Fanfiction: justified freely by his grace/like a storm cloud, your transgressions
Hello! I come bearing two OT4 fics, companion pieces, mostly centered on House/Cuddy but with mentions of the others. The first is Cuddy POV and the second is House POV. Originally posted to house_cuddy. Can I say how glad I am that this community exists? It's pretty amazing.
justified freely by his grace
Summary: So here she was in the middle of this complicated thing, this Gordian knot of caring, and it still didn't mean as much as being a doctor. She wanted something to. (Cuddy/Stacy/Wilson/House)
Timeline: No specific spoilers.
A/N: Title is from the Bible this time, Romans 3:24, but it's meant ironically (in a non-disrespectful way, because the Bible is a text worth quoting), because House is and isn't justified by what he does. The quote just kind of ties into the religious/mythological stuff this had going on (alternate title and now companion piece "like a storm cloud, thy transgressions"). It's kind of rough, but I'm not sure it would get any better if I spent any more time on it.
She fucked Stacy in the bed that Stacy shared with House, and it drove her crazy because she could smell him on the sheets. It was Stacy's hands and Stacy's mouth moving over her, but she could swear she could feel House at her back, pressing against her urgently, that twisted smile on his face as he watched his lover make his boss scream. She could almost feel the rake of his stubble over the tender nape of her neck and the heat of his breath on her shoulder as Stacy kissed her all over, using fingers and tongue anywhere she liked until Cuddy's toes curled and her back arched and she had to bite back anyone's name.
He was right. Guilt did make for good sex. She just wasn't sure if it was her guilt or Stacy's that made the difference, but there was always that little flush on her face as she watched him limp through the halls of her hospital.
It was different with Wilson. She slept with him because he was sweet, because he opened doors for her. He was what a doctor should be: intelligent but not blindingly so, caring but not overinvolved. He had nice hands and he looked good in scrubs, and then there was the boyish charm that still got to her even though she knew that it got to everyone else. When she was with Wilson, she believed she was loved. Maybe not for herself exactly, and maybe not on purpose, but Wilson loved everyone and she liked the tenderness of that. He was good in bed but he didn't drive her crazy and it was all so convenient. She didn't have time for real love, focused, committed love where you were sure who the object was and why.
When Wilson said, "Say yes," people did. And so she had. And Stacy had just been there, and lonely despite House, and Cuddy had been lonely too.
She ignored that it was House in her dreams. It was a strange balance they all lived in, a complicated mix of love and desire and friendship and jealousy. She knew Wilson had fucked Stacy, or the other way around, and that House had talked himself into Wilson's bed more than once, which made her more than a little hot and bothered for reasons she couldn't explain. It stood to reason that she would want House. He was what she didn't have. She had had a thing for him since college, when he was a grad student with the touch of God on him and she was fighting hard to be the best there ever was. He was brilliant, he was deliciously arrogant, and he was charming in an antisocial way. They had had a thing, a brief thing, one tipsy night after she had found him playing the piano at a club, and that night she had felt touched by God too.
She had left in the morning, hoping he'd been too high on jazz and weed and wine to remember that it had been her in his bed, and he had treated her afterwards with the same indifference he showed toward everyone, except that someone introduced them months later and he knew that she was first in her class, or almost. He'd given her a onceover. "Talk to me, Cuddy." He had walked away and she had trotted after him, chosen. She went to him about tricky cases she was studying and he helped her. He didn't need her, but she entertained him, she thought. They were like friends, though he was caustic and distant as a general rule. He didn't seem to remember they'd met in a club before they'd met properly. She thought it was best that way, though she still thought about the strength of his thighs and the fast murmur of his heart as they'd lain in bed together with the smoke and sweat of the club on them. She wondered if he played better when he wasn't stoned. She never found out. He kept things business between them, an academic puzzle, a meeting of the minds. He was the priest of his own holy order and she was his acolyte, lighting candles in his name. He wrote in the margins of her books and shouted when she got things wrong, but she was acing all her classes.
She fell in love the way any college girl would, but she kept it to herself. She wanted him so much she shivered at night sometimes, but she wanted to be a doctor more.
By the time she found him again, there was Stacy and there was Wilson and she was all caught up in it the way she was caught up in her hospital, working out the beginnings of structure. She thought it was almost funny that she slept with Stacy first, before Wilson, but she couldn't say why, except that if House knew, he would get that questing look on his face the way he always did when he found some new piece of information that didn't fit with what he'd known. Riddle me out, she wanted to say. Unravel all the reasons I'm fucking your girlfriend. I can't touch your skin but hers is so smooth. Find me in bed with your best friend. He's got brown eyes and a lesser measure of genius, but his shoulders are broad enough.
The unexpected thing was that she found she was a little in love with Stacy too. The wit, the compassion of the woman, the slim hips compelled. Stacy bantered, but at the end of the day, she had endearments ready, and the warmth of her arms. And then Wilson, but everyone loved Wilson. Cuddy had never been one to stand against the natural flow of things. So here she was in the middle of this complicated thing, this Gordian knot of caring, and it still didn't mean as much as being a doctor. She wanted something to.
House was The Guy who could never be The Guy and they all stood by him anyway, some kind of desperate masochistic cult of hope.
When Stacy left, Cuddy stopped fucking Wilson and she couldn't say why. She thought that House had never known, but the pull of it was gone. Wilson accepted this quietly. He wasn't fucking House either. He had found a wife. Another wife, a carbon copy of the wives before, not in looks or personality but in some indescribable way. Cuddy knew she would leave him someday, poor handsome Wilson breaking his wineglass for his absent rabbi after his big church wedding as his wife fussed that he'd stain his suit. Wilson would live. House held all their hearts and it wasn't given to anyone else to break them, which was a curse and a blessing that kept them all in a constant minor melancholy. They were saved the pains of mortal love at the price of genuine happiness. It was not a trade she had time to regret.
House grew more and more bitter and she was such an expert at not being in love with him that it was agonizing. He was the labyrinth and the minotaur and if she had any magic string, it had to go toward tying bandages and splinting broken limbs, not broken hearts. He had never asked her to find him, but she couldn't help reminding him that he was going home to empty rooms to his lonely piano, never playing the best that he could. She couldn't save him. She had always known that.
She still loved Wilson, in a way. She still loved Stacy in absentia, tied to her by the way that Stacy still loved House. House between them was too significant to put aside. Strange how one man had so much power: even the people who hated him had faith in him. The ones who loved him were lost forever. He staked an intangible, unbreakable claim.
I would leave you, she wanted to say, but there was nowhere to go and nothing she could name between them, and she had brought him here in the first place. I want you to do your job, she said instead, not saying that it (and her, and Wilson, but those were never, ever to be said) was all he had.
Inspiration made gods out of men, but gods could be tricksters. Inspiration gave him an uncanny gift of healing and laughing irony made him a bastard. Cuddy tended the altar the way she always had and surrendered to his unhappiness. It was the way of the world, to make these untouchable things, and his misery was exquisite. She fought to protect him and and she fought to redeem his humanity and he fought to stay miserable. It was an aching under her breastbone every time he popped the cap on his Vicodin, but he stayed. She had her hospital and she had her doctors. She told herself it was enough. He was irredeemable and so was she.
No one was ever really cured. They never talked about how all the patients he saved went on to die someday. They never talked about the ones he didn't save. The book she had to keep of his cases, tracking his statistics, felt like a holy text. He was praised with much praise. He was cursed for his callousness, for his failures, for his absence. He had been betrayed. He was not a messiah.
At night she still shivered, the ghosts of their youth scribbling marginalia over her life the way he'd written in her books: regrets, dreams, the smell of old smoke on her freshly laundered pillows. Across town she knew he was emptying whiskey bottles inch by golden inch, blues rattling his neighbors' windows as his hands moved over his piano the way that once, just once, they'd moved over her. She lit a candle for him and watched the little flame until her eyes burned.
like a storm cloud, thy transgressions
Summary: He had been flippant and she was cranky and that was the way that things were supposed to be, except that he wasn't quite satisfied by the way things were ending tonight, and somehow with the low light and the soft music and the familiar Vicodin blur at the edges of things, it seemed like a poignant moment, a time for confessions.
Timeline: In my mind, set between "Who's Your Daddy?" and "No Reason"
A/N: Title misquoted from Isaiah 44:21-23. Yay for the internet. Companion piece to "justified freely by his grace". (Cuddy/Wilson/Stacy/House)
"I remember," he said one night as she was walking out of his office. He was looking down at a file and she almost didn't stop for him, but then she paused and turned. He had one light on, just the lamp on his desk, and the quiet rasp of blues for company until Cuddy had come in to ask him again to chart, to remind him of his clinic hours, to have someone to talk to at midnight when they were both at work. He had been flippant and she was cranky and that was the way that things were supposed to be, except that he wasn't quite satisfied by the way things were ending tonight, and somehow with the low light and the soft music and the familiar Vicodin blur at the edges of things, it seemed like a poignant moment, a time for confessions.
"You remember what?" She was impatient. He had been hard on her for the past few weeks, not quite intentionally, but he enjoyed the way she snapped at him. Cuddy shouting was a true thing in a strange world. He understood life better when he had something to stand against. A disease, an authority figure, an imagined slight. He liked the challenge of a life that resisted perfection. He tried not to take the easy way out. But this thing, with Cuddy, it had never been easy, and there was no resisting it anymore.
"I remember Ann Arbor," he said, and she chuffed in annoyance.
"So do I. We went to college there." She was impatient to get away from him. The wisps of her hair caught the backlight from the hallway and threw lacy shadows across her forehead.
"No," he said on a note that rose and fell in a way he hadn't quite intended, looking up at her, watching her fingers curled loosely around the handle of his door. "I remember we slept together. In Ann Arbor. The night I played at the Old Town."
She had gone completely still. "Oh," she said. "You never..."
"No." He sat down. He had been thinking about telling her all of this for weeks, rehearsing it in his head as he played through the familiar structures of Bach sonatas. There were times to act, opportune moments that would pass before he could limp to the starting line unless he made them happen. Her date with Wilson had frightened him: the cancer scare, the nearly as frightening reality that she might have a child and get all wrapped up in someone else. As (the philosopher, he added parenthetically, smirking) Joni Mitchell said, you didn't know what you had until it was gone, or until you'd almost lost it to hypothetical cancer or her own deep need to have anyone's child. "Do you remember my sleeping sickness patient?"
"What does that have to do with anything?" Her hand tightened on the door. From his desk he could see her calves tensing. Cuddy didn't run from much, but he wouldn't blame her if she ran from him.
"I was there when she woke up." He hesitated.
"You went to see a patient?" she asked, but her voice was rougher than it should be and he knew she was upset. She had become a doctor because she wanted to heal people and make lives better. He had become a doctor because he wanted to know everything, to stand unsurprised at all the little ways his body would fail him, and the bigger ways. Watching his patients walk out of the hospital under their own power was a mildly compelling side benefit, but the laying on of hands had never been his endall. Maybe he'd been wrong. He wouldn't change, but he could admit an error.
"She woke up because her husband asked her to. He brought her out of the end of a coma with just the sound of his voice. The strength of psychological bonds is something that we can't always explain medically. Call it love, whatever you want." He looked down at his hands on the desk and pushed some papers together. "I've never been that guy."
"I didn't ask you to be," she said, her chest rising and falling with her slightly accelerated breath. He watched her with a mix of clinical detachment, evaluating her stress level, and some new tightness in his chest. "It was one night, House. Even a college girl doesn't expect a lifetime commitment from a one night stand. I thought you were too altered to remember."
"I wanted to be that guy," he said quietly. "But I'm not and I never would have been."
She shook her head. "That's why you never called? That's why you pretended we'd never met?" He shrugged and she leaned against his bookshelf, her mouth twisted with irony. "The world's greatest perfectionist."
"There's nothing wrong with wanting to do things right, Cuddy."
"Something wrong with doing them right or not at all," she retorted.
"It must really piss you off that my percentages are excellent," he said.
Her chin jerked up in resentful agreement. "They are excellent. Fortunately for this hospital. Unfortunately for the rest of us." She took a deep breath. "Why are we having this conversation?"
"Come on," he said, trying for affable and not quite getting there. "I thought you loved discussing my inadequacies."
"Professionally. Not romantically. Unlike you, I understand that some things are none of my business." She stopped, looked for a moment as if she were fighting against the impulse to say something else. "Anyway, you were that guy for Stacy."
"No," he said with real regret. "Otherwise she wouldn't have slept with you. Or Wilson. I couldn't love her more than my leg, or that was how she saw it."
She crossed her arms across her chest. He liked what that did to her cleavage. "You knew?"
"She started wearing your perfume," he said. "You smelled like cigarettes. She stopped calling Wilson by his first name. I was killing all of you."
"You were," she said, and he half expected her to be crying, but Cuddy was strong. She always had been. That was why he had liked her when he met her in Michigan: the straightness of her back in the club, the glint in her eye that meant she was going to work her ass off to get what she wanted. "Why are you telling me all of this, House?"
He stuck his hand in his pocket for his pill bottle and rattled the tablets. "Liquid courage. Well. Not liquid."
"The pain is worse?" Her voice was soft. She was giving him her doctor eyes and the compassion almost killed him. Cuddy, forever guilty.
"It has been." He tipped his head and looked at her. "I owed you, Cuddy. For standing up for me. For standing up to me."
"What do you want from me, House?" she asked wearily.
He thought of Stacy in the last weeks of their relationship, the same exhausted tension in the neck that brought out the lovely curve of the trapezius muscle as it met the shoulder. Cuddy had been looking at him this way for years, all her beauty exaggerated by the lean, stressed lines of her.
"You never asked if I remembered," he said.
"It was one night," she said again. "Twenty years ago. I didn't think it meant anything. That's not why I hired you, if that's what you're asking." She was recovering herself now, retreating into sarcasm that gave her words a flat tang. "I haven't been secretly in love with you all this time."
No one has ever thought it was secret, he did not say, remembering questions from Stacy, Wilson, Vogler, Chase, Cameron. He rose slowly and limped over to her, leaving the cane at his desk, stumbling a little against the pile of the carpet. She shifted against the bookcase but did not bolt.
"I liked you," he said. "I liked you a lot. We would have distracted each other. The medicine was more important."
"Yes," she said, and bit her lip. "It was. It is."
"You like me," he said, and watched her teeth sink further into her lip. The tops of her breasts flushed a slow pink under the shadows of the room.
"You're my best doctor," she said in a low voice.
"Anyone else would have fired me."
"I trusted you." She tried to shrug. The points of her shoulders were sharp through the thin fabric of her blouse. She had left her jacket in her office, he thought. A welcome heat washed off of her, rising from the scooped neck of her blouse. In the half-light through the glass wall, her eyeshadow looked bruisy.
"Cuddy." He traced her cheekbone with one finger and she leaned into his touch, eyes fluttering closed as if she were in pain. "I'm not kind, on a daily average. I'm not trustworthy. Tell me how much I cost the hospital, on top of Vogler's hundred million."
"You save lives," she said, eyes still closed. He brushed her hair back, catching the little curls on his fingertips, and kissed the ridge of her cheekbone where it flattened out beneath and a little behind her eye. She shivered, her arms untangling against his chest, and caught at his shirt, sliding from pocket to loose tails, her fingers ending up clasped feebly through his belt loop.
"You love me," he said, his fingers still twined through her curls. He had drawn back just enough that he could focus on her face.
"Of all the self-centered, arrogant assumptions to make," she muttered. Her eyes were open and very blue. She would only look at the place where his collar lay open to show the neck of his t-shirt and the rough skin of his throat.
"You stood by me," he said, untangling his fingers and tracing the line of her jaw. "I don't deserve you."
"I don't," she said, but her fingers clutched at his belt loop. His finger under her chin had tipped her face up and she was looking at him now the way she had looked through the candlelight of her menorah, the time she had invited Wilson for Hannukah dinner and House had invited himself. The fear of God, of the unknown, of something greater: it was something like that and he knew he wasn't God but he knew there were things no one could explain and love was one of them. He had never feared God, but he feared love and so did she, the way it overwhelmed you, the way it dragged you down. She was drowning against him. He should never have started this, but twenty years ago there had been a piano, and a pretty girl with a light in her eyes, and a bottle of wine, and the thrill of beginning something, and now she was reaching out to a nameless man inside a manila folder and he thought that she should have more comfort than a catheter and a lonely prayer.
Twenty years later she still had that light in her eyes, and when he was honest, he had more in mind than some fleeting reassurance, but the only words for it were so difficult to say. It was easier to pretend that the ache in his chest would be eased by the Vicodin, the liberal application of alcohol, and melancholy hours with his piano.
"House," she said, and tried to move away, and it might have worked if she hadn't still been holding his belt loop. She pulled him off balance a little and he stumbled against the bookcase, one arm out stiff to hold himself up and fence her in. She let go of him and moved around through the space between them, almost at the door when he gave up supporting himself and caught at her wrist, banging his hip hard as he crashed against the bookshelf.
"I love you," he said, because he was about to lose her, and he had nothing left but the truth to keep her from going. His life passed before his eyes: Stacy laughing, Wilson puzzled, Cuddy shouting, his father sternly disapproving as his mother tried to make it better with the promise of a sandwich. They all loved him and he had broken all of them, diffident and narcissistic, but they had kept the faith. They were lit candles that had never gone out, and Cuddy perhaps most of all had suffered from the burning.
She made a little noise in her throat as if something had broken inside her and leaned against the door. "I can't," she said, so quiet it was almost nothing against the gentle rasp of the music across the room. He pulled her toward him and she stumbled so that he had to catch her around the waist, and then he kissed her, a desperate last attempt.
He had almost believed her, the lady protesting too much, and when she kissed him back, his relief was so profound that he nearly fell to the floor, overbalancing against the weakness of his thigh and his suddenly unsteady knees.
"You put me in a coma," he whispered against her mouth, "and you brought me back. You restarted my heart."
"Don't get poetic now," she said, and kissed him. Her mouth opened against his, warm and sweet, and her tongue was pushing against his, and he was glad it was late and dim. She was reaching over his shoulder for the cord to close the blinds, almost overbalancing against him so that her body was pressed into his from breast to thigh, and he didn't care if she ever got the windows covered as long as they could stay like this, the heat of her against him and her obliques flexing under the pressure of his fingers. But she found the cord and the blinds rattled across the window, hiding them from nurses on the late shift and patients out of bounds.
"Lean on me," she said when she broke away, and muscled him over to his chair. He was always startled by the strength of her though she'd proved it time and again. She pushed him back into the pale yellow cushions and kicked off her shoes, climbing over his lap so that her skirt rucked up her thighs, the fabric tight. She put her arms over his wrists, pinning them to the armrests, and looked at him with a fierce desire in her face.
"You hurt us," she said, instead of kissing him. "You hurt Stacy so much she left you, when she loved you more than anything. You hurt me and all I wanted was to love you, and so I loved them instead. You hurt Wilson and now he's fucked his way through half the nurses in this hospital." The word was strange and raw from her lips. He was fascinated by the shape of her mouth as she said it. Fucked, the act of love made harsh by pain and need, and he imagined her suddenly pressed up against Stacy, straddling Wilson, and groaned a little. Penitence had never been his strong suit and he ached with his want for her. He was throbbing all over trying to get closer, but she had him well pinned.
"I fucked them because it was better than crying," she told him. "I loved them because it was as close as I could get to loving you and healing them." Her breath on his face was driving him crazy, and the smell of her shampoo, and the stretch of her skirt over her smooth thighs.
"I'm broken," he said slowly, "but you can have me." It was a wrench to find the words and push them out between his teeth. He had lived in his head all his life, accountable to no one. He wasn't sure what she wanted. There were no apologies for the way they had all lived, but he did love her, with a deep-seated fervor that surprised him.
She leaned forward and kissed him, surprising him, pushing one hand around the back of his neck so that he had a hand free to run under the back of her shirt as she nipped at his lips. She put the other hand on his face and he started to undo her buttons as he kissed her, letting her lead, astounded by the feel of her tongue in his mouth.
"I love you," he said again into her mouth, just to hear her breath catch, and she let her hand slip down his face to his chest and then his pants, cupping over the place where the fabric stretched over his erection.
"Fuck me," she told him, and his cock jumped underneath her hand, and he couldn't stop the groan from escaping his mouth. She smiled a wicked smile and shrugged off the shirt that he had unbuttoned, and he put his hands behind her shoulder blades and pulled her forward so that her breasts were against his face as he undid the clasps of her bra. He pulled a nipple into his mouth as his tongue worked against the underside and Cuddy moaned. She fumbled with the fly of his pants, racheting the zipper down roughly, and he lifted his hips so that she could slide thick denim and thin cotton down his thighs. The air of the office was cool against the heat of his arousal, and he pushed Cuddy's skirt up impatiently, his fingers pushing aside the lace of her underwear to reach her clit. He stroked it lightly with his thumb, pressing two fingers inside her, looking for the rough patch that was her g-spot. She made another soft long sound and shifted off of him, going to the door and flicking the lock home before stepping out of her panties and rolling off her stockings. She left her skirt on, hips swaying a little as she walked back to him on bare feet, and he struggled out of his shirts but couldn't kick his jeans all the way off. She paused just out of reach, her eyes drinking him in, and he swallowed hard at the sight of her, all curves and shadow and then pale honey where the light touched her. She crossed her arms and blushed a little.
"This wasn't," he began, "this wasn't how I envisioned this."
"I'll bet," she said, dry as a good martini. He wanted to get up and fold her in his arms but he was hobbled by denim and lust. "We had wine and song the first time, House. If that was what I was waiting for, I wouldn't be here with you."
He was struck by the certainty that this would be all right, whatever was starting again between them. "I love you," he told her, and every time it got easier.
"I love you," she said, and softened just a little. "But it doesn't fix things."
"I know," he said, watching her. She came the few feet to him and bent briefly over his groin, one hand wrapping around the base of his cock as her mouth closed over him and her tongue flicked against the underside of his shaft. He voiced wordless amazement, clutching the arms of the chair, and she drew back and straddled him.
"Previews," she said, holding herself over him so that his head just brushed against her curls. "But now...." She eased down, her eyelids dropping as he pushed into her and she began to rock against him. She was so wet it left a slick of dampness on his thighs, and he thought he would have to consider that later, when his brain worked instead of being the processing unit for the bone-melting pleasure of being inside Cuddy. She was gorgeous above him, hair loose over her shoulders, and he kissed her breasts as they came close to make her mewl. He had one hand on her hip, the other against her clit as she rolled her hips against his, and it was all happening too fast but he didn't want her to slow down, and he worked his fingers increasingly faster against her clit and let her move against him. He tried thinking about clinic duty, cable bills, vacuuming, but nothing helped, and all he could do was hope that Cuddy was wired as tightly as he was. She brought her head down, muffling her whimpers against his mouth, and he squeezed her ass with his free hand, feeling her muscles tensing against his wrist. He jerked his hips against her, trying to help, and she made a little strangled noise and spasmed around him, breathing out the grating consonants of his first name on the downswing of her orgasm, and the sound of her voice saying "Greg" was incredible and he was coming too, thrusting roughly inside her as the low light of the room turned into a thousand candles.
When his brain functioned again, he found that Cuddy was lying against his chest and he was stroking her hair, and her face was damp in the lamplight, just a couple of tears. He kissed them away, bending his neck awkwardly and trying not to scrape his stubble over the tender skin of her cheeks.
"I think I have some moist towelettes in the desk," he offered, and she laughed, almost a sob, and he smiled against her forehead because they weren't whole or well, but it was a start.
justified freely by his grace
Summary: So here she was in the middle of this complicated thing, this Gordian knot of caring, and it still didn't mean as much as being a doctor. She wanted something to. (Cuddy/Stacy/Wilson/House)
Timeline: No specific spoilers.
A/N: Title is from the Bible this time, Romans 3:24, but it's meant ironically (in a non-disrespectful way, because the Bible is a text worth quoting), because House is and isn't justified by what he does. The quote just kind of ties into the religious/mythological stuff this had going on (alternate title and now companion piece "like a storm cloud, thy transgressions"). It's kind of rough, but I'm not sure it would get any better if I spent any more time on it.
She fucked Stacy in the bed that Stacy shared with House, and it drove her crazy because she could smell him on the sheets. It was Stacy's hands and Stacy's mouth moving over her, but she could swear she could feel House at her back, pressing against her urgently, that twisted smile on his face as he watched his lover make his boss scream. She could almost feel the rake of his stubble over the tender nape of her neck and the heat of his breath on her shoulder as Stacy kissed her all over, using fingers and tongue anywhere she liked until Cuddy's toes curled and her back arched and she had to bite back anyone's name.
He was right. Guilt did make for good sex. She just wasn't sure if it was her guilt or Stacy's that made the difference, but there was always that little flush on her face as she watched him limp through the halls of her hospital.
It was different with Wilson. She slept with him because he was sweet, because he opened doors for her. He was what a doctor should be: intelligent but not blindingly so, caring but not overinvolved. He had nice hands and he looked good in scrubs, and then there was the boyish charm that still got to her even though she knew that it got to everyone else. When she was with Wilson, she believed she was loved. Maybe not for herself exactly, and maybe not on purpose, but Wilson loved everyone and she liked the tenderness of that. He was good in bed but he didn't drive her crazy and it was all so convenient. She didn't have time for real love, focused, committed love where you were sure who the object was and why.
When Wilson said, "Say yes," people did. And so she had. And Stacy had just been there, and lonely despite House, and Cuddy had been lonely too.
She ignored that it was House in her dreams. It was a strange balance they all lived in, a complicated mix of love and desire and friendship and jealousy. She knew Wilson had fucked Stacy, or the other way around, and that House had talked himself into Wilson's bed more than once, which made her more than a little hot and bothered for reasons she couldn't explain. It stood to reason that she would want House. He was what she didn't have. She had had a thing for him since college, when he was a grad student with the touch of God on him and she was fighting hard to be the best there ever was. He was brilliant, he was deliciously arrogant, and he was charming in an antisocial way. They had had a thing, a brief thing, one tipsy night after she had found him playing the piano at a club, and that night she had felt touched by God too.
She had left in the morning, hoping he'd been too high on jazz and weed and wine to remember that it had been her in his bed, and he had treated her afterwards with the same indifference he showed toward everyone, except that someone introduced them months later and he knew that she was first in her class, or almost. He'd given her a onceover. "Talk to me, Cuddy." He had walked away and she had trotted after him, chosen. She went to him about tricky cases she was studying and he helped her. He didn't need her, but she entertained him, she thought. They were like friends, though he was caustic and distant as a general rule. He didn't seem to remember they'd met in a club before they'd met properly. She thought it was best that way, though she still thought about the strength of his thighs and the fast murmur of his heart as they'd lain in bed together with the smoke and sweat of the club on them. She wondered if he played better when he wasn't stoned. She never found out. He kept things business between them, an academic puzzle, a meeting of the minds. He was the priest of his own holy order and she was his acolyte, lighting candles in his name. He wrote in the margins of her books and shouted when she got things wrong, but she was acing all her classes.
She fell in love the way any college girl would, but she kept it to herself. She wanted him so much she shivered at night sometimes, but she wanted to be a doctor more.
By the time she found him again, there was Stacy and there was Wilson and she was all caught up in it the way she was caught up in her hospital, working out the beginnings of structure. She thought it was almost funny that she slept with Stacy first, before Wilson, but she couldn't say why, except that if House knew, he would get that questing look on his face the way he always did when he found some new piece of information that didn't fit with what he'd known. Riddle me out, she wanted to say. Unravel all the reasons I'm fucking your girlfriend. I can't touch your skin but hers is so smooth. Find me in bed with your best friend. He's got brown eyes and a lesser measure of genius, but his shoulders are broad enough.
The unexpected thing was that she found she was a little in love with Stacy too. The wit, the compassion of the woman, the slim hips compelled. Stacy bantered, but at the end of the day, she had endearments ready, and the warmth of her arms. And then Wilson, but everyone loved Wilson. Cuddy had never been one to stand against the natural flow of things. So here she was in the middle of this complicated thing, this Gordian knot of caring, and it still didn't mean as much as being a doctor. She wanted something to.
House was The Guy who could never be The Guy and they all stood by him anyway, some kind of desperate masochistic cult of hope.
When Stacy left, Cuddy stopped fucking Wilson and she couldn't say why. She thought that House had never known, but the pull of it was gone. Wilson accepted this quietly. He wasn't fucking House either. He had found a wife. Another wife, a carbon copy of the wives before, not in looks or personality but in some indescribable way. Cuddy knew she would leave him someday, poor handsome Wilson breaking his wineglass for his absent rabbi after his big church wedding as his wife fussed that he'd stain his suit. Wilson would live. House held all their hearts and it wasn't given to anyone else to break them, which was a curse and a blessing that kept them all in a constant minor melancholy. They were saved the pains of mortal love at the price of genuine happiness. It was not a trade she had time to regret.
House grew more and more bitter and she was such an expert at not being in love with him that it was agonizing. He was the labyrinth and the minotaur and if she had any magic string, it had to go toward tying bandages and splinting broken limbs, not broken hearts. He had never asked her to find him, but she couldn't help reminding him that he was going home to empty rooms to his lonely piano, never playing the best that he could. She couldn't save him. She had always known that.
She still loved Wilson, in a way. She still loved Stacy in absentia, tied to her by the way that Stacy still loved House. House between them was too significant to put aside. Strange how one man had so much power: even the people who hated him had faith in him. The ones who loved him were lost forever. He staked an intangible, unbreakable claim.
I would leave you, she wanted to say, but there was nowhere to go and nothing she could name between them, and she had brought him here in the first place. I want you to do your job, she said instead, not saying that it (and her, and Wilson, but those were never, ever to be said) was all he had.
Inspiration made gods out of men, but gods could be tricksters. Inspiration gave him an uncanny gift of healing and laughing irony made him a bastard. Cuddy tended the altar the way she always had and surrendered to his unhappiness. It was the way of the world, to make these untouchable things, and his misery was exquisite. She fought to protect him and and she fought to redeem his humanity and he fought to stay miserable. It was an aching under her breastbone every time he popped the cap on his Vicodin, but he stayed. She had her hospital and she had her doctors. She told herself it was enough. He was irredeemable and so was she.
No one was ever really cured. They never talked about how all the patients he saved went on to die someday. They never talked about the ones he didn't save. The book she had to keep of his cases, tracking his statistics, felt like a holy text. He was praised with much praise. He was cursed for his callousness, for his failures, for his absence. He had been betrayed. He was not a messiah.
At night she still shivered, the ghosts of their youth scribbling marginalia over her life the way he'd written in her books: regrets, dreams, the smell of old smoke on her freshly laundered pillows. Across town she knew he was emptying whiskey bottles inch by golden inch, blues rattling his neighbors' windows as his hands moved over his piano the way that once, just once, they'd moved over her. She lit a candle for him and watched the little flame until her eyes burned.
like a storm cloud, thy transgressions
Summary: He had been flippant and she was cranky and that was the way that things were supposed to be, except that he wasn't quite satisfied by the way things were ending tonight, and somehow with the low light and the soft music and the familiar Vicodin blur at the edges of things, it seemed like a poignant moment, a time for confessions.
Timeline: In my mind, set between "Who's Your Daddy?" and "No Reason"
A/N: Title misquoted from Isaiah 44:21-23. Yay for the internet. Companion piece to "justified freely by his grace". (Cuddy/Wilson/Stacy/House)
"I remember," he said one night as she was walking out of his office. He was looking down at a file and she almost didn't stop for him, but then she paused and turned. He had one light on, just the lamp on his desk, and the quiet rasp of blues for company until Cuddy had come in to ask him again to chart, to remind him of his clinic hours, to have someone to talk to at midnight when they were both at work. He had been flippant and she was cranky and that was the way that things were supposed to be, except that he wasn't quite satisfied by the way things were ending tonight, and somehow with the low light and the soft music and the familiar Vicodin blur at the edges of things, it seemed like a poignant moment, a time for confessions.
"You remember what?" She was impatient. He had been hard on her for the past few weeks, not quite intentionally, but he enjoyed the way she snapped at him. Cuddy shouting was a true thing in a strange world. He understood life better when he had something to stand against. A disease, an authority figure, an imagined slight. He liked the challenge of a life that resisted perfection. He tried not to take the easy way out. But this thing, with Cuddy, it had never been easy, and there was no resisting it anymore.
"I remember Ann Arbor," he said, and she chuffed in annoyance.
"So do I. We went to college there." She was impatient to get away from him. The wisps of her hair caught the backlight from the hallway and threw lacy shadows across her forehead.
"No," he said on a note that rose and fell in a way he hadn't quite intended, looking up at her, watching her fingers curled loosely around the handle of his door. "I remember we slept together. In Ann Arbor. The night I played at the Old Town."
She had gone completely still. "Oh," she said. "You never..."
"No." He sat down. He had been thinking about telling her all of this for weeks, rehearsing it in his head as he played through the familiar structures of Bach sonatas. There were times to act, opportune moments that would pass before he could limp to the starting line unless he made them happen. Her date with Wilson had frightened him: the cancer scare, the nearly as frightening reality that she might have a child and get all wrapped up in someone else. As (the philosopher, he added parenthetically, smirking) Joni Mitchell said, you didn't know what you had until it was gone, or until you'd almost lost it to hypothetical cancer or her own deep need to have anyone's child. "Do you remember my sleeping sickness patient?"
"What does that have to do with anything?" Her hand tightened on the door. From his desk he could see her calves tensing. Cuddy didn't run from much, but he wouldn't blame her if she ran from him.
"I was there when she woke up." He hesitated.
"You went to see a patient?" she asked, but her voice was rougher than it should be and he knew she was upset. She had become a doctor because she wanted to heal people and make lives better. He had become a doctor because he wanted to know everything, to stand unsurprised at all the little ways his body would fail him, and the bigger ways. Watching his patients walk out of the hospital under their own power was a mildly compelling side benefit, but the laying on of hands had never been his endall. Maybe he'd been wrong. He wouldn't change, but he could admit an error.
"She woke up because her husband asked her to. He brought her out of the end of a coma with just the sound of his voice. The strength of psychological bonds is something that we can't always explain medically. Call it love, whatever you want." He looked down at his hands on the desk and pushed some papers together. "I've never been that guy."
"I didn't ask you to be," she said, her chest rising and falling with her slightly accelerated breath. He watched her with a mix of clinical detachment, evaluating her stress level, and some new tightness in his chest. "It was one night, House. Even a college girl doesn't expect a lifetime commitment from a one night stand. I thought you were too altered to remember."
"I wanted to be that guy," he said quietly. "But I'm not and I never would have been."
She shook her head. "That's why you never called? That's why you pretended we'd never met?" He shrugged and she leaned against his bookshelf, her mouth twisted with irony. "The world's greatest perfectionist."
"There's nothing wrong with wanting to do things right, Cuddy."
"Something wrong with doing them right or not at all," she retorted.
"It must really piss you off that my percentages are excellent," he said.
Her chin jerked up in resentful agreement. "They are excellent. Fortunately for this hospital. Unfortunately for the rest of us." She took a deep breath. "Why are we having this conversation?"
"Come on," he said, trying for affable and not quite getting there. "I thought you loved discussing my inadequacies."
"Professionally. Not romantically. Unlike you, I understand that some things are none of my business." She stopped, looked for a moment as if she were fighting against the impulse to say something else. "Anyway, you were that guy for Stacy."
"No," he said with real regret. "Otherwise she wouldn't have slept with you. Or Wilson. I couldn't love her more than my leg, or that was how she saw it."
She crossed her arms across her chest. He liked what that did to her cleavage. "You knew?"
"She started wearing your perfume," he said. "You smelled like cigarettes. She stopped calling Wilson by his first name. I was killing all of you."
"You were," she said, and he half expected her to be crying, but Cuddy was strong. She always had been. That was why he had liked her when he met her in Michigan: the straightness of her back in the club, the glint in her eye that meant she was going to work her ass off to get what she wanted. "Why are you telling me all of this, House?"
He stuck his hand in his pocket for his pill bottle and rattled the tablets. "Liquid courage. Well. Not liquid."
"The pain is worse?" Her voice was soft. She was giving him her doctor eyes and the compassion almost killed him. Cuddy, forever guilty.
"It has been." He tipped his head and looked at her. "I owed you, Cuddy. For standing up for me. For standing up to me."
"What do you want from me, House?" she asked wearily.
He thought of Stacy in the last weeks of their relationship, the same exhausted tension in the neck that brought out the lovely curve of the trapezius muscle as it met the shoulder. Cuddy had been looking at him this way for years, all her beauty exaggerated by the lean, stressed lines of her.
"You never asked if I remembered," he said.
"It was one night," she said again. "Twenty years ago. I didn't think it meant anything. That's not why I hired you, if that's what you're asking." She was recovering herself now, retreating into sarcasm that gave her words a flat tang. "I haven't been secretly in love with you all this time."
No one has ever thought it was secret, he did not say, remembering questions from Stacy, Wilson, Vogler, Chase, Cameron. He rose slowly and limped over to her, leaving the cane at his desk, stumbling a little against the pile of the carpet. She shifted against the bookcase but did not bolt.
"I liked you," he said. "I liked you a lot. We would have distracted each other. The medicine was more important."
"Yes," she said, and bit her lip. "It was. It is."
"You like me," he said, and watched her teeth sink further into her lip. The tops of her breasts flushed a slow pink under the shadows of the room.
"You're my best doctor," she said in a low voice.
"Anyone else would have fired me."
"I trusted you." She tried to shrug. The points of her shoulders were sharp through the thin fabric of her blouse. She had left her jacket in her office, he thought. A welcome heat washed off of her, rising from the scooped neck of her blouse. In the half-light through the glass wall, her eyeshadow looked bruisy.
"Cuddy." He traced her cheekbone with one finger and she leaned into his touch, eyes fluttering closed as if she were in pain. "I'm not kind, on a daily average. I'm not trustworthy. Tell me how much I cost the hospital, on top of Vogler's hundred million."
"You save lives," she said, eyes still closed. He brushed her hair back, catching the little curls on his fingertips, and kissed the ridge of her cheekbone where it flattened out beneath and a little behind her eye. She shivered, her arms untangling against his chest, and caught at his shirt, sliding from pocket to loose tails, her fingers ending up clasped feebly through his belt loop.
"You love me," he said, his fingers still twined through her curls. He had drawn back just enough that he could focus on her face.
"Of all the self-centered, arrogant assumptions to make," she muttered. Her eyes were open and very blue. She would only look at the place where his collar lay open to show the neck of his t-shirt and the rough skin of his throat.
"You stood by me," he said, untangling his fingers and tracing the line of her jaw. "I don't deserve you."
"I don't," she said, but her fingers clutched at his belt loop. His finger under her chin had tipped her face up and she was looking at him now the way she had looked through the candlelight of her menorah, the time she had invited Wilson for Hannukah dinner and House had invited himself. The fear of God, of the unknown, of something greater: it was something like that and he knew he wasn't God but he knew there were things no one could explain and love was one of them. He had never feared God, but he feared love and so did she, the way it overwhelmed you, the way it dragged you down. She was drowning against him. He should never have started this, but twenty years ago there had been a piano, and a pretty girl with a light in her eyes, and a bottle of wine, and the thrill of beginning something, and now she was reaching out to a nameless man inside a manila folder and he thought that she should have more comfort than a catheter and a lonely prayer.
Twenty years later she still had that light in her eyes, and when he was honest, he had more in mind than some fleeting reassurance, but the only words for it were so difficult to say. It was easier to pretend that the ache in his chest would be eased by the Vicodin, the liberal application of alcohol, and melancholy hours with his piano.
"House," she said, and tried to move away, and it might have worked if she hadn't still been holding his belt loop. She pulled him off balance a little and he stumbled against the bookcase, one arm out stiff to hold himself up and fence her in. She let go of him and moved around through the space between them, almost at the door when he gave up supporting himself and caught at her wrist, banging his hip hard as he crashed against the bookshelf.
"I love you," he said, because he was about to lose her, and he had nothing left but the truth to keep her from going. His life passed before his eyes: Stacy laughing, Wilson puzzled, Cuddy shouting, his father sternly disapproving as his mother tried to make it better with the promise of a sandwich. They all loved him and he had broken all of them, diffident and narcissistic, but they had kept the faith. They were lit candles that had never gone out, and Cuddy perhaps most of all had suffered from the burning.
She made a little noise in her throat as if something had broken inside her and leaned against the door. "I can't," she said, so quiet it was almost nothing against the gentle rasp of the music across the room. He pulled her toward him and she stumbled so that he had to catch her around the waist, and then he kissed her, a desperate last attempt.
He had almost believed her, the lady protesting too much, and when she kissed him back, his relief was so profound that he nearly fell to the floor, overbalancing against the weakness of his thigh and his suddenly unsteady knees.
"You put me in a coma," he whispered against her mouth, "and you brought me back. You restarted my heart."
"Don't get poetic now," she said, and kissed him. Her mouth opened against his, warm and sweet, and her tongue was pushing against his, and he was glad it was late and dim. She was reaching over his shoulder for the cord to close the blinds, almost overbalancing against him so that her body was pressed into his from breast to thigh, and he didn't care if she ever got the windows covered as long as they could stay like this, the heat of her against him and her obliques flexing under the pressure of his fingers. But she found the cord and the blinds rattled across the window, hiding them from nurses on the late shift and patients out of bounds.
"Lean on me," she said when she broke away, and muscled him over to his chair. He was always startled by the strength of her though she'd proved it time and again. She pushed him back into the pale yellow cushions and kicked off her shoes, climbing over his lap so that her skirt rucked up her thighs, the fabric tight. She put her arms over his wrists, pinning them to the armrests, and looked at him with a fierce desire in her face.
"You hurt us," she said, instead of kissing him. "You hurt Stacy so much she left you, when she loved you more than anything. You hurt me and all I wanted was to love you, and so I loved them instead. You hurt Wilson and now he's fucked his way through half the nurses in this hospital." The word was strange and raw from her lips. He was fascinated by the shape of her mouth as she said it. Fucked, the act of love made harsh by pain and need, and he imagined her suddenly pressed up against Stacy, straddling Wilson, and groaned a little. Penitence had never been his strong suit and he ached with his want for her. He was throbbing all over trying to get closer, but she had him well pinned.
"I fucked them because it was better than crying," she told him. "I loved them because it was as close as I could get to loving you and healing them." Her breath on his face was driving him crazy, and the smell of her shampoo, and the stretch of her skirt over her smooth thighs.
"I'm broken," he said slowly, "but you can have me." It was a wrench to find the words and push them out between his teeth. He had lived in his head all his life, accountable to no one. He wasn't sure what she wanted. There were no apologies for the way they had all lived, but he did love her, with a deep-seated fervor that surprised him.
She leaned forward and kissed him, surprising him, pushing one hand around the back of his neck so that he had a hand free to run under the back of her shirt as she nipped at his lips. She put the other hand on his face and he started to undo her buttons as he kissed her, letting her lead, astounded by the feel of her tongue in his mouth.
"I love you," he said again into her mouth, just to hear her breath catch, and she let her hand slip down his face to his chest and then his pants, cupping over the place where the fabric stretched over his erection.
"Fuck me," she told him, and his cock jumped underneath her hand, and he couldn't stop the groan from escaping his mouth. She smiled a wicked smile and shrugged off the shirt that he had unbuttoned, and he put his hands behind her shoulder blades and pulled her forward so that her breasts were against his face as he undid the clasps of her bra. He pulled a nipple into his mouth as his tongue worked against the underside and Cuddy moaned. She fumbled with the fly of his pants, racheting the zipper down roughly, and he lifted his hips so that she could slide thick denim and thin cotton down his thighs. The air of the office was cool against the heat of his arousal, and he pushed Cuddy's skirt up impatiently, his fingers pushing aside the lace of her underwear to reach her clit. He stroked it lightly with his thumb, pressing two fingers inside her, looking for the rough patch that was her g-spot. She made another soft long sound and shifted off of him, going to the door and flicking the lock home before stepping out of her panties and rolling off her stockings. She left her skirt on, hips swaying a little as she walked back to him on bare feet, and he struggled out of his shirts but couldn't kick his jeans all the way off. She paused just out of reach, her eyes drinking him in, and he swallowed hard at the sight of her, all curves and shadow and then pale honey where the light touched her. She crossed her arms and blushed a little.
"This wasn't," he began, "this wasn't how I envisioned this."
"I'll bet," she said, dry as a good martini. He wanted to get up and fold her in his arms but he was hobbled by denim and lust. "We had wine and song the first time, House. If that was what I was waiting for, I wouldn't be here with you."
He was struck by the certainty that this would be all right, whatever was starting again between them. "I love you," he told her, and every time it got easier.
"I love you," she said, and softened just a little. "But it doesn't fix things."
"I know," he said, watching her. She came the few feet to him and bent briefly over his groin, one hand wrapping around the base of his cock as her mouth closed over him and her tongue flicked against the underside of his shaft. He voiced wordless amazement, clutching the arms of the chair, and she drew back and straddled him.
"Previews," she said, holding herself over him so that his head just brushed against her curls. "But now...." She eased down, her eyelids dropping as he pushed into her and she began to rock against him. She was so wet it left a slick of dampness on his thighs, and he thought he would have to consider that later, when his brain worked instead of being the processing unit for the bone-melting pleasure of being inside Cuddy. She was gorgeous above him, hair loose over her shoulders, and he kissed her breasts as they came close to make her mewl. He had one hand on her hip, the other against her clit as she rolled her hips against his, and it was all happening too fast but he didn't want her to slow down, and he worked his fingers increasingly faster against her clit and let her move against him. He tried thinking about clinic duty, cable bills, vacuuming, but nothing helped, and all he could do was hope that Cuddy was wired as tightly as he was. She brought her head down, muffling her whimpers against his mouth, and he squeezed her ass with his free hand, feeling her muscles tensing against his wrist. He jerked his hips against her, trying to help, and she made a little strangled noise and spasmed around him, breathing out the grating consonants of his first name on the downswing of her orgasm, and the sound of her voice saying "Greg" was incredible and he was coming too, thrusting roughly inside her as the low light of the room turned into a thousand candles.
When his brain functioned again, he found that Cuddy was lying against his chest and he was stroking her hair, and her face was damp in the lamplight, just a couple of tears. He kissed them away, bending his neck awkwardly and trying not to scrape his stubble over the tender skin of her cheeks.
"I think I have some moist towelettes in the desk," he offered, and she laughed, almost a sob, and he smiled against her forehead because they weren't whole or well, but it was a start.