Till the Next Time We Say Goodbye
Title: Till the Next Time We Say Goodbye
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Rating: M
Part 3/3
Summary: They met in a crowed hotel bar.
Two strangers, one night. AU.
Notes: Title from a Rolling Stones song again. Think I could be making a theme of it. This is AU but alludes to many canonical events and gradually becomes a what if --- fic.
Also an attempt at smut turned sentimental.
{Please forgive any medical mistakes in this chapter} Also:
If you read this (and didn't hate it) please comment. Feel free to shout 'encore, encore!' Or suggest another AU prompt or Stones song to translate into a House/Cuddy narrative. This sort of fic helps me over hurdles when composing (or revising) orig fic, and sometimes I test metaphors and ideas this way, sometimes I just distract myself but I'm always looking for feedback.
Thanks for reading!
Till the Next Time We Say Goodbye
A week after their one night, a patient came into the clinic complaining of leg pain. Kismet or cruelty or both, Cuddy was handed his chart. The name she ignored, the symptom seemed simple. Until she opened the exam room door.
continental drift
Fairway fell from his Nike cleats, dangling a foot from the tile floor. He rubbed his right leg and smiled feebly, watching her gape. For him, this reunion was more ironic than awkward.
“You,” Cuddy said, choking. Strangling the chart, her eyes darted down, improvising.
“You’re here for leg pain.”
She was standing a continent away from him. If he could have felt anything other than agony, he’d have told her he needed her so much closer.
“Greg,” she tried then connected first to last. “House.”
He saw her recognition of the name, but clutched at his thigh, grimaced, before she could ask.
“When did the pain start?”
“Ninth hole.” Then, “1:30.”
“No previous injury to the leg, trauma today, even minor?”
“No. Nothing.”
She stalled, trying to understand the unlikely confluence of coincidences.
“Give me something for the pain,” he begged gruff, his teeth gritted.
Nodding idly, Cuddy was concerned as much about the pain as the possibility of him being an addict.
“Take off your pants,” she insisted, clinical but hoping he didn’t have a comeback.
He complied without protest and she bent to examine the leg, knocking the rubber hammer against his knee.
“Decreased reflexes in the patellar tendon. Means it’s most likely muscular- skeletal. I’ll call an orthopedic consult.”
---
Following the consult, most of which he’d spent eve’s dropping on the patient’s symptoms and doctor’s misdiagnosis in the next room, House met the girl in the waiting room, holding a prescription that only placated.
“It’s not a yeast infection. It’s VD!” He felt the need to shout.
Cuddy witnessed his outburst and tore the chart from the consulting physician’s hands, leading House back into her office.
“The consult came back clean. No sprain or fracture, dislocation, arthritis or bruising,” she said, still reading the notes.
“I’m ordering a full blood count. PT, APTT, Fibrinogen”
“You’re thinking DVT.”
“Maybe. Or an aneurysm. If the D-dimer comes back normal, you’re
getting an MRI.”
“Here,” she said, handing him two pain pills.
A nurse drew blood and Cuddy had it pushed to the front of the formidable stack in the lab. She was doing more than exercising her dominion as Dean. It was almost an obligation. He saw her first and the more she tried to paper over that night, the more it replayed in her mind. It could have been worse. It could still be more.
---
“You’re my attending,” House said after the MRI, his voice level now that the pain had subsided from an 11 to an 8.
“It was an aneurysm that clotted, leading to an infarction. But we caught it early, there’s no necrosis. We remove the clot and you’ll make tee time by Sunday morning.”
He nodded, signing the consent form.
“Thank you.”
Cuddy beamed, almost as relieved as her patient.
“The surgery is minimally invasive. There’s an endovascular technique that allows covered metallic stent grafts to be inserted through the arteries of the leg and deployed across the aneurysm. A nurse will be in to prep you soon. “
She’d bumped three surgeries for his. Not that it wasn’t justifiable. As she walked away, Cuddy realized she was happier now than she’d been in a long time. It felt like a personal victory, unless she was deluding herself. She saved his leg, not his life and after he was discharged she’d probably never see him again.
For a while longer though, their epilogue wasn’t so bleak.
---
“I was thinking we should move in together.”
Cuddy sighed incredulous. He read it as a yes.
Their love story should have ended there.
“You’re breaking the rules,” she told him, bluffing. She knew she was
no referee.
“You broke them first. You didn’t leave in the middle of night, didn’t dress and slip out while I snored. You didn’t regret it.”
He was afraid she did now.
“I was going to order room service. Breakfast in bed.
Something,” his voice trailed off.
"Find out where we went from there.”
Cuddy wavered, trying not to appear so transparent or touched but not knowing why was he trying to sentimentalize the insignificant.
“You’re going to need to stay off your feet for a few days. We’ll give you crutches, or a cane.” clearing her throat.
“Let me take you to dinner.”
“No.”
“A movie then.”
She shook her head.
“Monster truck rally?”
“No.”
“I’m not trying to get in your pants. Again. This isn’t some futile crush. We started something. I just want a chance to see where it goes.”
A nurse came in then, handing Cuddy the chart of the patient sharing the room with House and whispering worried about some discrepancy.
“That doesn’t make sense.” Cuddy said to the sheet of paper.
“It does if it’s not ALS. It’s Kennedy’s disease.
“How do you know--“
“He’s going to need an endocrinologist.”
She scribbled an order for a genetic test to confirm Kennedy’s and wasn’t sure if she was impressed or put off by his certainty.
“What are you doing in Jersey anyway?”
“Staying at the Hyatt across from University Center,” he proffered flirtatiously. She’d seen the key and room number when she sifted through his backpack to find out if he was holding narcotics, or married for that matter.
“A buddy of mine said he’d try to get me in at Princeton General. He lied.”
It made sense now. They were just two doctors in the same hotel in the same city for the same conference. She was there representing this place and he was there to bribe or blackmail himself into another job.
“You know, this place could use a diagnostics department.”
“Get some rest, House,” Cuddy deflected, for now.
“You’ll be out of here in the morning.”
---
On the third day House was discharged.
Discharged but not gone.
Morning came and went and when Cuddy made her rounds back to her office, he was sitting behind her desk, clean shaven and waiting for her. She couldn’t tell whether he was mulishly quixotic or no better than a junkie jonesing for a fix.
“The cafeteria here makes a damn good reuben,” he said, chomping and splattering mustard all over her desk calendar.
“Have a bite.”
“What are you doing?” She asked, shaking her head confused.
“Don’t worry, it’s not a date. It’s a job interview.”
“I’m not looking to hire,” she retorted quickly.
A long silence stretched between them, familiar.
“You went to Michigan,” he said wistful, wiping crumbs from the corner of his mouth and motioning to the framed degree hung proud on her wall.
“So did you.”
From then on it would always be their collegiate alibi. They’d fabricate their history-- he finished years before she was accepted, she only knew him as a legend-- but one night lacked the poeticism of wandering youth racing toward the same tomorrow.
Cuddy walked closer, he swallowed. House knew she was the one to exhume his heart from the grave, just not how to say it.
“You should hire me.”
“Four hospitals fired you.”
Flattered she’d done her research over the last two days, he paused a beat.
“I could make a difference here. Find zebras when all your other doctors think they’re sending horses home.”
She knew House was right, but she also knew that guising what might be an inopportune accident (or the love of her life) as an asset to her hospital would be her own undoing.
“You have a reputation House.”
He was the best. Obscenely unorthodox, but the best.
“What if you pull the same stunts here that you did in Florida, or Philadelphia, or Ann Arbor?”
What if you love me and it ruins everything.
“My ass is on the line here. They’d fire me for hiring you.”
Her feigned self interest he knew was defensive naiveté. She was sacrificing so much as a way to preserve the dissolute ephemeron they shared days ago.
"I want you.” To leave was supposed to come next. Cuddy’s voice failed her, so he stood, whole and healthy, ready to start a fight or take her then and there, bent over the desk, or slow and steady in her leather chair.
"Go, House. Please."
Incapable of deciding whether the great wall she was building between them was deliberate and impenetrable or only intended to make her eventual surrender more momentous, he left without another word.
It was dusk when he stammered uneven into his hotel. The scotch bottle by the nightstand was beckoning though his leg hardly hurt. She confiscated the greater part of his soul the first time she kissed him--held it that entire night and never really let go.
Now the room was too quiet, his blood too still.
till the next time
Leaving behind her lonely office, lost in all the mistakes the people on her payroll make, Cuddy drove the short way to the Hyatt. His unrealized possibilities had infiltrated hers. She saw what he could be and knew who he was and her indecision would only leave them both miserable.
In the elevator her doubts were quelled. Tonight they would keep their clothes on, play the role of professionals. She knew what it would cost her and she knew it was the only choice.
A knock on the door and he answered and neither could escape the déja vu.
“Change of heart, or are you just here for a quickie before I skip town?”
She sighed loud, exasperated, then stepped past the brief threshold of the present and into their future, together.
“Just because I hire you doesn’t mean I won’t fire you.”
"Pithy."
“Every case you take, every test you run, goes through me.”
“Bossy and beautiful. I’d invite you back to my room, but you’re
already here,” even in her presence, he pined for her.
“And you’re going to work the clinic at least fifteen hours a week,” she continued.
He nodded in elated disbelief.
“Start looking for an apartment in Princeton.”
The golf shorts he was still wearing covered the bandaged sutures enough but at the sight of her turning to walk away he panicked and dashed toward the door, wincing.
“Lise.”
Hearing him finally say her name, she envisioned House in cufflinks and a cravat, and wondered if he’d lisp when he said Lisa, taking vows. Immediately she suppressed the fantasy, but like every other intention it backfired so that all she could see was him in cufflinks and a cravat.
"And us?” His voice fell low, sank into her breast; she was already sorry for what she was about to say.
“There is no us if I hire you.”
That was the concession. The choice clamped his heart in a vice.
“I don’t want this to end, ” he murmured, his voice breaking with regret.
Then his palm cradled her cheek and House rested his forehead against hers.
Cuddy knew he loved her, no matter how unethical or inexpressible. Guilt gleamed in her eyes, she wanted to take it back, apologize. There was nothing she could do but kiss him. Her lips on his told him better than all her stumbling words.
The touch sealed their fate when her hands framed his face. He tasted like scotch and summer and aftershave. This was what it was like without the abrasion and the complications and all she could think was why not sooner, a different destiny, born out of more than restless anonymity.
On his left leg he leaned heavy, arms tightening as he lifted her off her feet and nothing else mattered, not gravity or the irresolution or their relationship only the indelible truth that they belonged together.
“Goodnight,” she whispered, grounded again and backing away from him.
The door shut quietly and House stood a moment, brooding by himself.
This goodnight, he knew, was no goodbye.
---
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Rating: M
Part 3/3
Summary: They met in a crowed hotel bar.
Two strangers, one night. AU.
Notes: Title from a Rolling Stones song again. Think I could be making a theme of it. This is AU but alludes to many canonical events and gradually becomes a what if --- fic.
Also an attempt at smut turned sentimental.
{Please forgive any medical mistakes in this chapter} Also:
If you read this (and didn't hate it) please comment. Feel free to shout 'encore, encore!' Or suggest another AU prompt or Stones song to translate into a House/Cuddy narrative. This sort of fic helps me over hurdles when composing (or revising) orig fic, and sometimes I test metaphors and ideas this way, sometimes I just distract myself but I'm always looking for feedback.
Thanks for reading!
Till the Next Time We Say Goodbye
A week after their one night, a patient came into the clinic complaining of leg pain. Kismet or cruelty or both, Cuddy was handed his chart. The name she ignored, the symptom seemed simple. Until she opened the exam room door.
continental drift
Fairway fell from his Nike cleats, dangling a foot from the tile floor. He rubbed his right leg and smiled feebly, watching her gape. For him, this reunion was more ironic than awkward.
“You,” Cuddy said, choking. Strangling the chart, her eyes darted down, improvising.
“You’re here for leg pain.”
She was standing a continent away from him. If he could have felt anything other than agony, he’d have told her he needed her so much closer.
“Greg,” she tried then connected first to last. “House.”
He saw her recognition of the name, but clutched at his thigh, grimaced, before she could ask.
“When did the pain start?”
“Ninth hole.” Then, “1:30.”
“No previous injury to the leg, trauma today, even minor?”
“No. Nothing.”
She stalled, trying to understand the unlikely confluence of coincidences.
“Give me something for the pain,” he begged gruff, his teeth gritted.
Nodding idly, Cuddy was concerned as much about the pain as the possibility of him being an addict.
“Take off your pants,” she insisted, clinical but hoping he didn’t have a comeback.
He complied without protest and she bent to examine the leg, knocking the rubber hammer against his knee.
“Decreased reflexes in the patellar tendon. Means it’s most likely muscular- skeletal. I’ll call an orthopedic consult.”
---
Following the consult, most of which he’d spent eve’s dropping on the patient’s symptoms and doctor’s misdiagnosis in the next room, House met the girl in the waiting room, holding a prescription that only placated.
“It’s not a yeast infection. It’s VD!” He felt the need to shout.
Cuddy witnessed his outburst and tore the chart from the consulting physician’s hands, leading House back into her office.
“The consult came back clean. No sprain or fracture, dislocation, arthritis or bruising,” she said, still reading the notes.
“I’m ordering a full blood count. PT, APTT, Fibrinogen”
“You’re thinking DVT.”
“Maybe. Or an aneurysm. If the D-dimer comes back normal, you’re
getting an MRI.”
“Here,” she said, handing him two pain pills.
A nurse drew blood and Cuddy had it pushed to the front of the formidable stack in the lab. She was doing more than exercising her dominion as Dean. It was almost an obligation. He saw her first and the more she tried to paper over that night, the more it replayed in her mind. It could have been worse. It could still be more.
---
“You’re my attending,” House said after the MRI, his voice level now that the pain had subsided from an 11 to an 8.
“It was an aneurysm that clotted, leading to an infarction. But we caught it early, there’s no necrosis. We remove the clot and you’ll make tee time by Sunday morning.”
He nodded, signing the consent form.
“Thank you.”
Cuddy beamed, almost as relieved as her patient.
“The surgery is minimally invasive. There’s an endovascular technique that allows covered metallic stent grafts to be inserted through the arteries of the leg and deployed across the aneurysm. A nurse will be in to prep you soon. “
She’d bumped three surgeries for his. Not that it wasn’t justifiable. As she walked away, Cuddy realized she was happier now than she’d been in a long time. It felt like a personal victory, unless she was deluding herself. She saved his leg, not his life and after he was discharged she’d probably never see him again.
For a while longer though, their epilogue wasn’t so bleak.
---
“I was thinking we should move in together.”
Cuddy sighed incredulous. He read it as a yes.
Their love story should have ended there.
“You’re breaking the rules,” she told him, bluffing. She knew she was
no referee.
“You broke them first. You didn’t leave in the middle of night, didn’t dress and slip out while I snored. You didn’t regret it.”
He was afraid she did now.
“I was going to order room service. Breakfast in bed.
Something,” his voice trailed off.
"Find out where we went from there.”
Cuddy wavered, trying not to appear so transparent or touched but not knowing why was he trying to sentimentalize the insignificant.
“You’re going to need to stay off your feet for a few days. We’ll give you crutches, or a cane.” clearing her throat.
“Let me take you to dinner.”
“No.”
“A movie then.”
She shook her head.
“Monster truck rally?”
“No.”
“I’m not trying to get in your pants. Again. This isn’t some futile crush. We started something. I just want a chance to see where it goes.”
A nurse came in then, handing Cuddy the chart of the patient sharing the room with House and whispering worried about some discrepancy.
“That doesn’t make sense.” Cuddy said to the sheet of paper.
“It does if it’s not ALS. It’s Kennedy’s disease.
“How do you know--“
“He’s going to need an endocrinologist.”
She scribbled an order for a genetic test to confirm Kennedy’s and wasn’t sure if she was impressed or put off by his certainty.
“What are you doing in Jersey anyway?”
“Staying at the Hyatt across from University Center,” he proffered flirtatiously. She’d seen the key and room number when she sifted through his backpack to find out if he was holding narcotics, or married for that matter.
“A buddy of mine said he’d try to get me in at Princeton General. He lied.”
It made sense now. They were just two doctors in the same hotel in the same city for the same conference. She was there representing this place and he was there to bribe or blackmail himself into another job.
“You know, this place could use a diagnostics department.”
“Get some rest, House,” Cuddy deflected, for now.
“You’ll be out of here in the morning.”
---
On the third day House was discharged.
Discharged but not gone.
Morning came and went and when Cuddy made her rounds back to her office, he was sitting behind her desk, clean shaven and waiting for her. She couldn’t tell whether he was mulishly quixotic or no better than a junkie jonesing for a fix.
“The cafeteria here makes a damn good reuben,” he said, chomping and splattering mustard all over her desk calendar.
“Have a bite.”
“What are you doing?” She asked, shaking her head confused.
“Don’t worry, it’s not a date. It’s a job interview.”
“I’m not looking to hire,” she retorted quickly.
A long silence stretched between them, familiar.
“You went to Michigan,” he said wistful, wiping crumbs from the corner of his mouth and motioning to the framed degree hung proud on her wall.
“So did you.”
From then on it would always be their collegiate alibi. They’d fabricate their history-- he finished years before she was accepted, she only knew him as a legend-- but one night lacked the poeticism of wandering youth racing toward the same tomorrow.
Cuddy walked closer, he swallowed. House knew she was the one to exhume his heart from the grave, just not how to say it.
“You should hire me.”
“Four hospitals fired you.”
Flattered she’d done her research over the last two days, he paused a beat.
“I could make a difference here. Find zebras when all your other doctors think they’re sending horses home.”
She knew House was right, but she also knew that guising what might be an inopportune accident (or the love of her life) as an asset to her hospital would be her own undoing.
“You have a reputation House.”
He was the best. Obscenely unorthodox, but the best.
“What if you pull the same stunts here that you did in Florida, or Philadelphia, or Ann Arbor?”
What if you love me and it ruins everything.
“My ass is on the line here. They’d fire me for hiring you.”
Her feigned self interest he knew was defensive naiveté. She was sacrificing so much as a way to preserve the dissolute ephemeron they shared days ago.
"I want you.” To leave was supposed to come next. Cuddy’s voice failed her, so he stood, whole and healthy, ready to start a fight or take her then and there, bent over the desk, or slow and steady in her leather chair.
"Go, House. Please."
Incapable of deciding whether the great wall she was building between them was deliberate and impenetrable or only intended to make her eventual surrender more momentous, he left without another word.
It was dusk when he stammered uneven into his hotel. The scotch bottle by the nightstand was beckoning though his leg hardly hurt. She confiscated the greater part of his soul the first time she kissed him--held it that entire night and never really let go.
Now the room was too quiet, his blood too still.
till the next time
Leaving behind her lonely office, lost in all the mistakes the people on her payroll make, Cuddy drove the short way to the Hyatt. His unrealized possibilities had infiltrated hers. She saw what he could be and knew who he was and her indecision would only leave them both miserable.
In the elevator her doubts were quelled. Tonight they would keep their clothes on, play the role of professionals. She knew what it would cost her and she knew it was the only choice.
A knock on the door and he answered and neither could escape the déja vu.
“Change of heart, or are you just here for a quickie before I skip town?”
She sighed loud, exasperated, then stepped past the brief threshold of the present and into their future, together.
“Just because I hire you doesn’t mean I won’t fire you.”
"Pithy."
“Every case you take, every test you run, goes through me.”
“Bossy and beautiful. I’d invite you back to my room, but you’re
already here,” even in her presence, he pined for her.
“And you’re going to work the clinic at least fifteen hours a week,” she continued.
He nodded in elated disbelief.
“Start looking for an apartment in Princeton.”
The golf shorts he was still wearing covered the bandaged sutures enough but at the sight of her turning to walk away he panicked and dashed toward the door, wincing.
“Lise.”
Hearing him finally say her name, she envisioned House in cufflinks and a cravat, and wondered if he’d lisp when he said Lisa, taking vows. Immediately she suppressed the fantasy, but like every other intention it backfired so that all she could see was him in cufflinks and a cravat.
"And us?” His voice fell low, sank into her breast; she was already sorry for what she was about to say.
“There is no us if I hire you.”
That was the concession. The choice clamped his heart in a vice.
“I don’t want this to end, ” he murmured, his voice breaking with regret.
Then his palm cradled her cheek and House rested his forehead against hers.
Cuddy knew he loved her, no matter how unethical or inexpressible. Guilt gleamed in her eyes, she wanted to take it back, apologize. There was nothing she could do but kiss him. Her lips on his told him better than all her stumbling words.
The touch sealed their fate when her hands framed his face. He tasted like scotch and summer and aftershave. This was what it was like without the abrasion and the complications and all she could think was why not sooner, a different destiny, born out of more than restless anonymity.
On his left leg he leaned heavy, arms tightening as he lifted her off her feet and nothing else mattered, not gravity or the irresolution or their relationship only the indelible truth that they belonged together.
“Goodnight,” she whispered, grounded again and backing away from him.
The door shut quietly and House stood a moment, brooding by himself.
This goodnight, he knew, was no goodbye.
---