Blessings, part 6
Title: Blessings, part 6
Pairings, characters: House/Cuddy established.
Rating: G
Warning: some angst
Summary: “It is one of the blessings of old friends that we can afford to be stupid with them.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson. A sharkverse fic, in which House and Cuddy are still together 6 years after the end of “Help Me.”
“Did you talk to Rachel’s teacher? “ Fizzou addressed House through the open door between their offices. “After Cuddy specifically told you not to ever do that again?”
“The entire conversation consisted of, ‘Good Morning, Doctor House; Good morning Mrs. Crown.’ For God's sake, Cuddy didn’t want me to snub the woman.”
Fizzou shook his head and raised the phone back to his ear. “I’m pretty sure he was supposed to snub her,” Rachel said.
“Have a good practice, Punk. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.” Fizzou hung up.
“Do me a favor,” he said to House, who was now looming in the doorway to the outer office looking persecuted. “When in doubt, err on the side of snubbery.”
He went back to his desk and started churning out answers to conference invitations. There was a rhythm to the task: Address, Date, Dear Sirs, No., Sincerely yours, Gregory House MD; Address, Date, To Whom it May Concern, No., Sincerely, Gregory House MD. No; No; No. Rinse, repeat.
He’d have used a boilerplate, but it was more satisfying this way, and it made him look busy. It was boring, but Fizzou had always liked boring. In Fizzou’s considerable experience, boring beat the crap out of random and depressing any day.
If a request seemed especially plaintive, or if it came from North Carolina, he’d change the body of the letter to, “Hell, no. Go away.” Once in a while he’d boldface the No, just to mix things up. House approved of this. Fizzou approved of making House happy.
“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” House asked.
“Turkey, sage stuffing. Sweet potatoes.” Fizzou concentrated on blowing off a tragically persistent infectious disease board. “Mashed potatoes, gravy, yeast rolls, green beans, corn, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, walnut cake, blood orange mimosas.” The printer on his desk hiccupped, threatening to implode from all that gracious negativity, and he gave it a pat of encouragement. Although Fizzou dearly missed the proud little ping! of his old beloved manual typewriter’s carriage return, he felt fond of the printer. He and that printer were the only things in this office that ever seemed to work all the time and do exactly what they were told, so he figured they shared a bond.
“Are you quite sure that’s going to be enough?” Chase asked.
Fizzou nodded and picked up a pencil and his shopping list. “And peas with those pearl onions,” he added. “Wait; what am I doing? Nobody likes those. Macaroni and cheese.”
“Whew, that’s better,” Chase said. “You can’t leave out a carbohydrate covered in fat; it would be unpatriotic. Are you really so nervous about hosting this Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Oh, no, I’ve always had this twitch over my left eye,” Fizzou said. “It has nothing to do with feeding eight finicky people and celebrating my first big holiday with my girlfriend. I’m not stressed.” He added an exclamation point to a no, and then deleted it.
“April would be happy with a sandwich and an iced coffee, if it came from you.”
“That well may be, but I’ve got standards,” Fizzou replied, being rude to some editor who had the audacity to ask House to moderate a panel discussion. “You clowns just all better remember your assignments. Taub’s bringing the cider April likes, Shaeffer’s doing the banana pudding with vanilla wafers, and Kate promised to get that cinnamon ice cream from Aldo’s. You, are signed up for the after-dinner cigars and cognac. Do not disappoint me.”
“What do you want me to bring?”
Chase stared at House. “But we thought you were,”
“Huh? It’s at your house, Man,” Fizzou reminded him dully.
Ignoring their concerned frowns, House popped a couple of pills and limped over to the massage chair. “Change in plans. Whisky?”
Fizzou did some quick mental calculations; he was up to catering for ten people, now, most of them mad as hatters, for six hours in his boss’s house, and said boss was being weird about something.
No, no pressure there at all.
He’d looked forward to being able to play his music as loudly and at whatever hours he chose, to avoid almost all people and their demands, to sleep in late, to eat as often and as eccentrically as he dared.
The music had not sounded as good, and the solitude had been more boring and less soothing than House expected. The junk food gave him gas and heartburn. This was the aging process: the things that at one time excited you, begin to make you constipated and tired. It's hard to be irresponsible and self-destructive when all you want to do is have a good crap and then take a nap.
Worse, five years of sleeping with Cuddy, the pillow thief, had somehow changed House’s spinal physiology. More than four hours prone with a pillow caused an annoyingly painful kink, not of the sexual variety. It barely rated a 4 on his pain scale, but it was relentless, and as any chronic pain sufferer can equate, 4 * neverstops = 9. Overloaded, irritable, and cursing the woman as a literal as well as figurative pain in the neck, House had thrown the pillows into a hall closet three weeks after she left.
These and other minor irritations had receded somewhat as he lowered himself into a graceless domesticity, but House still suffered from … not exactly insomnia; more like sleep avoidance. Exhausted, but wanting to be anywhere but in bed, doing anything but inhaling the lingering scent of a person who did not want him in her own, doubtlessly deliciously fragrant and well-cushioned, bed - where without any competition for blankets she was probably comfortably cocooned in all of the covers, too - House ran his fingers lightly over the keys of his piano, and tried to psych himself up for another long, lost, night.
His stomach growled, but he wasn’t hungry. Or he was, but not in any way that seemed worth sating. House probed at this awareness. His first thought was that there must be a rightness, of some kind, to feeling empty. His second thought was that even his self-pity was beginning to bore him.
He was shuffling through sheet music when there was a warm fuzzy sniffling nudge, and Rachel sat down next to him on the bench.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean it.”
“You kinda did,” he contradicted gently.
She shook her head. “I don’t hate you.”
House opened a book of Gershwin. “It would be okay if you did,” he said. “Hell, I’d pay you, to hate your Nana Arlene.”
“If you pay me to hate Justin I’m going to be rich,” she said sourly.
He played a few notes.
“Mom never flunks anything,” Rachel said fiercely. “She did not have to go to winter school.”
“True. Your mother excels at everything she does.” House rested his fingers on the keys.
“So, she could just work someplace else. She’s smart enough to find another place.”
House had no argument for that reasoning; he’d used it himself. Cuddy had countered that there were few “other places” that would want an un-credentialed chief administrator who had never really practiced medicine. Even fewer, would also employ House.
But Rachel did not seem to be looking, right now, for an excuse to blame him for her unhappiness, or for Cuddy’s. There would be time for that later.
“Let me ask you something,” he said slowly. “If, after you write your book, somebody puts their name on it, and says you should just let them do that because you’re talented enough to write another book, what would you do?”
“Punch ‘em out and take my book back.”
“That’s just what your mom is doing. Metaphorically.”
“Metaphorically?”
“The university wants to take her hospital away from her and give it to somebody else who has a piece of paper, so she’s earning an even more valuable, more impressive piece of paper from Winter School, and then she’s going to shove that piece of paper down their stuck-up, stupid throats, and take her hospital back.”
“Good,” Rachel said, with a determined jerk of her head. “I hope it hurts. Metaphorically.”
“I thought the potential for catastrophe might be a lot lower if at least some of them were drinking the hard stuff,” Fizzou said.
“Unless it’s a lot higher,” April suggested. She was folding laundry while he pretended to read. Fizzou was trying to appreciate the domestic gesture, and he found that a lot easier to do when he had his head in a book and could not see her wrinkle the arms of his t-shirts or smoosh the cuffs of his socks.
“I bet Taub is a maudlin drunk, and Stephens is probably a mean one,” she conjectured. “Chase probably gets flirty. Shaeffer is probably just the way he is sober, only more so. I bet Foreman is the only one out of all of us who’s a happy drunk.”
“Now that’s just fuckin’ scary.”
April turned his Ferris State shirt right side out. “Poor House, poor Cuddy,” she sighed. “She probably just couldn't stand the prospect of having her family with her just to see them leave again so soon. Poor Rachel. How’d she take it?”
“I couldn’t make it all out over the door slamming and crying and throwing stuff, but the general gist was that she hates her mom, she hates school, she hates her Nana Arlene, she hates her coach and her carpool buddy and some kid in her class named Justin, she hates the whole state of Michigan, she hates the stupid old hospital and the stoopid president of the stupid old medical school, and the stupid board of directors and she hates House and she HATES EVERYBODY WHO EVER LIVED EXCEPT FOR FIZZOU! I’m here to tell you, that last part makes me very uncomfortable. I am not ready for that kind of power.”
April slumped onto the sofa, Fizzou’s blue Framingham State t-shirt wadded up in her hands. “House has three hours tomorrow afternoon blocked off on his calendar. What’s that about?”
“Don’t.” Fizzou put his book down.
“He has PT in the mornings, he got a massage today, and he’s not due for another pain management appointment.”
“April, Baby, please don’t.”
“He can’t be meeting with Chan. There’s nothing left for Chan to give him, now that he’s exempted from clinic hours.”
“That, was a mercy to the clinic staff as much as a concession to House,” Fizzou pointed out. “The nurses sent Chan a fruit basket to thank him.”
April pulled his Findley-Sandburg Unified golf shirt out of the basket and smoothed it over her lap. “Is he meeting with the publishers and lawyers again?”
It was a realistic assumption. The battle had been going on for months, and had reached a standoff. House would fire off a draft, explaining that despite his editor’s uncanny resemblance to Queen of the Zombies, he could not get written permission to publish details of their medical case files, from deceased patients. (“I am as thrilled by bureaucratic challenges as the next guy, but dead people are remarkably uncooperative. They simply refuse to take a moment from their busy schedules of decomposing to fill out a HIPAA waiver.”) The attorneys for the hospital would reply in triplicate with some document that seemed to imply that they did not believe House was trying hard enough.
Still, it did not even cross Fizzou’s mind to lie to her. “He’s meeting with a lawyer, for lunch,” he answered, and when April’s face darkened, he repeated, “don’t. You do not know that woman. You don’t ever know, you can’t ever know, what goes on in anyone else’s relationships.”
She twisted the collar of the shirt. “I know everything about her that I need to know.”
“You know what we all do: twenty years ago she made a choice, for reasons we cannot even begin to understand because we have never been in her situation, that affected both of them for the rest of their lives. How they feel about it now, how they feel about each other, is not knowable. They might not even know.”
“Don’t be silly,” she ordered mildly. “Obviously, she made that choice based on love. She knew he was going to hate her for it and it was worth it to her for him to be alive to hate her.”
Her brow puckered. “Love like that, never goes away. Do you love me enough to let me hate you?”
“There is no way in hell I am going to answer that question. I am not stupid.” He opened his book.
“Okay. Anyway, that’s not what I meant. When I said I know everything about her that I need to.”
“You know her social security number and her date of birth, don’t you,” he realized with a sense of doom and admiration.
“That’s all I really need,” she acknowledged brightly. “With those two things I can find out stuff she doesn’t know about her, and if she makes him cry I can do pretty much anything I want to, to her.”
“You’re not going to threaten her, are you?”
“Every time I threaten a person, that person gets all shocked and incredulous. They’re all like, ‘are you threatening me?’ So I’m obviously not very good at it,” she pouted.
“Are you going to threaten him?”
“That would be totally rude.” She picked up the basket and held it against her hip. “Would you like a beer?”
Fizzou shook his head. “I’m good.”
And indeed, he was. In fact, Fizzou was pretty fantastic. He had, after all, a roof over his head, no one shooting at him, and clean laundry.
Part 7
Pairings, characters: House/Cuddy established.
Rating: G
Warning: some angst
Summary: “It is one of the blessings of old friends that we can afford to be stupid with them.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson. A sharkverse fic, in which House and Cuddy are still together 6 years after the end of “Help Me.”
“Did you talk to Rachel’s teacher? “ Fizzou addressed House through the open door between their offices. “After Cuddy specifically told you not to ever do that again?”
“The entire conversation consisted of, ‘Good Morning, Doctor House; Good morning Mrs. Crown.’ For God's sake, Cuddy didn’t want me to snub the woman.”
Fizzou shook his head and raised the phone back to his ear. “I’m pretty sure he was supposed to snub her,” Rachel said.
“Have a good practice, Punk. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.” Fizzou hung up.
“Do me a favor,” he said to House, who was now looming in the doorway to the outer office looking persecuted. “When in doubt, err on the side of snubbery.”
He went back to his desk and started churning out answers to conference invitations. There was a rhythm to the task: Address, Date, Dear Sirs, No., Sincerely yours, Gregory House MD; Address, Date, To Whom it May Concern, No., Sincerely, Gregory House MD. No; No; No. Rinse, repeat.
He’d have used a boilerplate, but it was more satisfying this way, and it made him look busy. It was boring, but Fizzou had always liked boring. In Fizzou’s considerable experience, boring beat the crap out of random and depressing any day.
If a request seemed especially plaintive, or if it came from North Carolina, he’d change the body of the letter to, “Hell, no. Go away.” Once in a while he’d boldface the No, just to mix things up. House approved of this. Fizzou approved of making House happy.
“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” House asked.
“Turkey, sage stuffing. Sweet potatoes.” Fizzou concentrated on blowing off a tragically persistent infectious disease board. “Mashed potatoes, gravy, yeast rolls, green beans, corn, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, walnut cake, blood orange mimosas.” The printer on his desk hiccupped, threatening to implode from all that gracious negativity, and he gave it a pat of encouragement. Although Fizzou dearly missed the proud little ping! of his old beloved manual typewriter’s carriage return, he felt fond of the printer. He and that printer were the only things in this office that ever seemed to work all the time and do exactly what they were told, so he figured they shared a bond.
“Are you quite sure that’s going to be enough?” Chase asked.
Fizzou nodded and picked up a pencil and his shopping list. “And peas with those pearl onions,” he added. “Wait; what am I doing? Nobody likes those. Macaroni and cheese.”
“Whew, that’s better,” Chase said. “You can’t leave out a carbohydrate covered in fat; it would be unpatriotic. Are you really so nervous about hosting this Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Oh, no, I’ve always had this twitch over my left eye,” Fizzou said. “It has nothing to do with feeding eight finicky people and celebrating my first big holiday with my girlfriend. I’m not stressed.” He added an exclamation point to a no, and then deleted it.
“April would be happy with a sandwich and an iced coffee, if it came from you.”
“That well may be, but I’ve got standards,” Fizzou replied, being rude to some editor who had the audacity to ask House to moderate a panel discussion. “You clowns just all better remember your assignments. Taub’s bringing the cider April likes, Shaeffer’s doing the banana pudding with vanilla wafers, and Kate promised to get that cinnamon ice cream from Aldo’s. You, are signed up for the after-dinner cigars and cognac. Do not disappoint me.”
“What do you want me to bring?”
Chase stared at House. “But we thought you were,”
“Huh? It’s at your house, Man,” Fizzou reminded him dully.
Ignoring their concerned frowns, House popped a couple of pills and limped over to the massage chair. “Change in plans. Whisky?”
Fizzou did some quick mental calculations; he was up to catering for ten people, now, most of them mad as hatters, for six hours in his boss’s house, and said boss was being weird about something.
No, no pressure there at all.
He’d looked forward to being able to play his music as loudly and at whatever hours he chose, to avoid almost all people and their demands, to sleep in late, to eat as often and as eccentrically as he dared.
The music had not sounded as good, and the solitude had been more boring and less soothing than House expected. The junk food gave him gas and heartburn. This was the aging process: the things that at one time excited you, begin to make you constipated and tired. It's hard to be irresponsible and self-destructive when all you want to do is have a good crap and then take a nap.
Worse, five years of sleeping with Cuddy, the pillow thief, had somehow changed House’s spinal physiology. More than four hours prone with a pillow caused an annoyingly painful kink, not of the sexual variety. It barely rated a 4 on his pain scale, but it was relentless, and as any chronic pain sufferer can equate, 4 * neverstops = 9. Overloaded, irritable, and cursing the woman as a literal as well as figurative pain in the neck, House had thrown the pillows into a hall closet three weeks after she left.
These and other minor irritations had receded somewhat as he lowered himself into a graceless domesticity, but House still suffered from … not exactly insomnia; more like sleep avoidance. Exhausted, but wanting to be anywhere but in bed, doing anything but inhaling the lingering scent of a person who did not want him in her own, doubtlessly deliciously fragrant and well-cushioned, bed - where without any competition for blankets she was probably comfortably cocooned in all of the covers, too - House ran his fingers lightly over the keys of his piano, and tried to psych himself up for another long, lost, night.
His stomach growled, but he wasn’t hungry. Or he was, but not in any way that seemed worth sating. House probed at this awareness. His first thought was that there must be a rightness, of some kind, to feeling empty. His second thought was that even his self-pity was beginning to bore him.
He was shuffling through sheet music when there was a warm fuzzy sniffling nudge, and Rachel sat down next to him on the bench.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean it.”
“You kinda did,” he contradicted gently.
She shook her head. “I don’t hate you.”
House opened a book of Gershwin. “It would be okay if you did,” he said. “Hell, I’d pay you, to hate your Nana Arlene.”
“If you pay me to hate Justin I’m going to be rich,” she said sourly.
He played a few notes.
“Mom never flunks anything,” Rachel said fiercely. “She did not have to go to winter school.”
“True. Your mother excels at everything she does.” House rested his fingers on the keys.
“So, she could just work someplace else. She’s smart enough to find another place.”
House had no argument for that reasoning; he’d used it himself. Cuddy had countered that there were few “other places” that would want an un-credentialed chief administrator who had never really practiced medicine. Even fewer, would also employ House.
But Rachel did not seem to be looking, right now, for an excuse to blame him for her unhappiness, or for Cuddy’s. There would be time for that later.
“Let me ask you something,” he said slowly. “If, after you write your book, somebody puts their name on it, and says you should just let them do that because you’re talented enough to write another book, what would you do?”
“Punch ‘em out and take my book back.”
“That’s just what your mom is doing. Metaphorically.”
“Metaphorically?”
“The university wants to take her hospital away from her and give it to somebody else who has a piece of paper, so she’s earning an even more valuable, more impressive piece of paper from Winter School, and then she’s going to shove that piece of paper down their stuck-up, stupid throats, and take her hospital back.”
“Good,” Rachel said, with a determined jerk of her head. “I hope it hurts. Metaphorically.”
“I thought the potential for catastrophe might be a lot lower if at least some of them were drinking the hard stuff,” Fizzou said.
“Unless it’s a lot higher,” April suggested. She was folding laundry while he pretended to read. Fizzou was trying to appreciate the domestic gesture, and he found that a lot easier to do when he had his head in a book and could not see her wrinkle the arms of his t-shirts or smoosh the cuffs of his socks.
“I bet Taub is a maudlin drunk, and Stephens is probably a mean one,” she conjectured. “Chase probably gets flirty. Shaeffer is probably just the way he is sober, only more so. I bet Foreman is the only one out of all of us who’s a happy drunk.”
“Now that’s just fuckin’ scary.”
April turned his Ferris State shirt right side out. “Poor House, poor Cuddy,” she sighed. “She probably just couldn't stand the prospect of having her family with her just to see them leave again so soon. Poor Rachel. How’d she take it?”
“I couldn’t make it all out over the door slamming and crying and throwing stuff, but the general gist was that she hates her mom, she hates school, she hates her Nana Arlene, she hates her coach and her carpool buddy and some kid in her class named Justin, she hates the whole state of Michigan, she hates the stupid old hospital and the stoopid president of the stupid old medical school, and the stupid board of directors and she hates House and she HATES EVERYBODY WHO EVER LIVED EXCEPT FOR FIZZOU! I’m here to tell you, that last part makes me very uncomfortable. I am not ready for that kind of power.”
April slumped onto the sofa, Fizzou’s blue Framingham State t-shirt wadded up in her hands. “House has three hours tomorrow afternoon blocked off on his calendar. What’s that about?”
“Don’t.” Fizzou put his book down.
“He has PT in the mornings, he got a massage today, and he’s not due for another pain management appointment.”
“April, Baby, please don’t.”
“He can’t be meeting with Chan. There’s nothing left for Chan to give him, now that he’s exempted from clinic hours.”
“That, was a mercy to the clinic staff as much as a concession to House,” Fizzou pointed out. “The nurses sent Chan a fruit basket to thank him.”
April pulled his Findley-Sandburg Unified golf shirt out of the basket and smoothed it over her lap. “Is he meeting with the publishers and lawyers again?”
It was a realistic assumption. The battle had been going on for months, and had reached a standoff. House would fire off a draft, explaining that despite his editor’s uncanny resemblance to Queen of the Zombies, he could not get written permission to publish details of their medical case files, from deceased patients. (“I am as thrilled by bureaucratic challenges as the next guy, but dead people are remarkably uncooperative. They simply refuse to take a moment from their busy schedules of decomposing to fill out a HIPAA waiver.”) The attorneys for the hospital would reply in triplicate with some document that seemed to imply that they did not believe House was trying hard enough.
Still, it did not even cross Fizzou’s mind to lie to her. “He’s meeting with a lawyer, for lunch,” he answered, and when April’s face darkened, he repeated, “don’t. You do not know that woman. You don’t ever know, you can’t ever know, what goes on in anyone else’s relationships.”
She twisted the collar of the shirt. “I know everything about her that I need to know.”
“You know what we all do: twenty years ago she made a choice, for reasons we cannot even begin to understand because we have never been in her situation, that affected both of them for the rest of their lives. How they feel about it now, how they feel about each other, is not knowable. They might not even know.”
“Don’t be silly,” she ordered mildly. “Obviously, she made that choice based on love. She knew he was going to hate her for it and it was worth it to her for him to be alive to hate her.”
Her brow puckered. “Love like that, never goes away. Do you love me enough to let me hate you?”
“There is no way in hell I am going to answer that question. I am not stupid.” He opened his book.
“Okay. Anyway, that’s not what I meant. When I said I know everything about her that I need to.”
“You know her social security number and her date of birth, don’t you,” he realized with a sense of doom and admiration.
“That’s all I really need,” she acknowledged brightly. “With those two things I can find out stuff she doesn’t know about her, and if she makes him cry I can do pretty much anything I want to, to her.”
“You’re not going to threaten her, are you?”
“Every time I threaten a person, that person gets all shocked and incredulous. They’re all like, ‘are you threatening me?’ So I’m obviously not very good at it,” she pouted.
“Are you going to threaten him?”
“That would be totally rude.” She picked up the basket and held it against her hip. “Would you like a beer?”
Fizzou shook his head. “I’m good.”
And indeed, he was. In fact, Fizzou was pretty fantastic. He had, after all, a roof over his head, no one shooting at him, and clean laundry.
Part 7