Title Insurance
Title: Title Insurance
Characters, Pairings: Chase, Cuddy/Lucas, House/Wilson.
Warning: Quite silly. Features a sick wilson and a matchmaking Chase.
Summary: It's all going so well, until it isn't. Sequel to "The Asking Price." 1600 words, complete.
"You can't have him, he's not yours, he's MINE!" House bellows.
"Actually, no, he's not, he's mine," Cuddy replies, her voice hard and even. "More importantly, so are you."
Chase and Taub, standing just outside the dean's office, exchange a look.
"Ten bucks on Cuddy, " Taub says.
"They're fighting about Foreman, not Wilson," Nurse Jeffrey says.
"Oh. Then, ten bucks on House."
"No bet," Chase says, with just the hint of a smirk.
"That woman," House mutters again. "Thinks she can just appropriate whoever she wants, whenever she needs to get laid."
Chase takes advantage of his boss' distraction and moves a knight into position. "I don't remember you bitching this much when she put Cameron in charge during her maternity leave."
"That was different." House slides a rook forward. "I had Cameron all broken in. And what the hell is Cuddy doing, taking a honeymoon, anyway?"
Chase counters immediately. "Have you been able to figure out where they're going, yet?"
"It's ridiculous, a woman her age," House grumbles. "She shacked up with Lucas for almost a year before they even got married. Even Wilson, the buy-three-get-one-free proposer, had more class than that."
Chase studies him for a long moment before he says, "Check."
It's all going so well, until it isn't.
It was easy enough to talk Wilson into taking House on vacation -- no one had a more vested interest in defusing House than the man who lived with his confounding moods -- but Cuddy and House's dynamic is more like an acquired immune response than a contact dermatitis, and it's one thing to remove an irritant, and another thing entirely to detoxify an entire physiology.
Chase wrinkles his nose at that thought, and flings one of Cuddy's suitcases into the boot of his car.
"I'm really, really sorry," Lucas is saying to her. "I had no idea they were so picky."
"It's right there on the damned travel itinerary," Cuddy snaps. Her eyes are red and puffy.
"My passport expires five and a half months after we were supposed to get back, for fuck's sake!" Lucas wails, and she nails him with a walleyed stare.
"Exactly. Which is not, six months."
"I'm really really sorry, Babe," Lucas repeats, climbing into the back seat beside his wife.
"I know you are," she sighs.
"We can still have a good vacation," Lucas insists. "I'll find a bed and breakfast on the coast."
"Maybe tomorrow. Right now I just want to go home."
She is still looking forlornly out the window when Lucas pipes up, "Hey, that was our exit! Where are we going?"
"LaGuardia Airport," Chase replies. "There's a one-day passport renewal office on the fourth floor of the international terminal, and a flight to Heathrow leaving at nine-thirty tonight."
"No shit?!"
"No shit."
Cuddy looks pensively at Chase in the mirror, and gives him a wan smile. "And you knew this, how?"
He shrugs. "I have it on very good authority."
"Come back," Foreman says, "when you have evidence of enough tumor lysis to justify this." He pushes the file across Cuddy's desk.
Chase cocks his head. "Seriously? Have you forgotten what happened the last time we waited until the tumor exploded before going in to stop the leakage into the patient's spine? Oh, hold it, of course you don't remember that, because it never happened. We don't take those sorts of chances."
Foreman narrows his eyes. "Why are you trying to be House?"
"I'm trying to do my job," Chase says, in a deeply aggrieved tone -- the one, as it happens, that he learned from House.
"And I'm trying to do mine. Stop making it harder for me."
"Harder?" Chase scoffs. "I got House out of the bloody country for you, what more do you want?"
Foreman pouts and bobs his head. "Fine. Just get the consent form signed."
""I hope Cuddy got her trip all sorted out," Wilson says.
"Yes, you can tell House he was right, and she's quite gratefully on her way to Norway as we speak." Chase interprets smoothly. "How is he?"
"Relaxed. As they say here, un-Belize-ably so," Wilson chuckles. Chase can hear contentment in his voice, and almost nothing else; there's no clacking of a pool cue, no bar chatter, no pagers beeping or machines clanging or televised machine gun fire or piano music, and no yelling. It's as if Wilson is calling from a sensory deprivation chamber, or House is calm. "I keep checking him for signs of boredom or existential angst or some kind of disgruntlement, but so far he's been perfectly gruntled, even, dare I say, un-miserable. I've even managed to get him to come with me on the river cruise, and on a snorkeling sail and picnic, and if you can believe it, bird-watching."
Chase feels reality slip out of his grasp for a moment. "In that case, feel free to stay as long as you like."
"Well, there is this one thing you can do for us."
"Name it."
"One of the other tourists has the flu. Anyway, I'm sure it's the flu; House wants to run some blood tests."
"He can't maneuver his way into a clinic with a whiteboard anywhere on the island?" Chase is bemused.
"There's a tropical storm, Eduardo, expected to hit the mainland sometime in the morning. The native doctors have flown over there to get ready for casualties."
"You're not evacuating too?"
"I think we're safer here than in one of those ridiculously tiny little planes. They're like soup cans with wings. I practically fell out of ours when we hit some turbulence on the way over here."
"Are you okay?"
"Not so much as a bruise, and I was fine after, but now I feel like I was hit by a train. I think the wing had duct tape on it. Anyway, they're saying we should expect the power to go out tonight, so House is out trying to snag a microscope now."
"Have him send me a slide and a patient history before you lose internet, then. I'll get the gang together for a remote ddx."
"Thanks. Take care!"
"You too," Chase says, with a vague tickle of worry at the back of his mind. House, bird-watching?
"Ah, the happy reunion," Foreman says, as he sits down next to Thirteen at the diagnostics conference table.
"Looks more like a boxing match," Taub observes.
He's right. House and Cuddy are squared off in his office.
"Pearl Jam concerts?" he asks scornfully.
"They're Lucas' favorite band," Cuddy says defensively. "Dengue fever?"
"It's Wilson's favorite mosquito-borne disease."
Wilson fidgets and scratches his neck. "I'm fine, now, thanks for asking," he says weakly. He does look much better, although the rash has left one side of his face looking sunburned. He's told Chase that he mistook the worse rash on his ass for sand flea bites; Chase didn't ask for further detail.
"This hospital is not paying eleven hundred dollars for a lawn mower," Cuddy says, and wags an envelope under House's nose.
"It was an ambulance," House says indignantly.
"The city of San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, says it was a lawnmower, and you wrapped it around a palm tree."
"It was a banana palm, and I was using the lawn mow.... the tractor, to pull a trailer full of supplies and two sick people to our hotel where I could treat them, ergo, it was an ambulance. And the city of San Pedro owes me, for single-handedly treating an outbreak."
"Sixteen people is not an outbreak."
"Out of a population of thirteen thousand? The World Health Organization would beg to differ with you on that," House shoots back. "And it would have been worse, if tropical storm Edmundo --"
"Eduardo," Wilson corrects mildly.
"-- hadn't wiped out transport for six days, confining the outbreak."
"And that's another thing," Cuddy says, and moves in on House. "I authorized one week of vacation for you and Wilson. I did not authorize thirteen days of vacation, for anyone."
"Which is why I cleverly took only 7 days of vacation. For the remainder of that time, Wilson was on sick leave, and I was working. In a hurricane."
"Tropical storm, actually," Wilson says.
"You were wreaking havoc."
"That's what I do at work," House says reasonably.
"Nevertheless," Cuddy concedes. "Six days of the this will be unpaid."
House scowls ferociously. "One."
"Five. And from now on, you and Wilson have to submit any request for joint leave three months in advance. I can't have two of my best department heads get sucked into a hurricane --"
"--tropical storm," Wilson says.
"-- at the same time, without warning."
"Two days," House says.
"Five. Final offer."
"We're requesting a week, September 21-25, right now," Wilson says firmly.
In unison, Cuddy and House swivel their heads toward him.
"You're what?" Cuddy asks.
"We're what?" House asks.
"We're getting married," Wilson says shakily. "and going on a honeymoon, in New Orleans, September 21st."
He looks sheepishly over at House. "I was planning on proposing on the island, but with Eduardo and the itching and bleeding and throwing up and almost falling out of a plane and the sand fleas and the lawnmower crash, I didn't get around to it."
Cuddy takes a step backward. She looks at Wilson, then at House, then back at Wilson, and then down at the envelope in her hand.
"I accept," House says. He turns to Cuddy. "Two days."
"Congratulations," she says dully. She looks like she's just been drained.
"Holy shit," Taub mutters.
"That about covers it," Foreman says.
"The wedding preparations are going to be interesting," Thirteen predicts.
"Are we going to have to buy them a wedding gift?" Taub asks, horrified. "What do you think they'll want?"
"A gift certificate to Gay, Bath and Beyond is always nice," Thirteen suggests sarcastically.
"Offhand," Chase says, watching Cuddy embrace Wilson in a loose, uncomfortable hug, "I'd say they'd be happy with six days of paid vacation and a Belizian lawnmower."
A/N: Written for the Sick Wilson Bingo Challenge. Prompts were lawnmower, outbreak, island, storm, and power outage.
Characters, Pairings: Chase, Cuddy/Lucas, House/Wilson.
Warning: Quite silly. Features a sick wilson and a matchmaking Chase.
Summary: It's all going so well, until it isn't. Sequel to "The Asking Price." 1600 words, complete.
"You can't have him, he's not yours, he's MINE!" House bellows.
"Actually, no, he's not, he's mine," Cuddy replies, her voice hard and even. "More importantly, so are you."
Chase and Taub, standing just outside the dean's office, exchange a look.
"Ten bucks on Cuddy, " Taub says.
"They're fighting about Foreman, not Wilson," Nurse Jeffrey says.
"Oh. Then, ten bucks on House."
"No bet," Chase says, with just the hint of a smirk.
"That woman," House mutters again. "Thinks she can just appropriate whoever she wants, whenever she needs to get laid."
Chase takes advantage of his boss' distraction and moves a knight into position. "I don't remember you bitching this much when she put Cameron in charge during her maternity leave."
"That was different." House slides a rook forward. "I had Cameron all broken in. And what the hell is Cuddy doing, taking a honeymoon, anyway?"
Chase counters immediately. "Have you been able to figure out where they're going, yet?"
"It's ridiculous, a woman her age," House grumbles. "She shacked up with Lucas for almost a year before they even got married. Even Wilson, the buy-three-get-one-free proposer, had more class than that."
Chase studies him for a long moment before he says, "Check."
It's all going so well, until it isn't.
It was easy enough to talk Wilson into taking House on vacation -- no one had a more vested interest in defusing House than the man who lived with his confounding moods -- but Cuddy and House's dynamic is more like an acquired immune response than a contact dermatitis, and it's one thing to remove an irritant, and another thing entirely to detoxify an entire physiology.
Chase wrinkles his nose at that thought, and flings one of Cuddy's suitcases into the boot of his car.
"I'm really, really sorry," Lucas is saying to her. "I had no idea they were so picky."
"It's right there on the damned travel itinerary," Cuddy snaps. Her eyes are red and puffy.
"My passport expires five and a half months after we were supposed to get back, for fuck's sake!" Lucas wails, and she nails him with a walleyed stare.
"Exactly. Which is not, six months."
"I'm really really sorry, Babe," Lucas repeats, climbing into the back seat beside his wife.
"I know you are," she sighs.
"We can still have a good vacation," Lucas insists. "I'll find a bed and breakfast on the coast."
"Maybe tomorrow. Right now I just want to go home."
She is still looking forlornly out the window when Lucas pipes up, "Hey, that was our exit! Where are we going?"
"LaGuardia Airport," Chase replies. "There's a one-day passport renewal office on the fourth floor of the international terminal, and a flight to Heathrow leaving at nine-thirty tonight."
"No shit?!"
"No shit."
Cuddy looks pensively at Chase in the mirror, and gives him a wan smile. "And you knew this, how?"
He shrugs. "I have it on very good authority."
"Come back," Foreman says, "when you have evidence of enough tumor lysis to justify this." He pushes the file across Cuddy's desk.
Chase cocks his head. "Seriously? Have you forgotten what happened the last time we waited until the tumor exploded before going in to stop the leakage into the patient's spine? Oh, hold it, of course you don't remember that, because it never happened. We don't take those sorts of chances."
Foreman narrows his eyes. "Why are you trying to be House?"
"I'm trying to do my job," Chase says, in a deeply aggrieved tone -- the one, as it happens, that he learned from House.
"And I'm trying to do mine. Stop making it harder for me."
"Harder?" Chase scoffs. "I got House out of the bloody country for you, what more do you want?"
Foreman pouts and bobs his head. "Fine. Just get the consent form signed."
""I hope Cuddy got her trip all sorted out," Wilson says.
"Yes, you can tell House he was right, and she's quite gratefully on her way to Norway as we speak." Chase interprets smoothly. "How is he?"
"Relaxed. As they say here, un-Belize-ably so," Wilson chuckles. Chase can hear contentment in his voice, and almost nothing else; there's no clacking of a pool cue, no bar chatter, no pagers beeping or machines clanging or televised machine gun fire or piano music, and no yelling. It's as if Wilson is calling from a sensory deprivation chamber, or House is calm. "I keep checking him for signs of boredom or existential angst or some kind of disgruntlement, but so far he's been perfectly gruntled, even, dare I say, un-miserable. I've even managed to get him to come with me on the river cruise, and on a snorkeling sail and picnic, and if you can believe it, bird-watching."
Chase feels reality slip out of his grasp for a moment. "In that case, feel free to stay as long as you like."
"Well, there is this one thing you can do for us."
"Name it."
"One of the other tourists has the flu. Anyway, I'm sure it's the flu; House wants to run some blood tests."
"He can't maneuver his way into a clinic with a whiteboard anywhere on the island?" Chase is bemused.
"There's a tropical storm, Eduardo, expected to hit the mainland sometime in the morning. The native doctors have flown over there to get ready for casualties."
"You're not evacuating too?"
"I think we're safer here than in one of those ridiculously tiny little planes. They're like soup cans with wings. I practically fell out of ours when we hit some turbulence on the way over here."
"Are you okay?"
"Not so much as a bruise, and I was fine after, but now I feel like I was hit by a train. I think the wing had duct tape on it. Anyway, they're saying we should expect the power to go out tonight, so House is out trying to snag a microscope now."
"Have him send me a slide and a patient history before you lose internet, then. I'll get the gang together for a remote ddx."
"Thanks. Take care!"
"You too," Chase says, with a vague tickle of worry at the back of his mind. House, bird-watching?
"Ah, the happy reunion," Foreman says, as he sits down next to Thirteen at the diagnostics conference table.
"Looks more like a boxing match," Taub observes.
He's right. House and Cuddy are squared off in his office.
"Pearl Jam concerts?" he asks scornfully.
"They're Lucas' favorite band," Cuddy says defensively. "Dengue fever?"
"It's Wilson's favorite mosquito-borne disease."
Wilson fidgets and scratches his neck. "I'm fine, now, thanks for asking," he says weakly. He does look much better, although the rash has left one side of his face looking sunburned. He's told Chase that he mistook the worse rash on his ass for sand flea bites; Chase didn't ask for further detail.
"This hospital is not paying eleven hundred dollars for a lawn mower," Cuddy says, and wags an envelope under House's nose.
"It was an ambulance," House says indignantly.
"The city of San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, says it was a lawnmower, and you wrapped it around a palm tree."
"It was a banana palm, and I was using the lawn mow.... the tractor, to pull a trailer full of supplies and two sick people to our hotel where I could treat them, ergo, it was an ambulance. And the city of San Pedro owes me, for single-handedly treating an outbreak."
"Sixteen people is not an outbreak."
"Out of a population of thirteen thousand? The World Health Organization would beg to differ with you on that," House shoots back. "And it would have been worse, if tropical storm Edmundo --"
"Eduardo," Wilson corrects mildly.
"-- hadn't wiped out transport for six days, confining the outbreak."
"And that's another thing," Cuddy says, and moves in on House. "I authorized one week of vacation for you and Wilson. I did not authorize thirteen days of vacation, for anyone."
"Which is why I cleverly took only 7 days of vacation. For the remainder of that time, Wilson was on sick leave, and I was working. In a hurricane."
"Tropical storm, actually," Wilson says.
"You were wreaking havoc."
"That's what I do at work," House says reasonably.
"Nevertheless," Cuddy concedes. "Six days of the this will be unpaid."
House scowls ferociously. "One."
"Five. And from now on, you and Wilson have to submit any request for joint leave three months in advance. I can't have two of my best department heads get sucked into a hurricane --"
"--tropical storm," Wilson says.
"-- at the same time, without warning."
"Two days," House says.
"Five. Final offer."
"We're requesting a week, September 21-25, right now," Wilson says firmly.
In unison, Cuddy and House swivel their heads toward him.
"You're what?" Cuddy asks.
"We're what?" House asks.
"We're getting married," Wilson says shakily. "and going on a honeymoon, in New Orleans, September 21st."
He looks sheepishly over at House. "I was planning on proposing on the island, but with Eduardo and the itching and bleeding and throwing up and almost falling out of a plane and the sand fleas and the lawnmower crash, I didn't get around to it."
Cuddy takes a step backward. She looks at Wilson, then at House, then back at Wilson, and then down at the envelope in her hand.
"I accept," House says. He turns to Cuddy. "Two days."
"Congratulations," she says dully. She looks like she's just been drained.
"Holy shit," Taub mutters.
"That about covers it," Foreman says.
"The wedding preparations are going to be interesting," Thirteen predicts.
"Are we going to have to buy them a wedding gift?" Taub asks, horrified. "What do you think they'll want?"
"A gift certificate to Gay, Bath and Beyond is always nice," Thirteen suggests sarcastically.
"Offhand," Chase says, watching Cuddy embrace Wilson in a loose, uncomfortable hug, "I'd say they'd be happy with six days of paid vacation and a Belizian lawnmower."
A/N: Written for the Sick Wilson Bingo Challenge. Prompts were lawnmower, outbreak, island, storm, and power outage.