Faint of Heart, Part 5
Title: Faint of Heart, 5/17
Pairing: House/Cuddy established
Warnings: Some explicit content, some fluff.
Summary: House and Cuddy need a vacation, and they take one, but it isn't that simple. Set in the sharkverse, and will include events from "Recession Proof" and "The Last Temptation."
Author’s Note: I posted chapter one of Coming to Terms on June 24 of 2010, so this is my one year blogiversary. Which seems, as House would say, like a really arbitrary thing to celebrate, but there it is. Thank you all for your encouragement over the past year.
It seemed to Cuddy at times that she hadn’t had an adult life, so much as a series of events: college, House, medical school, House, appointment to the deanship, House, motherhood, House, marriage, House, a family vacation.
House.
“So we have a theory we can’t test,” he was saying into his phone. He had his leg stretched out and the passenger seat of her car cranked back as far as it would go. “We can change the theory to something testable, or we could come up with some way to test the theory we have.”
“Unpause!” Rachel demanded from the back seat.
“In a minute, Sweetie,” Cuddy soothed into the rear view mirror. “House is talking.”
“No talking! Shhh. I am watsing this.” Rachel’s chin jutted out, her mouth pinched up, and her tiny feet thrust forward to emphasize the complaint. Except for the pink sandals and pigtails, she looked and sounded exactly like House during episodes of his soap operas.
House looked pensive as he jabbed the remote for the backseat DVD player, and pressed the phone more closely to his ear when Timon and Pumbaa started to sing again. Cuddy gripped the steering wheel more tightly. It was driving her crazy, but she couldn’t bring herself to admit out loud that a carefree animated warthog was stressing her out.
“Put him in a high-intensity PUVA machine until we get something measurable,” House said. “What? Because he’s got the accent, that’s why. Stop bitching, or I’ll make you be Paula.” He tucked his phone into his pocket and went back to staring sullenly out the window.
“Has April even applied for the job?” Cuddy frowned at him.
For the first time since she’d tried to broach this subject with him, he didn’t say anything about his authority over his department or make an attempt to tell her to mind her own business. He only asked, “April who?”
It wasn’t an answer, but it was progress. Finally, he was deflecting her as his personal partner, instead of deflecting her - or tossing her out on her ear -- as his boss.
He reached back, plucked a stuffed animal from the back seat beside Rachel and propped it under his leg as a pillow.
“That’s my duck,” Rachel said.
“Sharing is caring,” he shot back.
“My duck.”
“House,” she said, in the voice of Cuddy his boss, although Cuddy the Employer didn’t particularly care. Rachel had loaded the SUV with so many stuffed toy ducks (and one penguin, two owls, a goose, and a pterodactyl, all of which, to House’s blinding frustration, she insisted on referring to as ducks) that an incursion of plush waterfowl into the front seat was eventually inevitable anyway. Cuddy was a cracking good compartmentalizer, and had been since even before she became a working mother. In this case one of her, the Dean who Employed Greg House, was willing to tolerate a certain degree of excessive birdy cuteness in the life of the other one, The Woman Who Loved Greg House, if it meant getting a better handle on whatever was distressing him.
“My leg,” House said.
“My duck,” Rachel argued. “Mom!”
“Actually, Fang, it’s a swan. Which, by the way, is wrong. Swans aren’t cuddly. In real life, they’re invasive, belligerent and territorial.”
“Takes one to know one,” both Cuddys muttered under her breath.
“What did you just say?” He jerked his head toward her and scowled.
“I said at least they’re mute.”
“Shows what you know. They hiss. They also occasionally,” he narrowed his eyes at Rachel, “slaughter their offspring.”
“Hakuna Matata,” Rachel told him haughtily. She bobbed her head to the music.
“You aren’t wearing a heat wrap,” Cuddy observed, glancing over at his thigh. “And you didn’t use the Jacuzzi last night. Didn’t you have an appointment with Vince yesterday?”
He tossed the duck -swan, whatever -- over his shoulder. It whiffed Rachel in the head, and she giggled. Thankfully, it didn’t occur to her to return fire. An onboard duckfight at sixty-five mph would have been distracting, and very hard to explain to a traffic officer or an insurance adjustor.
“House? What happened at physical therapy? And what’s going on with your med student?”
“You’re going too slow,” he announced. “Cut that loser in front of you off, or we’ll never get there.”
To be fair, allowing for metaphors, that could have been aimed at either one of her.
Cuddy sighed and eyed the GPS on the dashboard. There was nothing for it, she knew, but to put the pedal down and keep her eyes on the road, however rough it might get.
She moved her right hand over to House’s leg, and relaxed a bit when he covered it with his own.
“Leave the driving to me,” she ordered warmly. “We’ll get there.”
“Interesting choice of case to review,” Thirteen said pleasantly. “Can you tell me why you picked it?”
On stage, at the lecture podium, a doctor squinted and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Um,” he said.
Chase rolled his eyes and tapped his foot. “We haven’t got all day,” he grumbled.
“Chase,” Foreman chided. He addressed the doctor: “If you picked it because it was labeled, ‘Teen Supermodel With Seizures,’ that’s really fine. House takes a lot of cases based on his personal …”
“Interest,” Thirteen finished.
“Oh, well,” the doctor blushed. “To be honest, it was a toss-up between this one and the ‘Sex games couple’.”
“Good call,” Thirteen said, and looked down at her notes. “Your initial hypothesis about the drugs was totally predictable, and turned out in the actual case to be false, but you did take the time to verify it and check it against her facebook friends pages, so that was thorough. I liked the way you recommended a download of her laptop in your search for environmental factors. I’m saying yes. Foreman?”
“You made some very good points and asked some relevant questions,” Foreman said. “The idea about her femur to foot length ratio, and the possibility of a genetic spinal deformity was excellent; we didn’t even consider the metabolic bone growth disorder ourselves. So, a go from me, too.”
“Thank you,” the doctor said bashfully. He looked hopefully at Chase.
“You were hesitant, halting, and easily dissuaded,” Chase said. “You lack confidence, and if you even use the term ‘double check to be sure’ in House’s presence, he will eat you alive.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Chase said emphatically. “I just made an assertion, and you could have either argued with it, or used it to your advantage. I’m full of shit, incidentally. If you’d said, ‘then I’ll watch that,’ or ‘I was just nervous’ or made some lame attempt to prove me wrong, I’d think you had a shot. As it is, I have grave reservations. I just intimidated you without breaking a sweat, and I’m a cuddly kitten compared to House.”
“A cuddly kitten with teeth, maybe,” Thirteen said.
“Small teeth,” Foreman agreed, holding his index finger and thumb apart a degree.
“I don’t think you’ll pass the next step. But you may surprise me. Just remember, when it comes to the actual performance, you’re not a supplicant,” Chase said. “You’ll be an equal. Don’t hesitate to call anyone on his, or her, crap.” He waved his hand toward the exit. “The job is yours to lose.”
The doctor, looking very much like a supplicant, hesitated. “Just out of curiosity,” he said. “What was the eventual diagnosis?”
“Testicular cancer,” Thirteen supplied happily.
“Oh. That must have been … fascinating,” he said uncertainly.
“If by fascinating you mean ‘ewww’. Thanks for coming. Doctor Taub will take the file from you on your way out.”
The doctor paused again at the edge of the stairs. He fiddled with his tie for a second, and looked back. “And the couple with the sex games?” he asked.
“The wife is serving fifteen to twenty years for attempted murder,” Chase answered briskly. “That’s another thing: you need to learn to not look shocked. Try to look bored, in fact. I find that reciting the catechism, or the periodic table of elements, in my head helps for that. We’ll see you in two weeks.”
“Thanks. I think. I mean, thanks.”
“Well, that’s a day’s work. One conclusive diagnosis and three new rats for House’s laboratory. How much time do you give that last one?” Chase asked.
“Twenty bucks says less than two hours,” Foreman replied. “I still think I should be Simon.”
“Get over it.” Thirteen released a sigh. “God, our jobs are weird.”
“Mycosis fungoides,” April said. “His response to the PUVA confirmed it.”
“Cutaneous T cell lymphoma.” Shaking his head sadly, Wilson accepted the folder from her. “And an unusual presentation of it at that. Good work.”
“Yeah,” she said unenthusiastically.
“Is this your last case for diagnostics?”
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and tugged at the strap of her laptop case. “I’m not sure. Doctor House hasn’t asked me to apply for the opening.”
“He’s waiting for you to ask him to choose you for that opening.”
“Why should I be the one to ask?”
“He’s probably saying the same thing, right now, to Cuddy,” Wilson predicted. House and Miss July were well-suited to work together, but their similarities made it nearly impossible to bring them into collaboration. She was loyal even to people who had not earned it, creative, intuitive, sneaky, uncomfortable in social situations, and not good at communicating her needs.
And unorthodox those needs were: she had, she once confessed to Wilson, a desire to become a renowned expert in something no one had ever heard of. She craved obscure eminence, she said; that and a lifetime supply of vanilla wafers, and she’d be good.
“I’ve been accepted into the forensic pathology program,” she confessed. “That means a lot, you know.”
“I don’t think I do,” Wilson said kindly. “It means, what, exactly?”
“You know,” she shrugged. Also like House, she became inarticulate when emotional. “Plastic ID badges, dark sunglasses. Staff meetings. Nothing with a pulse. Less weirdness - which given that I just nuked a guy who had what looked like mushrooms growing under his skin to make his flesh fall off, on purpose, is going some. Not everybody gets to look at a career of examining murder victims as a dial-down on their ickmeter.”
“No, I’d say not,” he agreed, although he wasn't really sure what she had said. “But,”
He was interrupted by the ringing of his phone. He grinned at the caller ID. “How’s paradise?” he greeted, leaning back in his chair.
A moment later, his feet hit the floor with a thud and his smile disappeared. “Huh? That doesn’t sound like Cuddy.”
He shook his head at April, his concern deepening as he listened. “House, I swear to God, if you’re messing with me… no, okay. Yeah, that actually does sound like her.” He rolled his wrist over and consulted his watch. “Look, I’m four hours away.”
April took a step toward him, tilting her head, as he groaned. “Oh, shit. Okay, fine. Fine, I’ll meet you there. If you’re screwing with me, I will kill you, you know that, right? Slowly and painfully.”
She was on his heels as he hung up and reached for his jacket. “What happened? Is Doctor Cuddy okay? Is Rachel all right?”
“They’re fine. She’s been arrested. House needs someone to watch Rachel when he goes to court to get her out.”
It was absolutely disturbing, and would probably horrify Cuddy and amuse House no end, that she took this so much in stride. “What for?” she asked casually.
There was no use trying to deflect her. Also like House, she was a bloodhound for a secret, but she was no gossip. “Apparently, assault and causing a public disturbance.”
“Doctor Cuddy kicked somebody’s ass in a bar fight?”
“Not exactly.” Wilson paused in the doorway. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, April. But when you’re making your decision, factor this in: if you end up working anywhere else, for anyone else, you’ll probably never have to bail your boss out of jail for picking a fight at a roadside lemonade stand.”
Part 6
Pairing: House/Cuddy established
Warnings: Some explicit content, some fluff.
Summary: House and Cuddy need a vacation, and they take one, but it isn't that simple. Set in the sharkverse, and will include events from "Recession Proof" and "The Last Temptation."
Author’s Note: I posted chapter one of Coming to Terms on June 24 of 2010, so this is my one year blogiversary. Which seems, as House would say, like a really arbitrary thing to celebrate, but there it is. Thank you all for your encouragement over the past year.
It seemed to Cuddy at times that she hadn’t had an adult life, so much as a series of events: college, House, medical school, House, appointment to the deanship, House, motherhood, House, marriage, House, a family vacation.
House.
“So we have a theory we can’t test,” he was saying into his phone. He had his leg stretched out and the passenger seat of her car cranked back as far as it would go. “We can change the theory to something testable, or we could come up with some way to test the theory we have.”
“Unpause!” Rachel demanded from the back seat.
“In a minute, Sweetie,” Cuddy soothed into the rear view mirror. “House is talking.”
“No talking! Shhh. I am watsing this.” Rachel’s chin jutted out, her mouth pinched up, and her tiny feet thrust forward to emphasize the complaint. Except for the pink sandals and pigtails, she looked and sounded exactly like House during episodes of his soap operas.
House looked pensive as he jabbed the remote for the backseat DVD player, and pressed the phone more closely to his ear when Timon and Pumbaa started to sing again. Cuddy gripped the steering wheel more tightly. It was driving her crazy, but she couldn’t bring herself to admit out loud that a carefree animated warthog was stressing her out.
“Put him in a high-intensity PUVA machine until we get something measurable,” House said. “What? Because he’s got the accent, that’s why. Stop bitching, or I’ll make you be Paula.” He tucked his phone into his pocket and went back to staring sullenly out the window.
“Has April even applied for the job?” Cuddy frowned at him.
For the first time since she’d tried to broach this subject with him, he didn’t say anything about his authority over his department or make an attempt to tell her to mind her own business. He only asked, “April who?”
It wasn’t an answer, but it was progress. Finally, he was deflecting her as his personal partner, instead of deflecting her - or tossing her out on her ear -- as his boss.
He reached back, plucked a stuffed animal from the back seat beside Rachel and propped it under his leg as a pillow.
“That’s my duck,” Rachel said.
“Sharing is caring,” he shot back.
“My duck.”
“House,” she said, in the voice of Cuddy his boss, although Cuddy the Employer didn’t particularly care. Rachel had loaded the SUV with so many stuffed toy ducks (and one penguin, two owls, a goose, and a pterodactyl, all of which, to House’s blinding frustration, she insisted on referring to as ducks) that an incursion of plush waterfowl into the front seat was eventually inevitable anyway. Cuddy was a cracking good compartmentalizer, and had been since even before she became a working mother. In this case one of her, the Dean who Employed Greg House, was willing to tolerate a certain degree of excessive birdy cuteness in the life of the other one, The Woman Who Loved Greg House, if it meant getting a better handle on whatever was distressing him.
“My leg,” House said.
“My duck,” Rachel argued. “Mom!”
“Actually, Fang, it’s a swan. Which, by the way, is wrong. Swans aren’t cuddly. In real life, they’re invasive, belligerent and territorial.”
“Takes one to know one,” both Cuddys muttered under her breath.
“What did you just say?” He jerked his head toward her and scowled.
“I said at least they’re mute.”
“Shows what you know. They hiss. They also occasionally,” he narrowed his eyes at Rachel, “slaughter their offspring.”
“Hakuna Matata,” Rachel told him haughtily. She bobbed her head to the music.
“You aren’t wearing a heat wrap,” Cuddy observed, glancing over at his thigh. “And you didn’t use the Jacuzzi last night. Didn’t you have an appointment with Vince yesterday?”
He tossed the duck -swan, whatever -- over his shoulder. It whiffed Rachel in the head, and she giggled. Thankfully, it didn’t occur to her to return fire. An onboard duckfight at sixty-five mph would have been distracting, and very hard to explain to a traffic officer or an insurance adjustor.
“House? What happened at physical therapy? And what’s going on with your med student?”
“You’re going too slow,” he announced. “Cut that loser in front of you off, or we’ll never get there.”
To be fair, allowing for metaphors, that could have been aimed at either one of her.
Cuddy sighed and eyed the GPS on the dashboard. There was nothing for it, she knew, but to put the pedal down and keep her eyes on the road, however rough it might get.
She moved her right hand over to House’s leg, and relaxed a bit when he covered it with his own.
“Leave the driving to me,” she ordered warmly. “We’ll get there.”
“Interesting choice of case to review,” Thirteen said pleasantly. “Can you tell me why you picked it?”
On stage, at the lecture podium, a doctor squinted and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Um,” he said.
Chase rolled his eyes and tapped his foot. “We haven’t got all day,” he grumbled.
“Chase,” Foreman chided. He addressed the doctor: “If you picked it because it was labeled, ‘Teen Supermodel With Seizures,’ that’s really fine. House takes a lot of cases based on his personal …”
“Interest,” Thirteen finished.
“Oh, well,” the doctor blushed. “To be honest, it was a toss-up between this one and the ‘Sex games couple’.”
“Good call,” Thirteen said, and looked down at her notes. “Your initial hypothesis about the drugs was totally predictable, and turned out in the actual case to be false, but you did take the time to verify it and check it against her facebook friends pages, so that was thorough. I liked the way you recommended a download of her laptop in your search for environmental factors. I’m saying yes. Foreman?”
“You made some very good points and asked some relevant questions,” Foreman said. “The idea about her femur to foot length ratio, and the possibility of a genetic spinal deformity was excellent; we didn’t even consider the metabolic bone growth disorder ourselves. So, a go from me, too.”
“Thank you,” the doctor said bashfully. He looked hopefully at Chase.
“You were hesitant, halting, and easily dissuaded,” Chase said. “You lack confidence, and if you even use the term ‘double check to be sure’ in House’s presence, he will eat you alive.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Chase said emphatically. “I just made an assertion, and you could have either argued with it, or used it to your advantage. I’m full of shit, incidentally. If you’d said, ‘then I’ll watch that,’ or ‘I was just nervous’ or made some lame attempt to prove me wrong, I’d think you had a shot. As it is, I have grave reservations. I just intimidated you without breaking a sweat, and I’m a cuddly kitten compared to House.”
“A cuddly kitten with teeth, maybe,” Thirteen said.
“Small teeth,” Foreman agreed, holding his index finger and thumb apart a degree.
“I don’t think you’ll pass the next step. But you may surprise me. Just remember, when it comes to the actual performance, you’re not a supplicant,” Chase said. “You’ll be an equal. Don’t hesitate to call anyone on his, or her, crap.” He waved his hand toward the exit. “The job is yours to lose.”
The doctor, looking very much like a supplicant, hesitated. “Just out of curiosity,” he said. “What was the eventual diagnosis?”
“Testicular cancer,” Thirteen supplied happily.
“Oh. That must have been … fascinating,” he said uncertainly.
“If by fascinating you mean ‘ewww’. Thanks for coming. Doctor Taub will take the file from you on your way out.”
The doctor paused again at the edge of the stairs. He fiddled with his tie for a second, and looked back. “And the couple with the sex games?” he asked.
“The wife is serving fifteen to twenty years for attempted murder,” Chase answered briskly. “That’s another thing: you need to learn to not look shocked. Try to look bored, in fact. I find that reciting the catechism, or the periodic table of elements, in my head helps for that. We’ll see you in two weeks.”
“Thanks. I think. I mean, thanks.”
“Well, that’s a day’s work. One conclusive diagnosis and three new rats for House’s laboratory. How much time do you give that last one?” Chase asked.
“Twenty bucks says less than two hours,” Foreman replied. “I still think I should be Simon.”
“Get over it.” Thirteen released a sigh. “God, our jobs are weird.”
“Mycosis fungoides,” April said. “His response to the PUVA confirmed it.”
“Cutaneous T cell lymphoma.” Shaking his head sadly, Wilson accepted the folder from her. “And an unusual presentation of it at that. Good work.”
“Yeah,” she said unenthusiastically.
“Is this your last case for diagnostics?”
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and tugged at the strap of her laptop case. “I’m not sure. Doctor House hasn’t asked me to apply for the opening.”
“He’s waiting for you to ask him to choose you for that opening.”
“Why should I be the one to ask?”
“He’s probably saying the same thing, right now, to Cuddy,” Wilson predicted. House and Miss July were well-suited to work together, but their similarities made it nearly impossible to bring them into collaboration. She was loyal even to people who had not earned it, creative, intuitive, sneaky, uncomfortable in social situations, and not good at communicating her needs.
And unorthodox those needs were: she had, she once confessed to Wilson, a desire to become a renowned expert in something no one had ever heard of. She craved obscure eminence, she said; that and a lifetime supply of vanilla wafers, and she’d be good.
“I’ve been accepted into the forensic pathology program,” she confessed. “That means a lot, you know.”
“I don’t think I do,” Wilson said kindly. “It means, what, exactly?”
“You know,” she shrugged. Also like House, she became inarticulate when emotional. “Plastic ID badges, dark sunglasses. Staff meetings. Nothing with a pulse. Less weirdness - which given that I just nuked a guy who had what looked like mushrooms growing under his skin to make his flesh fall off, on purpose, is going some. Not everybody gets to look at a career of examining murder victims as a dial-down on their ickmeter.”
“No, I’d say not,” he agreed, although he wasn't really sure what she had said. “But,”
He was interrupted by the ringing of his phone. He grinned at the caller ID. “How’s paradise?” he greeted, leaning back in his chair.
A moment later, his feet hit the floor with a thud and his smile disappeared. “Huh? That doesn’t sound like Cuddy.”
He shook his head at April, his concern deepening as he listened. “House, I swear to God, if you’re messing with me… no, okay. Yeah, that actually does sound like her.” He rolled his wrist over and consulted his watch. “Look, I’m four hours away.”
April took a step toward him, tilting her head, as he groaned. “Oh, shit. Okay, fine. Fine, I’ll meet you there. If you’re screwing with me, I will kill you, you know that, right? Slowly and painfully.”
She was on his heels as he hung up and reached for his jacket. “What happened? Is Doctor Cuddy okay? Is Rachel all right?”
“They’re fine. She’s been arrested. House needs someone to watch Rachel when he goes to court to get her out.”
It was absolutely disturbing, and would probably horrify Cuddy and amuse House no end, that she took this so much in stride. “What for?” she asked casually.
There was no use trying to deflect her. Also like House, she was a bloodhound for a secret, but she was no gossip. “Apparently, assault and causing a public disturbance.”
“Doctor Cuddy kicked somebody’s ass in a bar fight?”
“Not exactly.” Wilson paused in the doorway. “I’m not going to tell you what to do, April. But when you’re making your decision, factor this in: if you end up working anywhere else, for anyone else, you’ll probably never have to bail your boss out of jail for picking a fight at a roadside lemonade stand.”
Part 6