fic
TITLE : techniques in skywriting
AUTHOR : applesred
PAIRING: Cuddy gen, some House/Cuddy, Cuddy/OC
TIMELINE : Season 5
SUMMARY : Incredibly late, for cuddy_fest . Prompt 77. Maybe not everything is supposed to last forever. Certain things are like skywriting; like a really beautiful thing that only lasts for a couple moments.
i. dog
Her father gives her a chocolate lab for Christmas and she names him Rory, all bundle of soft fur and drool.
He's just a month old, the vet says with a smile, just like your age in human terms.
She takes him wherever she goes and sleeps with him cuddled close to her at night, and for a time they were inseparable, Lisa with Rory in her arms or nipping at her heels, and when he dies--a motorcycle swerving at the sidewalk, he was dead long after she found him--she feels his loss, the matted fur, the lack of life, in human terms.
ii. doctor
"Charging!" She yells, both paddles heavy in her hands. "Clear!"
The limp body on the hospital bed gives a quick jerk and settles back lifelessly. Her heart is beating wildly and cold sweat starts to break on her forehead, and she is only dimly aware of the muffled sobs of the patient's daughter somewhere behind her.
"I'm going again--clear!"
She doesn't know how many times she tries to bring this man back to life--it could've been sixty times, for all knows, though later the nurse informs her that it's on the eighth try.
"We have a pulse!" She says in time to the sudden spike in the monitor. "We have a pulse," she repeats.
Later, when her own heart is no longer in danger of stopping and she is able to breathe in and exhale, Lucy hangs on to her waist and grips her lab coat, "Thank you for saving my daddy, Dr. Cuddy," she whispers.
It's the first life she's saved. She can't imagine ever stopping.
iii. office
"It's wonderful," she says.
"You don't find it a little old-fashioned?" The decorator asks, wrinkling his nose. "I think I may have gone a little overboard with the wooden furniture."
"No, no," she assures him, runs her hand lightly on one of the shelves. She loves it, loves the warm light from the antique lamps and the soft colors. She's really just waiting for him to get out of there so she could kick off her shoes and wriggle her toes on the carpet, sit on her desk in her brand new office with the new name on the door.
"I love that it's old-fashioned," she says. "It's very welcoming, for a glass hospital."
"I'm glad you think so," he tells her, with a broad smile. "Well, anytime you feel like you want to trade it in with hotter, more expensive stuff--which is going to be soon, I think--just give me a call."
"Thank you, Michael," she says. "but I don't think there's anything that'll make me change it."
iv. 100,000,000
"Dr. Kepler, I have wonderful news," she says on the phone, twisting the chord. It's not hard to tell she has wonderful news--her cheeks are practically splitting from the grin that's threatening to spill to joyous giggles, and she'd actually wanted to take her secretary into her arms and dance a jig. "I--we have funding for an expansion of the pediatric ward."
She thinks her voice rises to a little squeal at the last syllable, so she clears her throat a little even as she listens to Dr. Kepler's enthuasiastic response.
"Oh yes, he gave it all. Just one string attached, something we could so easily give." She's still smiling as she boots up her computer, cradles the phone on one shoulder. "Yes, yes, absolutely. Send me a report on everything you need and I'll do my best to make sure it happens. But the expansion is definite."
She twists the chord again, around her fingers and looks out at the clinic, and she can't help the laugh that spills from her lips. "Yes. This is really happening."
v. stacy
She used to catch Stacy up on the roof smoking, inhaling and exhaling compulsively like the world depended on each expelled breath, hands jittery, fingers tapping an irregular, impatient beat on the granite wall.
"When I'm stressed," she offers, and Cuddy doesn't have to ask what--or who--causes it. She'd just seen House with a similarly agitated look on his face down in the clinic, abusing another of the night shift nurses.
"It's just, when I'm with him," Stacy begins and stops, and throws her hands up in the air. "Lisa, this is stupid."
Cuddy raises an eyebrow. "Tell me about it."
Though she doesn't really mean tell her about it like tell her about it, every moment in their twisted, painful story that's only ever going to end one way. But Stacy launches into her tirade anyway, hands lifting in frustrated gestures, and Cuddy isn't used to this girlfriend heartfelt talk/Wilson girl version thing but she thinks she can learn.
When Stacy leaves at the end, she stops by Cuddy's office, squeezes her hand and gives her a tiny smile before she goes. It's strangely sharp, the feeling of losing cigarettes on the rooftop, the girltalk thing, the Lisa.
vi. boyfriend
His name was Sean and after sex he would feed her foie gras dripping in truffle sauce with his fingers.
House never does find out about him but Sean found out a lot about House, and on Sundays he used to give her backrubs and chuckle along to her rants about her favorite employee.
"Sounds like I'll like him," he mused once, interrupting his ministrations with a nip to her shoulder.
"You say that now," she replied lazily. "Wait until he scratches your car to say hello."
"Alpha male pissing contests? I'll have him wrapped around my finger with my duck confit," he teased. "Otherwise, I love challenges."
They were together for five months and give or take a few weeks, and on the last day of the last given week when they're on her porch with her feet up on his lap, he tells her that he's leaving for Paris to open a restaurant.
She twirls the stem of her empty wine glass absently. "That's great."
"I'll have my own place there--probably within walking distance of the best shoe stores in Paris," he tells her, tracing the arch of her foot.
She thinks back to this moment more times than she can count, and what could only be a thinly-veiled invitation, and knows that she was as close as she could ever get to throwing away her entire career for a man.
He leaves in the morning with a trail of kisses in her hair, but once in a while--when she catches the smallest whiff of perfume, the smell of leather, the heady scent of wine--she imagines them in Paris, walking the streets at dawn, the wool of his coat clutched in her fist--and she tells herself it wouldn't have been that perfect, it couldn't have been.
vii. goldfish
Her neighbor knocks on her door and gives it to her one day.
Something to brighten up your house, John tells her with a grin, holding up the plastic bag filled with water.
She accepts it with pleasant surprise and spends a Saturday buying colored rocks for it, fake corals, a tiny astronaut exhaling bubbles, some seaweed. She places it on her windowsill, where the light from the aquarium and its small inhabitant greet her after long hours at the hospital.
Then a month later she goes home late for days, trying to close a deal with a donor and when she finally does, she goes home tired but happy, and sees it floating on the surface of the water. She looks at it for a moment and scoops it out with her hand, feels the wet scales on her palm.
viii. mug
It was her father's, bright red ceramic with a fading logo of the Michigan State Spartans on the side. Even when he was still alive she loved wrapping her hands around it, feeling for the warmth of hot coffee in the morning, and when he died she couldn't stand the idea of throwing it away.
It lasted through jugs of black coffee for late night study sessions in college, all the way through steaming peppermint tea for heaps of paperwork. And then late one Sunday night, she's reaching for one of the financial reports on the far right corner of her desk and her father's mug is on the edge (she'd been afraid to spill her coffee on the reports) and her elbow on the handle sends it crashing to the floor.
Lukewarm coffee is spreading across her hardwood floor, inching towards the beige carpets that would be a bitch for maintenance to clean in the morning. She lowers herself to the ground and picks up the handle, separated from the rest of the shards. Her father liked his coffee black as the dead, no sugar, no cream, and she has always been clumsy with precious things.
ix. house
He gets her hospital sued, again. It's someone from his weekly case he pisses off, angry enough that the patient wants his license revoked and the whole hospital down with him.
"It's not my fault he didn't tell me an accurate enough history!" He snaps after she yells at him in her office.
"Yeah well, it's your fault his wife died," she fires back, her anxiety making her careless, "and then you antagonize him about it. Tell me, who the hell wouldn't want your damn license revoked?"
Three hundred fifty thousand dollars and his license saved, and the board on the knife edge of kicking him out themselves, and she doesn't know if she's on board with them or defending him. In the evenings she doesn't speak to him and he doesn't spend the night anymore, and when she chooses him over three hundred fifty thousand--what is it with House and the welfare of a thousand other patients--he thinks it's resolution and absolution, and kisses her mouth like he's breathing her in, grips her waist with a desperation that claws at her chest and later when their breathing is less heavy and his hold on her has slackened, she turns to him in the dark and says, "This isn't working," and she feels him nod against her breastbone, again and again, affirmation, and his answering call.
x. rachel
"For a year, temporarily," the lawyer tells her and she gathers the baby in her arms and examines the sweep of her lashes on her smooth cheek.
"And then we'll see," the lawyer adds softly. She doesn't blame him, she understands the implications of the word; her life is made up of temporary things.
Later at home she does two things that destroy her bounds, however much she knows implicitly that she was never going to uphold them from the beginning. First, she nudges the door to the yellow nursery open and places the baby's socks in the drawer. She does not put her on the crib and instead crosses the hallway to her bedroom and lays her down on the bed. Cuddy knows more than anyone the marks of possession and permanence and from now on there will always be an indent on her sheets, the wool from baby socks in the drawer, and a warm place on her sleeve the baby has firmly held in her fist.
And secondly--it is moments before she slides to sleep, fully clothed, her hand closing around her baby's tiny cheek, and though she knows that she's stepped over some boundary, some line, some cliff from which she is always tumbling down--she closes her eyes and gives her a name.
AUTHOR : applesred
PAIRING: Cuddy gen, some House/Cuddy, Cuddy/OC
TIMELINE : Season 5
SUMMARY : Incredibly late, for cuddy_fest . Prompt 77. Maybe not everything is supposed to last forever. Certain things are like skywriting; like a really beautiful thing that only lasts for a couple moments.
i. dog
Her father gives her a chocolate lab for Christmas and she names him Rory, all bundle of soft fur and drool.
He's just a month old, the vet says with a smile, just like your age in human terms.
She takes him wherever she goes and sleeps with him cuddled close to her at night, and for a time they were inseparable, Lisa with Rory in her arms or nipping at her heels, and when he dies--a motorcycle swerving at the sidewalk, he was dead long after she found him--she feels his loss, the matted fur, the lack of life, in human terms.
ii. doctor
"Charging!" She yells, both paddles heavy in her hands. "Clear!"
The limp body on the hospital bed gives a quick jerk and settles back lifelessly. Her heart is beating wildly and cold sweat starts to break on her forehead, and she is only dimly aware of the muffled sobs of the patient's daughter somewhere behind her.
"I'm going again--clear!"
She doesn't know how many times she tries to bring this man back to life--it could've been sixty times, for all knows, though later the nurse informs her that it's on the eighth try.
"We have a pulse!" She says in time to the sudden spike in the monitor. "We have a pulse," she repeats.
Later, when her own heart is no longer in danger of stopping and she is able to breathe in and exhale, Lucy hangs on to her waist and grips her lab coat, "Thank you for saving my daddy, Dr. Cuddy," she whispers.
It's the first life she's saved. She can't imagine ever stopping.
iii. office
"It's wonderful," she says.
"You don't find it a little old-fashioned?" The decorator asks, wrinkling his nose. "I think I may have gone a little overboard with the wooden furniture."
"No, no," she assures him, runs her hand lightly on one of the shelves. She loves it, loves the warm light from the antique lamps and the soft colors. She's really just waiting for him to get out of there so she could kick off her shoes and wriggle her toes on the carpet, sit on her desk in her brand new office with the new name on the door.
"I love that it's old-fashioned," she says. "It's very welcoming, for a glass hospital."
"I'm glad you think so," he tells her, with a broad smile. "Well, anytime you feel like you want to trade it in with hotter, more expensive stuff--which is going to be soon, I think--just give me a call."
"Thank you, Michael," she says. "but I don't think there's anything that'll make me change it."
iv. 100,000,000
"Dr. Kepler, I have wonderful news," she says on the phone, twisting the chord. It's not hard to tell she has wonderful news--her cheeks are practically splitting from the grin that's threatening to spill to joyous giggles, and she'd actually wanted to take her secretary into her arms and dance a jig. "I--we have funding for an expansion of the pediatric ward."
She thinks her voice rises to a little squeal at the last syllable, so she clears her throat a little even as she listens to Dr. Kepler's enthuasiastic response.
"Oh yes, he gave it all. Just one string attached, something we could so easily give." She's still smiling as she boots up her computer, cradles the phone on one shoulder. "Yes, yes, absolutely. Send me a report on everything you need and I'll do my best to make sure it happens. But the expansion is definite."
She twists the chord again, around her fingers and looks out at the clinic, and she can't help the laugh that spills from her lips. "Yes. This is really happening."
v. stacy
She used to catch Stacy up on the roof smoking, inhaling and exhaling compulsively like the world depended on each expelled breath, hands jittery, fingers tapping an irregular, impatient beat on the granite wall.
"When I'm stressed," she offers, and Cuddy doesn't have to ask what--or who--causes it. She'd just seen House with a similarly agitated look on his face down in the clinic, abusing another of the night shift nurses.
"It's just, when I'm with him," Stacy begins and stops, and throws her hands up in the air. "Lisa, this is stupid."
Cuddy raises an eyebrow. "Tell me about it."
Though she doesn't really mean tell her about it like tell her about it, every moment in their twisted, painful story that's only ever going to end one way. But Stacy launches into her tirade anyway, hands lifting in frustrated gestures, and Cuddy isn't used to this girlfriend heartfelt talk/Wilson girl version thing but she thinks she can learn.
When Stacy leaves at the end, she stops by Cuddy's office, squeezes her hand and gives her a tiny smile before she goes. It's strangely sharp, the feeling of losing cigarettes on the rooftop, the girltalk thing, the Lisa.
vi. boyfriend
His name was Sean and after sex he would feed her foie gras dripping in truffle sauce with his fingers.
House never does find out about him but Sean found out a lot about House, and on Sundays he used to give her backrubs and chuckle along to her rants about her favorite employee.
"Sounds like I'll like him," he mused once, interrupting his ministrations with a nip to her shoulder.
"You say that now," she replied lazily. "Wait until he scratches your car to say hello."
"Alpha male pissing contests? I'll have him wrapped around my finger with my duck confit," he teased. "Otherwise, I love challenges."
They were together for five months and give or take a few weeks, and on the last day of the last given week when they're on her porch with her feet up on his lap, he tells her that he's leaving for Paris to open a restaurant.
She twirls the stem of her empty wine glass absently. "That's great."
"I'll have my own place there--probably within walking distance of the best shoe stores in Paris," he tells her, tracing the arch of her foot.
She thinks back to this moment more times than she can count, and what could only be a thinly-veiled invitation, and knows that she was as close as she could ever get to throwing away her entire career for a man.
He leaves in the morning with a trail of kisses in her hair, but once in a while--when she catches the smallest whiff of perfume, the smell of leather, the heady scent of wine--she imagines them in Paris, walking the streets at dawn, the wool of his coat clutched in her fist--and she tells herself it wouldn't have been that perfect, it couldn't have been.
vii. goldfish
Her neighbor knocks on her door and gives it to her one day.
Something to brighten up your house, John tells her with a grin, holding up the plastic bag filled with water.
She accepts it with pleasant surprise and spends a Saturday buying colored rocks for it, fake corals, a tiny astronaut exhaling bubbles, some seaweed. She places it on her windowsill, where the light from the aquarium and its small inhabitant greet her after long hours at the hospital.
Then a month later she goes home late for days, trying to close a deal with a donor and when she finally does, she goes home tired but happy, and sees it floating on the surface of the water. She looks at it for a moment and scoops it out with her hand, feels the wet scales on her palm.
viii. mug
It was her father's, bright red ceramic with a fading logo of the Michigan State Spartans on the side. Even when he was still alive she loved wrapping her hands around it, feeling for the warmth of hot coffee in the morning, and when he died she couldn't stand the idea of throwing it away.
It lasted through jugs of black coffee for late night study sessions in college, all the way through steaming peppermint tea for heaps of paperwork. And then late one Sunday night, she's reaching for one of the financial reports on the far right corner of her desk and her father's mug is on the edge (she'd been afraid to spill her coffee on the reports) and her elbow on the handle sends it crashing to the floor.
Lukewarm coffee is spreading across her hardwood floor, inching towards the beige carpets that would be a bitch for maintenance to clean in the morning. She lowers herself to the ground and picks up the handle, separated from the rest of the shards. Her father liked his coffee black as the dead, no sugar, no cream, and she has always been clumsy with precious things.
ix. house
He gets her hospital sued, again. It's someone from his weekly case he pisses off, angry enough that the patient wants his license revoked and the whole hospital down with him.
"It's not my fault he didn't tell me an accurate enough history!" He snaps after she yells at him in her office.
"Yeah well, it's your fault his wife died," she fires back, her anxiety making her careless, "and then you antagonize him about it. Tell me, who the hell wouldn't want your damn license revoked?"
Three hundred fifty thousand dollars and his license saved, and the board on the knife edge of kicking him out themselves, and she doesn't know if she's on board with them or defending him. In the evenings she doesn't speak to him and he doesn't spend the night anymore, and when she chooses him over three hundred fifty thousand--what is it with House and the welfare of a thousand other patients--he thinks it's resolution and absolution, and kisses her mouth like he's breathing her in, grips her waist with a desperation that claws at her chest and later when their breathing is less heavy and his hold on her has slackened, she turns to him in the dark and says, "This isn't working," and she feels him nod against her breastbone, again and again, affirmation, and his answering call.
x. rachel
"For a year, temporarily," the lawyer tells her and she gathers the baby in her arms and examines the sweep of her lashes on her smooth cheek.
"And then we'll see," the lawyer adds softly. She doesn't blame him, she understands the implications of the word; her life is made up of temporary things.
Later at home she does two things that destroy her bounds, however much she knows implicitly that she was never going to uphold them from the beginning. First, she nudges the door to the yellow nursery open and places the baby's socks in the drawer. She does not put her on the crib and instead crosses the hallway to her bedroom and lays her down on the bed. Cuddy knows more than anyone the marks of possession and permanence and from now on there will always be an indent on her sheets, the wool from baby socks in the drawer, and a warm place on her sleeve the baby has firmly held in her fist.
And secondly--it is moments before she slides to sleep, fully clothed, her hand closing around her baby's tiny cheek, and though she knows that she's stepped over some boundary, some line, some cliff from which she is always tumbling down--she closes her eyes and gives her a name.