duty - never slides, nor sleeps, nor dreams. Again, she sighs, tests the weight of the bottle in her hand, and answers the call.
"Dr. Cuddy," she says automatically, and braces herself for the stentorian tones of whichever nurse is on duty, waits to be told that one of her team of doctors is ill or otherwise incapacitated and that she needs to urgently return to Princeton-Plainsboro.
"That would be Dr. Lisa Cuddy, I presume?" comes a familiar male voice, and she marvels that she recognises it through the years and everything else that has come between, "Wouldn't want to waste time that could be spent saving lives speaking to any other Dr. Cuddy."
"Dr. Gregory House," she half-laughs into the receiver, and trails the telephone cord after her as she settles down on the couch and throws the afghan her sister knitted for her last birthday over her legs. "What a surprise."
"Not easy tracking you down," he informs her, and out of nowhere comes a memory of the time he said those same words to her, in a tiny jazz pub miles away from campus, where she had gone to avoid the world. "Took me years to learn to read, and then to spell, and finally to use the Yellow Pages. And I'm darned if after all that effort there weren't ten Lisa Cuddys all living in the New Jersey area."
She does laugh, this time, and remembers the sharp blue of his eyes when he leans over to tell a joke he doesn't expect anyone else to get, the crease in his forehead when she studiously ignores yet another crack that she must have an extra Y chromosome for all the times she's beat him arm-wrestling. "You learnt to read for me?" she teases back, knowing that she is flirting barely five minutes into the conversation and almost thankful that she still remembers how. "I'm touched. The most I ever did for you was take part in that wet T-shirt contest in college."
"Literacy is a small price to pay for all the excellent dreams I've had about that one shining moment," he quips, and she smiles, takes another sip of wine. She's forgotten what it's like to talk to someone outside of what is now her world, someone who doesn't always want something from her, or need something from her, someone who knew her before the hospital became her life. Someone who knew she had a life, before the hospital.
"Well, since you've only just acquired the ability to read," she continues, "I now understand why you've never written, or even sent a card. But to what do I owe the pleasure of this call?"
She thinks back to the last time they met, maybe three years ago now, for a quick drink at Fleming's. He had been dressed as he had always dressed - in a scruffy T-shirt, stone-washed jeans from his university days, a motorcycle helmet painted a brilliant blue and orange at his elbow. They had traded stories of their housemanships over a couple of beers and a basket of chips, and he had smiled that sardonic smile of his after he'd pried an admission from her that there was still no one in her life, as he put it, celebrating the fact that you really are a woman after all. Good, he had informed her calmly, as he tilted his head back and dropped a chip in his mouth, proves I spoiled you for all other men and you'll never have a healthy, functional relationship again. She had thrown a chip in his face and, as maturely as she knew how, stuck her tongue out at him. Behaviour well befitting a future dean of medicine, he admonished her, and she remembered flushing at the compliment he never really gave her, because Gregory House had never really complimented anyone in his life.
"Just wanted to see how my little foal is getting on in the big, crazy world of professional doctoring," he replies, and clearing his throat, adds, "I read about your appointment as Dean of Medicine."
She's flushing again, fully aware that the warmth in her cheeks that is slipping down her neck and pooling in her belly has little to do with the wine in her system. It thrills her a little to think that he must still look out for her name in medical bulletins and journals, that, once in a while, he remembers being the bemused TA to a fiery nineteen-year-old hellbent on becoming the best female doctor America had ever seen. She had been so young then.
"You did, huh?" she asks, and knows that she is glowing. She doesn't need him to tell her she's doing well, she knows it's worth it, all the hard work, the stress, the fatigue, the fighting face she has to put on everyday as she deals with skeptics, men and women alike, who never believe she has the right or ability to be where she is now.
But sometimes it's harder to remember all that. Sometimes she wants to throw in every towel she's got, to hide in a corner in a world that doesn't constantly remind her of the expectations she has yet to surpass, of the glass ceilings she has yet to break through.
"You did good, Dr. Cuddy," he informs her now, more seriously than she has ever remembered him being, "I wanted to let you know that."
She blinks hard against the sudden swell of salt in her eyes, and is about to attempt a response through the lump in her throat, when he says, "Lisa, you know Stacy Hudson, don't you? You met at a benefit some years ago, and she says she's seen you on the conference circuit a couple times since."
Surprised, she pauses for a few moments before she says, tentatively, "I... yeah, I remember Stacy - she's a partner in that legal practice down by Fourth and..."
"Got it in one," he cuts her off, "let me pass the phone to her. She's the one who saw your name in the university gazette."
The sound of fumbling, whispers and a low laugh, and an unfamiliar voice cuts into her ear. "Lisa, I just had to call and congratulate you, but Greg wouldn't hear of it. He said he had to call you first, for old times' sake."
There is a quiet, confident joy in Stacy's voice that she hasn't heard before, not all the brief times they had met, not the one time they met for lunch and never discussed the fact that they both knew a man with impossibly blue eyes and rough hands lined with wistful, smoky jazz.
"Listen, we're on the way out so can't talk for much longer. But I'll call your assistant one day and we'll have lunch, okay?"
She barely has a chance to say anything more than thank you and that's nice of you (and not aloud, how long have you been with him), before Stacy disappears, and again it's his voice rumbling down the line.
"I know you, Lisa Cuddy," he tells her, before muffling his next words - I'll be right there - with his hand, "you're working sixty-hour days, saving the world, sticking it to the man, eating next to nothing. Don't kill yourself before I learn how to write."
It takes more of an effort than she thought it would to laugh through gritted teeth, but she does, and she dashes the itch from her eye before she chirps in as bright a voice as she can still find inside her, "I'll be fine. And breathlessly awaiting the day you can manage cursive."
"Perfect," he says, and she can tell he's grinning, even as Stacy runs her hand through his hair, or throws him his coat, or playfully tries to pry his fingers from the receiver. "I might actually write you a card some time, when I've figured out the intricacies involved in using a pen. Congratulations again, Dr. Cuddy. Chug a keg or two for me."
A click, the line dies, and she sighs.
The bottle of wine in her hand has gone warm, and the weight of the life she had chosen has returned, settled like a layer of fine dust over the furniture that is hers but never feels like hers. The world has moved on around her, she knows, and the world that is hers will still be there in the morning.
That night, she dreams of autumn leaves and Miles Davis and a sky the blue of her youth.