Shark Week, Monday
Title: Shark Week, 1/7
Fandom: House MD
Pairing: House/Cuddy
Warnings: Explicit content in some chapters highly likely.
Summary: A hiatus fic, in response to the prompt “Shark Week” (among other prompts); takes place after the S6 finale, "Coming to Terms" and "Fault Lines".
Disclaimer: Seriously? You do know that I am not David Shore, right?
Monday
"So where the hell are you hiding him?"
“He’s had six hours’ sleep in the last seventy-two. And probably two meals, at best. He was too tired to trust himself to drive,” Wilson said, his voice heavy with judgment. “He asked, and I took him home.”
“You could have called me,” she said, deflated. “You should have called me.”
“He could have called you. Yet, he didn’t.”
She endured the veiled accusation passively. "What do you want from me, Wilson?"
"It's not what I want that's at stake here."
Among the basic laws of Greg House: objects in motion tend to remain in motion. Once ignited, his curiosity and rage to learn were not easily sated or stilled. After diagnosing two patients, and inciting Administrative Armageddon in the process, he was likely to continue resonating energy for at least a few days. Knowing what she did of his cycles and moods, she half-expected to hear piano music or pacing, but only the light from one living room lamp met her senses.
She took off her shoes and set her bag down gently. He was sprawled on the bed, one arm wrapped over his ear and covering his eyes. He was home, but his body, ever vigilant, was still habitually protecting his sleep from the intrusions of hospital lights and noise. Never knowing when or for how long the pain or the intellectual mania might take him or how hard they might ride him, House pocketed rest away in little corners of his day when he could find it, tucked it into hidden moments and hidden spaces throughout the hospital: fifteen minutes on a clinic exam bed, an hour in his office, twenty minutes on the couch in Wilson’s. Even delivered to pillows and a welcoming mattress swathed in 500-thread count linens, even in silent darkness behind a locked door, he was guarded, careful.
And quick to seize on the opportunity for respite, she noticed; his jeans and sneakers lay in a hasty heap on the floor just inches from the bed, and the foot that protruded from beneath the blankets was still clad in a warm wool sock. The cane was propped against the nightstand, which meant he’d used it all the way into the bedroom.
Asleep, he was all gangly limbs and solid muscle, and still, he looked vulnerable; probably because it contrasted so sharply against his wakeful self. If he wasn’t invading the scene like a horde of maladjusted, insanely smart mercenaries, then there was something happening with him that made him fragile, brittle, primed for breakage.
Closing the bedroom door gently behind her, she walked quietly back to the living room.
His laundry service was courteous, and she suspected, accustomed to not only his hypersensitivities- she knew of no one else who so despised scented soap or even a hint of a tag against his neck -- but to getting excellent tips. She was digging through her purse while balancing four dress shirts and a sport coat, when the door to apartment C opened.
A woman with short-cropped silver hair and bright dark eyes, wearing loose knits and large ethnic earrings, stepped out into the hallway. “I have his groceries, “ she said quietly, and stepped back into her own home while Cuddy finished paying and flopped the shirts onto the back of the sofa.
The neighbor hefted two bags into her arms with a polite, friendly smile and introduced herself, adding, “He calls me Across the Hall Lady. Delivery is free with any order of over $100. Between us, we hit that about every other week. Watch the eggs on top there.”
“How much does he - do I, we - um, owe you?”
Across the Hall Lady - Helen - made a vague waving motion. “I’m still paying off a poker debt. You watch that one; he’s good-looking, but he’s trouble.”
Her mood oddly improved, she unpacked the basics of a bachelor diet - bread, milk, eggs, cold cuts, some ground beef, corn chips, one lonely onion, absolutely nothing green -- and then hung the clothing in the hall closet. Something about his apartment, the purposeful chaos and male ambience of the place, with its wide plank floors and sturdy furniture, and shelves and shelves of reading material and music, imbued the experience of puttering around in it with his attention deficit disorder and intense sensuality. It took her all of fifteen minutes to feel bored and overwhelmed simultaneously.
“What are you doing?” he asked, when he appeared in the kitchen doorway, freshly showered and fully dressed but rumpled, a full one hour and fifty minutes after that.
She looked up from the cutting board. “Apologizing.”
“With a turkey sandwich?” he asked pointedly. He took the milk from the refrigerator door. “Not exactly a peace offering from you, historically.”
“Shut up.” She didn’t need the reminder of the time a turkey sandwich had been the twist of a knife in his back; he knew she regretted it.
“No apology necessary.” He shrugged and drank from the carton. “You’ve always badgered me about that damned clinic, I’ve always ignored you. It’s our system. I don’t see any reason for either of us to start apologizing now.”
“This isn’t about the clinic.”
“Okay.” He plucked a sandwich half from between her hands on the slicing board and chewed for a moment. “This would be easier if you were halfway self-aware.”
She had opened her mouth to defend herself, and was still forming all the wrong, over-emotional words, when he asked, “How late were you?”
“Oh, that’s smart. Do something that puts the patients at risk, compound that by saying - yelling -- something that puts the entire hospital at risk, and when I actually apologize for pushing you outside your comfort zone, demean me, along with half the human race, by blaming my reaction to your unmitigated asshattery on PMS. You’re a piece of work, you know that?”
“Cuddy.”
She felt her pulse accelerate. “For your information, Genius, you’re an ass much, much, much more frequently than any woman could possibly menstruate and still live.”
“I could have told you, you weren’t pregnant,” he said.
“What?!”
“It was just perimenopause. Relax.” He picked up the remainder of the sandwich and limped into the living room. She stalked after him and watched, her head spinning, as he casually looped his legs up onto the coffee table and adjusted the television remote.
When she stepped in front of the television screen and put her hands on her hips, he sighed. “You were considering expanding your family with Lucas, but you started taking birth control pills again the week you and I started fu… became sexually active. You’re over forty, I’m over fifty, I have a sperm count of nine million per milliliter, and the pills are ninety-something percent effective at baseline. Even I’m not that unlucky. Your middle-aged body was still adjusting to the hormonal changes, that’s all.”
The air had been sucked out of her lungs. “How did you know?”
She could have meant, “how did you know I went back on the pill ten weeks ago?” or “how did you know I’m bleeding?” but he apparently saw no need to answer either, which was just as well.
He raised his eyes to her and they were wide, the lashes so pale that they were nearly invisible, and she yelled at herself, get a grip, Woman; if you cave now to a pair of grieving, bright blue eyes, you will set the women’s movement back fifty years.
“This is the part where you tell me, it’s not that you don’t want me in particular to father any more of your children, it’s just that you’re perfectly satisfied with the Small Evil One, and then I pretend to believe you, and then I reassure you that I don’t want children either - that’s the truth, by the way -- and then we both act like this was a joint decision that we discussed like two mature adults, instead of both of us doing exactly what we wanted without any regard for the other.
Now, move over, it’s Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.”
“House,”
His eyes were radiating heat. “I love you,” he said.
“House, what the hell?” was probably not on anyone’s list of appropriate responses, and it wasn’t the way she wanted to be remembered, but there it was: sometimes, you’re defined by your one-time-only deals.
Perversely, House seemed to approve of it.
“I couldn’t say that during foreplay, during sex, or just after sex,” he told her. “I sure as hell couldn’t say it if you were just going to parrot back some insipid ‘I love you too’ crap. I couldn’t say it to win an argument, or as part of making up after an argument, either. Since we spend almost all of our time either fighting or making out, and you’re a girl and thus programmed to think you have to say “I love you too’, I didn’t think I’d ever have to go there. But right now I’m too tired to get it up, you want to kill me a few times over, and there is no argument because I’m so obviously right and you’re so clearly wrong that you’re apologizing, so … ”
He made a shooing motion. “Shark Week.”
She stepped aside, and then thought better of it, and walked closer to him, taking her do-not-mess-with-me stance. He was sitting down, which neutralized their 10-inch height difference, and it was a refreshing perspective, but he was just as unimpressed as when he towered over her. The t-shirt he was wearing accentuated his solid biceps and chest.
“Greg,” she said tentatively, sitting down on the chair across from him. “You’re right. But you’re wrong, too.”
She took his hand and when he stiffened as though she’d slapped him, realized that she had no earthly idea what to do with it.
“That’s usually the way it works,” he said without rancor. He was not missing the bruised indecision in her voice.
She stared down at the muscle and bone of his hand cradled in hers, the short square nails and the long fingers, and she wanted to kiss his knuckles. Jesus, his knuckles; this was getting pathetic. She wanted to lick the prominent veins on the back of his hand. He rested his other hand on his thickly muscled thigh, and the low light graced the still-damp light brown hair on his ropy forearms, and the clunky watch at his wrist emphasized the pulsing vulnerability there. Her eyes traveled down the softer roll of his abdomen to his narrow hips and the vortex of his long legs, and she caught herself measuring relative sizes of various aspects of his anatomy.
“We should have talked about birth control,” she said, clearing her throat intentionally. “I should have told you how I felt. For that matter, I should have told Lucas how I felt. I don’t want another baby, but he did, and I was just trying so hard to want what I was supposed to want, instead of what I really wanted.”
“That,” he said, much more bluntly than necessary, “was unusually stupid of you.”
“I know.” On the television, some fool was inserting a camera into a bull shark’s mouth. Cuddy shuddered. She did not want this man, this complicated mess of sensitivities and pet peeves, this awkward, rude, conflicted bundle of raw nerves, to know so much about her. “But you’re completely wrong, about why I was angry. I was not projecting, or deflecting, or freaking out about a missed period, or whatever you think I was freaking out about. I was furious because that patient,”
“Emily.”
She closed her eyes and counted to three. Since when did House know his patient’s name? “Emily. Didn’t need you one bit more than the patient you already were working on.”
“The one you’d already ordered me to work on,” he corrected. “And informed that I’d taken his case, without even consulting me. And let me point out, she didn’t need me any less, either.”
“By spreading yourself across two cases - just to defy me and expatiate your authority issues, again - you endangered both of them. And not coincidentally, stressed yourself to the breaking point.”
“So you jumped down my throat in front of the team, and the patient, undermining me in stereo, for my own good?” His shoulders sagged just a fraction and she felt a bit guilty at the broken, arrogant defensiveness pouring off him.
“No. Yes. No; for the hospital’s sake. And mine. Putting aside the minor consideration that I happen to care about you, your breaking point always involves verbal violence. And your verbal violence always complicates my life.”
“If I don’t complicate your life when you tell me how to do my job, then how are you ever going to learn to quit doing it?” he asked reasonably. At some distant point in the past, she’d thought his eyes were cold and calculating, and described them as icy blue. That, it went to show, was what an idiot she had been in college. They were, in fact, flaming blue; fiery, alive with determination, male ego, intelligence.
“It’s my job to allocate hospital resources, and you’re a hospital resource, you stubborn ass,” she raised her voice to compete with a commercial.
“So, ‘sorry Emily, we only have one House, and I promised Mister Hoozywhatsit that he could use it first.’” He pulled his gaze away from the television screen again to give her a scorching glance. “I’m not a goddamned bathroom, Cuddy.”
“God, you’re impossible.”
“Right back at you,” he growled. He smiled at her, and she set her face into impassivity, because if he knew - if he had even an inkling - of the firepower his smile carried, if he even suspected the spark of protectiveness and pride evoked by the crease of his eyes and the curve of his lips, the way it slipped through her well-thought-out arguments like a field runner breaking through a defensive line - oh hell, she was breaking out into military metaphors and sports metaphors, now -never mind; if Greg House ever knew the effect of his masculine dimples on her will power, her life would truly be not worth living.
“No one’s actually seen great whites have sex,” he said. “We do know that male sharks have two claspers, but hypothetically they only use one at a time.”
She watched the graceful turn of his head. She wasn’t quite sure what was going on here, but she was fairly confident that it had nothing to do with shark penises. He kept surprising her, with his twisted humor and his equally twisted sadness, and there was always more to him than he showed; she was certain of that.
“The male communicates its amorous intentions to a sexually receptive female shark with ritualized swimming and gentle 'love nips' along her back or flanks,” he said with deliberate focus on her. “Then he grasps one of her pectoral fins and docks along one side of her, and inserts his clasper of choice into her vent.”
“How romantic.”
“He anchors it in place with a spike-like protuberance called a clasper spur.”
“Ouch.”
“Unborn shark pups are cannibalistic in utero; stronger pups eat their weaker womb-mates.”
She was painfully aware of the location of every part of her body. It’s well-established clinically that men are sexually stimulated by visual inputs; women, by more complex factors. Clearly, he was sparking a motherlode of these complex factors at her now, but House, being House, would make “complex” into “incomprehensible”; there was surely an explanation for why his voice reverberated with sex, why he smelled of it, why his body language seemed to broadcast it, but damned if she could identify it. Her hormones were talking, his were shouting - in a foreign language,that was par for the course with him, but communication was taking place - and, oh, damn, she was listening.
Even at the non-verbal level, they argued. The man's freaking pheromones were contrary.
House caught her eyes with his, and the corner of his mouth hitched up. “Wilson had a theory on why you got so pissed, that you’d like even less than mine,” he said, his heart-strangling smile hovering between them and her objections to jumping him right here and now crashing in her ears.
“I cannot begin to tell you how uninterested I am in Wilson’s theory excusing your crappy behavior,” she said, standing. “Do you want another sandwich?”
Absorbed in some visual having to do with the pounds per square inch of pressure in a bull shark’s jaw, he only nodded.
“What’s this?” she asked, nudging with her foot.
“A box.” He was still sulking, most likely out of principle, but the effect of his half-hearted pout was dampened by the fascinated head-tilt he gave the television; some surfer was showing off a scar.
“I can see it’s a box. I can even read the return address label and see that it’s from your mother. Why haven’t you opened it?”
He darted his eyes down anxiously. “I was waiting to do that with Wilson.”
Another of his psychic landmines, then, she translated, and he was avoiding it, relying on Wilson - Wilson, of course -- to disarm it.
She had not so desperately wanted to smack him senseless in years. Months. Weeks, anyway. Idiotically, and muttering under her breath because she was just as livid with herself as with him, she stomped into the kitchen and began slamming drawers and doors.
House thumbed the volume up.
When Wilson let himself in, he found them lying together on the sofa, House resting his chin on the top of her head, massaging her shoulder with one hand and keeping his vice grip on the remote with the other.
“You’re just in time for Jaws of Steel III,” House said.
Wilson sniffed. “Where’s the chili?”
“General Mussolini here fed me at four.”
“But you always make chili for Shark Week,” Wilson pointed out petulantly. He sat down and scowled briefly at Cuddy, who considered asking him to write these things down, and decided that retreat was the better part of valor. As she put her shoes back on and retrieved her purse and keys, House was already rummaging through the refrigerator.
Sometimes, you get what you need.
Tuesday