Heartbeats
Title: Heartbeats
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Part 3/3
Rating: M
Synopsis: Sometimes it lasts in love. Sometimes it hurts instead. Set five years after season seven.
Notes: Ignores everything following “After Hours.” There will be a fanmix posted for this. Also, I already have another fic (AU this time) in the works, so encouragement of any kind might help accelerate its completion. Thanks for reading! Fanmix is here:
http://melissaisdown.livejournal.com/44914.html
Oh, and if anybody's interested, there is a long, graphic RPF fic I wrote
http://melissaisdown.livejournal.com/48116.html
.
heartbeats
The drive to the hospital in the middle of the night with House’s life hanging in the balance is a too familiar scene.
Cuddy’s knuckles are white, clenching the steering wheel like it’s the last thing she has to hold on to. This was never going to last. She has no idea what kind of perverse denial was making her think he’d get better.
Do you think I can fix myself? He asked back before any of this started. She’s always loved him for his irreparability, the damage he’s worn like a contemptuous shield around his soul. How many people has he saved and with what extreme measures only to become a casualty himself.
Silently, irrepressible. she weeps in the driver’s seat and running the last red light, arriving to the hospital just behind the ambulance. Rachel and Lucy are half asleep in the backseat. Cuddy tries to compose herself before going inside.
With bloodshot eyes, clammy palms and the expectation that it is only going to get worse, she gets on the elevator. It’s been less than two weeks since he stood behind her on this same elevator and she thought maybe that was him in her periphery, maybe he found her and it’s not over.
What if he doesn’t make it? The thought makes her sick.
The girls are with her assistant, napping on either side of the couch in her office. Cuddy’s there when they wheel him into ICU, intubated. She’s staring through the glass, watching fluorescent light scatter a halo above his tired broken frame.
Some attending whose name she can’t pronounce walks up beside her. He starts to explain that House is stabilized but that this is the first stage of respiratory failure, that if he doesn’t get a lung in the next 48 hours he won’t make it. Then he mutters something about contacting his next of kin and Cuddy nods feebly, feeling like she is about to wake up and find it’s all been a bad dream; she’s in bed, in Princeton and this isn’t happening.
some other life
In some other life she knows, she stayed. She waited a week after what he did to his leg. She told him in his office late one night. The disbelief in his eyes was outshone by a broad uncontrollable smile.
The next days he beamed. He bragged to Wilson and sent out a hospital- wide memo about knocking her up. She told him at twelve weeks. At sixteen the heartbeat was weak. But by twenty there was respite. Cuddy could finally tell Rachel to expect a sister.
Cuddy’s diet boomeranged between donuts, decaf and tofutti and, through the most unusual cravings, the fiercest moods, the fear of not making it to term, he was there for her. He rubbed her feet, kissed her belly, kept her healthy and almost relieved. Fatherhood was becoming a reason to stay off vicodin. Cuddy was ready for a relapse but it never came. House had a distraction, a conviction outside medicine. He was happy and with her and ironically overwhelmed when she went into labor.
He stayed with them every night the first two weeks after they took Lucy home. He didn’t move in though, both cherishing the escape plan of his apartment and reluctant to jinx it by pretending anything might be permanent. He didn’t know what they were now. They never officially segued back into a real relationship. What they had was working.
She wasn’t alone with an infant this time. And although the way he handled Lucy was at first almost clinical, Cuddy gave him space and the attachment came. They both worked too many hours, he knew and devised a system of taking turns, sometimes sneaking her into work.
She took her first steps inside the hospital, with uncle Jimmy babysitting. She looked like House with the blue eyes and square chin and her mother’s dark hair gradually growing in.
In this life, when the tumors came back they were benign. It was just another incision, another scar, their business as usual.
Five years later he was teaching Lucy long division and driving Rachel to dance recitals. He put the ring on her finger, the one he meant to years ago. His great grandmother’s, it survived two world wars and traveled the world, born in Germany and going everywhere his mother’s jewelry box has been. Some footnote about their history he had engraved inside the band. There was no ceremony, no honeymoon, just two signatures to solidify what it took twenty five years and countless mistakes to make right, to make real.
--
In the mistake of the present, Cuddy reminds herself what she would give to keep him here. She knows they’re not the same blood type. This couldn’t be that easy. Her mind races, out of options.
The idea of him returning to her just to be lost again is followed in quick succession by the thought of her making that quiet phone call to Wilson, of funeral arrangements, an unworthy elegy she makes herself write, the sheet of paper drenched with tears.
She thinks of Lucy on his piano bench, the lake he’d promised decades ago to take her to. She thinks of Mont St. Michel and the night she left Lucas.
The infarction too bleeds at the edges like an overexposed photograph. Her heart’s in a constant turbulent riot, convinced that if she hadn’t made that decision then, imploring Stacy--if he hadn’t been misdiagnosed, golfing in Princeton, manipulated and deceived into a surgery he didn’t want--he wouldn’t be here now.
How many times she’s saved him, breathed life back into him, made his heart beat again. It will never make up for what she’s taken from him: the muscle debribement, a relationship he was willing to make work, his own flesh and blood.
asystole
A few hours pass. House wakes up wishing he wouldn’t have. Everything is impossibly worse. He knew it would be, knew the price to be paid for the weekend he spent as a human being. Back to being a lab rat, a pin cushion.
He’s returned to his hospital bed after another barrage of tests. His body’s giving up. He’s going to suffocate because of something he injected himself with years ago and he’s going to be in pain until the end.
There’s no delusion this time about Cuddy being his savior. He knows she tried. She’s still trying. The heartrending futility of it is watching her watch him die. He can’t stand another second of it so he shuts his eyes, maxes out his morphine and wonders if it will be the last time.
While House is tendering his existential resignation, Cuddy is having a long conversation with the nineteen year old daughter of a comatose car accident victim. He’s been here three days. Cuddy’s trying not to circle like a vulture. The man is four years House’s junior and though the brain damage is irreparable, his lungs are unharmed. He’ll never wake up, Cuddy explains in her clinical-compassionate way, knowing just as well this is House’s last hope.
The girl refuses. Cuddy explains again, with more blatant apathy, that he’s already dead; the insurance isn’t going to pay to keep him on life support another day. She tells her she has a decision to make and her father could save someone else’s--
The girl won’t listen; she stands firm, refusing to relinquish her dad’s lungs. She’s not touting religion or any moral principle, she just wants him to be whole when they bury him.
Cuddy storms out then, devastated as furious. She paces, too restless to know what else to do. Staring up the clock, she forces her head to clear. She considers what House would do, the laws he would break, the risks he would take, the reckless, wrong, indefensible way he would save her life.
Led by some desire that transcends personal interest, that defies all sound judgment, she starts back to that room. From the outside she can see the daughter saying goodbye. She’s not going to stay the night. Cuddy turns back. It will be easier to fabricate the paperwork than start a fist fight.
She goes to see him, She’s glad he’s asleep; the spindling pulp of her emotions has tears blurring her vision. They roll onto her index finger as she tries to catch them without smearing her mascara.
The sight of House sick and fading, his life reduced to a weak sine wave on a monitor is all she needs to make the decision. It may cost her her job, maybe her license but it’s no less than what he would risk. Hers is a boundless unequivocal devotion, true undying love. He means more to her than any of it.
The middle of the next day, Cuddy comes in, interrupting the nurse sent to disconnect the comatose father’s respirator and bypass. Cuddy gives her an errand to run and puts the forged consent form at the foot of his hospital bed, wheeling him to the OR herself. In a few hours the lungs are excised, procured, put on ice.
An orderly wakes House up, jarring him out of an opiate dream that loops with its vignetted edges and the pain at a distance. Cuddy is standing behind her by the time his eyes focus.
He wants to ask her where the time went. Why it feels like yesterday she was walking out of her hospital in Plainsboro in a peacoat and pencil skirt and he was shouting about the size of her ass and he could see she was smiling even though she didn’t look back.
“They’re prepping you for surgery.” The calm’s regained in her voice.
“How?” He asks.
She glares at him, her head dipping. She bites her lip. He has some idea of the consequences. He wants to tell her it isn’t worth it.
Fussing with his chart, she distracts herself from answering. She never could be persuaded to quit the cause that is Greg House, no matter how bleak.
“The trial’s made a difference. The cancer’s almost gone. After the transplant…”
Even she isn’t sure how she made it happen.
“It isn’t going to be easy but--“
There she is, he thinks, with that presumptive future tense.
“You can stay with me and the girls while you recover. And when you’re ready, get back to work.”
He’s worked for her and against her. She called him a hospital asset and an ass but he was the heartbeat of everything, a challenge, a lifeline, what she looked forward to the most everyday. She wants it back, wants to go back.
“Thank you,” he says, his eyelids heavy. The morphine is a slow curtain to raise.
She turns. There’s not enough time to tell him everything. This is it. He can almost hear the tiny hairline fractures as they splinter, what this is doing to her heart.
“Cuddy,” he calls out to her. “If I don’t--“
He struggles for a deep breath.
“I just wanted to live long enough for her to remember me.”
“You will,” her voices trembles as she walks over to his bedside.
She leans down, trying on a mournful smile, and presses her lips to his. With agonizing clarity, she relives all that has ever been between them, a growing morbid pathos threatening to eclipse the levity and irony and love--
Her tears feel warm as they fall on his forearm. The burden of tearing herself away from them together, from this, their last kiss, is unbearable. She’d rather lay down beside him and die than feel this helpless.
His arm around her waist retracts. He closes his eyes, his palm pulling away from hers. Then she’s standing alone in the middle of the empty room and for the first time since he go here, it’s out of her hands.
--
The surgery executes textbook flawless, not a single complication. Cuddy watches every hour of it, from the first incision to the last suture.
As if it was only a matter of time, the first wave of horror has passed. When she does step out of the operating room, into the cool arterial corridors of this hospital, the Chairman of the Board of hospital directors is there, his cheeks a livid crimson.
“Lisa, is it true? You forged paperwork for a desperate transplant patient?”
She strains to swallow, says ‘Yes’ on the exhalation.
“We could get into accusations here about fraud and negligence and outright criminal behavior but the outcome would be the same. I don’t know what kind of stress you’ve been under, if you know this man, but you’re fired. Without severance. Have your office cleaned out by noon.”
He’s still shaking his head. “You could lose you license, Lisa,” he inflects with pity, trundling away.
She nods rigid. It comes like a fist to an unsuspecting gut. But it’s over, it’s all over and he’s stable, alive, in recovery.
It will be a long convalescence. She’s going to have time off and maybe they can make what time he has left count. They’re looking at years in the single digits, an endless course of immunosuppressants. It’s going to be the hardest, longest struggle they’ve ever faced. She can only be grateful they’re facing it together.
“That was a hell of a sacrifice,” she can hear him saying in a few hours when he comes out of the anesthesia, breathes deep and sees right through her.
With everything she’s lost, the miracle she’s made happen breaks through. Cuddy goes to him in recovery, falls asleep with her arm stretched across him, her fingers twined steadfast with his.
Before they know it, spring has come. The winter they thought would never end is far enough away that they feel safe. They plan an escape.
The girls stay with her sister. House won’t tell her where they’re going. They cross four states in one long day. Miles outside Ann Arbor, she still doesn’t know what he’s plotting.
When she asks, he intones fake profundities about their destination, struggling not to sound sentimental. Really he’s been overwhelmed with nostalgic retrospection since this all began. The promise he never meant to break.
“This was supposed to be our second date,” he murmurs, vague and romantic.
He knows it’s not Normandy. Cuddy reacts slowly and he’s afraid he’s disappointed her or that she’s forgotten until she squeezes his hand in a way that tells him she’ll never let go. He parks and they walk to secluded shade on a knoll nodding up from the lake.
Honeysuckle and magnolia suffuse the tepid dusk. A sharp, lovesick awareness scythes through her. How close she came to losing him. How he brought her here at last, the solace of surviving a conspiracy of defeat.
Her eyes fill with tears as they sit. He’s peering over his bent knees at the lucent sun, its reflection in the water, the cast shadows of the trees. He breathes easy and when she can no longer hold back, her arms wrap around him in shuddering, unmistakable relief.
When she wakes, it’s as a visitor not an administrator. It’s still winter. And when she finally forces herself to walk away, go pack her things and call the babysitter, as she’s walking away, almost to the elevator, she hears it. The EKG falters, seizes, blares, flatlining.
The world ends in the rush back to him, the edge of time unravels. The sterile hall fades into an opaque haze. A violent panic stalls her intervention. She doesn’t know if she’s strong enough to watch him die.
This is all their love’s ever been--rushing into to a burning building with him, for him, time and again.
She has to vindicate her sacrifice. She has to save his life.
Cuddy tears open the curtain and pulls the paddles away from a nurse looming over the crash cart. His heart’s between her two clenched fists, the way it always is. She charges and clears and shocks him once, twice.
“Come on,” she cries when she thinks she hears him breathing.
“Please, House.”
She starts into chest compressions. Another minute passes and still no pulse. The defibrillator scorches his chest the higher she turns the voltage, but nothing--and again. His attending is pulling at her, telling her to stop but she can’t hear him, can’t hear anything save for the beating of her heart.
---
-
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Part 3/3
Rating: M
Synopsis: Sometimes it lasts in love. Sometimes it hurts instead. Set five years after season seven.
Notes: Ignores everything following “After Hours.” There will be a fanmix posted for this. Also, I already have another fic (AU this time) in the works, so encouragement of any kind might help accelerate its completion. Thanks for reading! Fanmix is here:
http://melissaisdown.livejournal.com/44914.html
Oh, and if anybody's interested, there is a long, graphic RPF fic I wrote
http://melissaisdown.livejournal.com/48116.html
.
heartbeats
The drive to the hospital in the middle of the night with House’s life hanging in the balance is a too familiar scene.
Cuddy’s knuckles are white, clenching the steering wheel like it’s the last thing she has to hold on to. This was never going to last. She has no idea what kind of perverse denial was making her think he’d get better.
Do you think I can fix myself? He asked back before any of this started. She’s always loved him for his irreparability, the damage he’s worn like a contemptuous shield around his soul. How many people has he saved and with what extreme measures only to become a casualty himself.
Silently, irrepressible. she weeps in the driver’s seat and running the last red light, arriving to the hospital just behind the ambulance. Rachel and Lucy are half asleep in the backseat. Cuddy tries to compose herself before going inside.
With bloodshot eyes, clammy palms and the expectation that it is only going to get worse, she gets on the elevator. It’s been less than two weeks since he stood behind her on this same elevator and she thought maybe that was him in her periphery, maybe he found her and it’s not over.
What if he doesn’t make it? The thought makes her sick.
The girls are with her assistant, napping on either side of the couch in her office. Cuddy’s there when they wheel him into ICU, intubated. She’s staring through the glass, watching fluorescent light scatter a halo above his tired broken frame.
Some attending whose name she can’t pronounce walks up beside her. He starts to explain that House is stabilized but that this is the first stage of respiratory failure, that if he doesn’t get a lung in the next 48 hours he won’t make it. Then he mutters something about contacting his next of kin and Cuddy nods feebly, feeling like she is about to wake up and find it’s all been a bad dream; she’s in bed, in Princeton and this isn’t happening.
some other life
In some other life she knows, she stayed. She waited a week after what he did to his leg. She told him in his office late one night. The disbelief in his eyes was outshone by a broad uncontrollable smile.
The next days he beamed. He bragged to Wilson and sent out a hospital- wide memo about knocking her up. She told him at twelve weeks. At sixteen the heartbeat was weak. But by twenty there was respite. Cuddy could finally tell Rachel to expect a sister.
Cuddy’s diet boomeranged between donuts, decaf and tofutti and, through the most unusual cravings, the fiercest moods, the fear of not making it to term, he was there for her. He rubbed her feet, kissed her belly, kept her healthy and almost relieved. Fatherhood was becoming a reason to stay off vicodin. Cuddy was ready for a relapse but it never came. House had a distraction, a conviction outside medicine. He was happy and with her and ironically overwhelmed when she went into labor.
He stayed with them every night the first two weeks after they took Lucy home. He didn’t move in though, both cherishing the escape plan of his apartment and reluctant to jinx it by pretending anything might be permanent. He didn’t know what they were now. They never officially segued back into a real relationship. What they had was working.
She wasn’t alone with an infant this time. And although the way he handled Lucy was at first almost clinical, Cuddy gave him space and the attachment came. They both worked too many hours, he knew and devised a system of taking turns, sometimes sneaking her into work.
She took her first steps inside the hospital, with uncle Jimmy babysitting. She looked like House with the blue eyes and square chin and her mother’s dark hair gradually growing in.
In this life, when the tumors came back they were benign. It was just another incision, another scar, their business as usual.
Five years later he was teaching Lucy long division and driving Rachel to dance recitals. He put the ring on her finger, the one he meant to years ago. His great grandmother’s, it survived two world wars and traveled the world, born in Germany and going everywhere his mother’s jewelry box has been. Some footnote about their history he had engraved inside the band. There was no ceremony, no honeymoon, just two signatures to solidify what it took twenty five years and countless mistakes to make right, to make real.
--
In the mistake of the present, Cuddy reminds herself what she would give to keep him here. She knows they’re not the same blood type. This couldn’t be that easy. Her mind races, out of options.
The idea of him returning to her just to be lost again is followed in quick succession by the thought of her making that quiet phone call to Wilson, of funeral arrangements, an unworthy elegy she makes herself write, the sheet of paper drenched with tears.
She thinks of Lucy on his piano bench, the lake he’d promised decades ago to take her to. She thinks of Mont St. Michel and the night she left Lucas.
The infarction too bleeds at the edges like an overexposed photograph. Her heart’s in a constant turbulent riot, convinced that if she hadn’t made that decision then, imploring Stacy--if he hadn’t been misdiagnosed, golfing in Princeton, manipulated and deceived into a surgery he didn’t want--he wouldn’t be here now.
How many times she’s saved him, breathed life back into him, made his heart beat again. It will never make up for what she’s taken from him: the muscle debribement, a relationship he was willing to make work, his own flesh and blood.
asystole
A few hours pass. House wakes up wishing he wouldn’t have. Everything is impossibly worse. He knew it would be, knew the price to be paid for the weekend he spent as a human being. Back to being a lab rat, a pin cushion.
He’s returned to his hospital bed after another barrage of tests. His body’s giving up. He’s going to suffocate because of something he injected himself with years ago and he’s going to be in pain until the end.
There’s no delusion this time about Cuddy being his savior. He knows she tried. She’s still trying. The heartrending futility of it is watching her watch him die. He can’t stand another second of it so he shuts his eyes, maxes out his morphine and wonders if it will be the last time.
While House is tendering his existential resignation, Cuddy is having a long conversation with the nineteen year old daughter of a comatose car accident victim. He’s been here three days. Cuddy’s trying not to circle like a vulture. The man is four years House’s junior and though the brain damage is irreparable, his lungs are unharmed. He’ll never wake up, Cuddy explains in her clinical-compassionate way, knowing just as well this is House’s last hope.
The girl refuses. Cuddy explains again, with more blatant apathy, that he’s already dead; the insurance isn’t going to pay to keep him on life support another day. She tells her she has a decision to make and her father could save someone else’s--
The girl won’t listen; she stands firm, refusing to relinquish her dad’s lungs. She’s not touting religion or any moral principle, she just wants him to be whole when they bury him.
Cuddy storms out then, devastated as furious. She paces, too restless to know what else to do. Staring up the clock, she forces her head to clear. She considers what House would do, the laws he would break, the risks he would take, the reckless, wrong, indefensible way he would save her life.
Led by some desire that transcends personal interest, that defies all sound judgment, she starts back to that room. From the outside she can see the daughter saying goodbye. She’s not going to stay the night. Cuddy turns back. It will be easier to fabricate the paperwork than start a fist fight.
She goes to see him, She’s glad he’s asleep; the spindling pulp of her emotions has tears blurring her vision. They roll onto her index finger as she tries to catch them without smearing her mascara.
The sight of House sick and fading, his life reduced to a weak sine wave on a monitor is all she needs to make the decision. It may cost her her job, maybe her license but it’s no less than what he would risk. Hers is a boundless unequivocal devotion, true undying love. He means more to her than any of it.
The middle of the next day, Cuddy comes in, interrupting the nurse sent to disconnect the comatose father’s respirator and bypass. Cuddy gives her an errand to run and puts the forged consent form at the foot of his hospital bed, wheeling him to the OR herself. In a few hours the lungs are excised, procured, put on ice.
An orderly wakes House up, jarring him out of an opiate dream that loops with its vignetted edges and the pain at a distance. Cuddy is standing behind her by the time his eyes focus.
He wants to ask her where the time went. Why it feels like yesterday she was walking out of her hospital in Plainsboro in a peacoat and pencil skirt and he was shouting about the size of her ass and he could see she was smiling even though she didn’t look back.
“They’re prepping you for surgery.” The calm’s regained in her voice.
“How?” He asks.
She glares at him, her head dipping. She bites her lip. He has some idea of the consequences. He wants to tell her it isn’t worth it.
Fussing with his chart, she distracts herself from answering. She never could be persuaded to quit the cause that is Greg House, no matter how bleak.
“The trial’s made a difference. The cancer’s almost gone. After the transplant…”
Even she isn’t sure how she made it happen.
“It isn’t going to be easy but--“
There she is, he thinks, with that presumptive future tense.
“You can stay with me and the girls while you recover. And when you’re ready, get back to work.”
He’s worked for her and against her. She called him a hospital asset and an ass but he was the heartbeat of everything, a challenge, a lifeline, what she looked forward to the most everyday. She wants it back, wants to go back.
“Thank you,” he says, his eyelids heavy. The morphine is a slow curtain to raise.
She turns. There’s not enough time to tell him everything. This is it. He can almost hear the tiny hairline fractures as they splinter, what this is doing to her heart.
“Cuddy,” he calls out to her. “If I don’t--“
He struggles for a deep breath.
“I just wanted to live long enough for her to remember me.”
“You will,” her voices trembles as she walks over to his bedside.
She leans down, trying on a mournful smile, and presses her lips to his. With agonizing clarity, she relives all that has ever been between them, a growing morbid pathos threatening to eclipse the levity and irony and love--
Her tears feel warm as they fall on his forearm. The burden of tearing herself away from them together, from this, their last kiss, is unbearable. She’d rather lay down beside him and die than feel this helpless.
His arm around her waist retracts. He closes his eyes, his palm pulling away from hers. Then she’s standing alone in the middle of the empty room and for the first time since he go here, it’s out of her hands.
--
The surgery executes textbook flawless, not a single complication. Cuddy watches every hour of it, from the first incision to the last suture.
As if it was only a matter of time, the first wave of horror has passed. When she does step out of the operating room, into the cool arterial corridors of this hospital, the Chairman of the Board of hospital directors is there, his cheeks a livid crimson.
“Lisa, is it true? You forged paperwork for a desperate transplant patient?”
She strains to swallow, says ‘Yes’ on the exhalation.
“We could get into accusations here about fraud and negligence and outright criminal behavior but the outcome would be the same. I don’t know what kind of stress you’ve been under, if you know this man, but you’re fired. Without severance. Have your office cleaned out by noon.”
He’s still shaking his head. “You could lose you license, Lisa,” he inflects with pity, trundling away.
She nods rigid. It comes like a fist to an unsuspecting gut. But it’s over, it’s all over and he’s stable, alive, in recovery.
It will be a long convalescence. She’s going to have time off and maybe they can make what time he has left count. They’re looking at years in the single digits, an endless course of immunosuppressants. It’s going to be the hardest, longest struggle they’ve ever faced. She can only be grateful they’re facing it together.
“That was a hell of a sacrifice,” she can hear him saying in a few hours when he comes out of the anesthesia, breathes deep and sees right through her.
With everything she’s lost, the miracle she’s made happen breaks through. Cuddy goes to him in recovery, falls asleep with her arm stretched across him, her fingers twined steadfast with his.
Before they know it, spring has come. The winter they thought would never end is far enough away that they feel safe. They plan an escape.
The girls stay with her sister. House won’t tell her where they’re going. They cross four states in one long day. Miles outside Ann Arbor, she still doesn’t know what he’s plotting.
When she asks, he intones fake profundities about their destination, struggling not to sound sentimental. Really he’s been overwhelmed with nostalgic retrospection since this all began. The promise he never meant to break.
“This was supposed to be our second date,” he murmurs, vague and romantic.
He knows it’s not Normandy. Cuddy reacts slowly and he’s afraid he’s disappointed her or that she’s forgotten until she squeezes his hand in a way that tells him she’ll never let go. He parks and they walk to secluded shade on a knoll nodding up from the lake.
Honeysuckle and magnolia suffuse the tepid dusk. A sharp, lovesick awareness scythes through her. How close she came to losing him. How he brought her here at last, the solace of surviving a conspiracy of defeat.
Her eyes fill with tears as they sit. He’s peering over his bent knees at the lucent sun, its reflection in the water, the cast shadows of the trees. He breathes easy and when she can no longer hold back, her arms wrap around him in shuddering, unmistakable relief.
When she wakes, it’s as a visitor not an administrator. It’s still winter. And when she finally forces herself to walk away, go pack her things and call the babysitter, as she’s walking away, almost to the elevator, she hears it. The EKG falters, seizes, blares, flatlining.
The world ends in the rush back to him, the edge of time unravels. The sterile hall fades into an opaque haze. A violent panic stalls her intervention. She doesn’t know if she’s strong enough to watch him die.
This is all their love’s ever been--rushing into to a burning building with him, for him, time and again.
She has to vindicate her sacrifice. She has to save his life.
Cuddy tears open the curtain and pulls the paddles away from a nurse looming over the crash cart. His heart’s between her two clenched fists, the way it always is. She charges and clears and shocks him once, twice.
“Come on,” she cries when she thinks she hears him breathing.
“Please, House.”
She starts into chest compressions. Another minute passes and still no pulse. The defibrillator scorches his chest the higher she turns the voltage, but nothing--and again. His attending is pulling at her, telling her to stop but she can’t hear him, can’t hear anything save for the beating of her heart.
---
-