Shark Week, Thursday
Title: Shark Week, 4/7
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?
Thursday
“What are you doing here?” One question, two voices. Two frustrated people, disguising their worry with anger, facing off in a hallway.
Wilson beat her to the apartment door and he already had his key in his hand, but he’d been raised too well to enter before she did.
Cuddy checked the bedroom and shook her head.
Wilson stepped into the kitchen. “He ate, at least. Cereal bowl is in the sink, coffee is fresh.”
There was an empty glass on the piano; she sniffed it.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
“I’ll look at you any damned way I want to.”
The patient’s name was Emily; House knew that much. He also knew that she worked with writers and visual artists as well as musicians, and did her job well - the ones who visited her seemed all but convinced that she walked on water -- and that she’d written a few books: Depression and the Creative Process, and something with the words ‘Genius’ and ‘Rage’ in the title. And she had dark hair. And nice legs, if he noticed that kind of thing - which he didn’t, because he wasn’t Wilson - and sharp, expressive features.
“He said we’d still have Starry Night, but Van Gogh would have died with both his ears,” he repeated.
“That’s a little simplistic,” she said, tapping the arms of her wheelchair.
“That’s what I thought. It’s more of a gateway mechanism, then?”
“There you go again, making comparisons between the physical and the psychological. For a person with chronic physical pain, you’re kind of stuck on that.” Her eyes were an odd color; sort of a foggy grey. House recalled a song title, Emily’s Eyes, some blues artist he’d heard, and wondered if the composer was someone she knew. The thought kind of bothered him, and he decided not to ask.
“Ever hear of a little thing called ‘conversion disorder’?” He held up the cane.
“Something tells me you’ve heard of it way too much,” she said with more irony than sympathy, and he grunted acknowledgement, blinked and stared at her; she was interesting. He could see why people - other people - might write songs about her. “Probably from the same idiots who think you run cold.”
She put her hand over his, briefly, and when she removed it he stared down at where it had been, as if it should have left a scorch mark.
“So if it’s not a gateway, what is it?” he asked clumsily, not letting the question go. “A channel? Release valve?”
“It’s more like a hard drive re-boot. No; a refrigerator.” Suddenly very animated, she sat up straighter. “Yeah. You go away for a vacation. Spur-of-the-moment thing.”
“Where do I go?”
“You? Copenhagen. And while you’re gone, the electricity goes out for a day or two. You come home to a refrigerator full of questionable, food.”
“Why do I go to Copenhagen?”
“Are you kidding? You have Copenhagen written all over you. There’s something very Kierkegaardian about you. Anyway, you come back to all this food that might be spoiled, and you can either: go through all of your various containers and packages and bottles and jars, tasting and sniffing and reading expiration dates and making judgment calls, or.”
“I can say, ‘fuck this; I have money’, toss it all out, and go to the supermarket.”
“Exactly. And the decision will be based on your general risk aversion, your tolerance for loss, the amount of food you have stored, your diet, and your access to replacement nourishment.”
He considered this. “It’s a little flimsy,” he finally pronounced.
“Admit it: you went right there. So why is someone who speaks fluent Figurative Language, who listens to the Doors and plays Beethoven, practicing medicine?”
“Medicine saves peoples’ lives. The arts, just keep them from getting bored.”
She rolled her eyes, and her face kind of glowed in the damp morning light. “You think you’re a hard core rationalist, don’t you.”
“I am a hard core rationalist. It’s one of my most annoying features.”
“One of the ones you like the best, you mean.”
“Same thing; I like annoying people.”
“Yeah-huh. Like I said. ‘In all eternity, it is impossible for me to compel a person to accept a belief, an opinion, a conviction. But one thing I can do: I can compel him to take notice.’”
“People understand me so little, that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood,” he countered, holding his hand over his heart melodramatically, and he was inexplicably cheered when she laughed again. He didn’t spend enough time making pretty girls laugh.
Of course, he hadn’t met that many pretty girls who laughed at Kierkegaard quotes. Poor planning on his part, surely; there had to be all of three women on the planet who met those criteria and didn’t hate him yet.
“And here comes your Regine now,” she nodded toward Cuddy, who was crossing the lobby with a grimly civil expression on her face.
House felt his right eye twitch. Fuck it all; she was wearing the hot pink top. And her hair was up. This day had sucked from the get-go, when his leg woke him up at the crack of dark griping about the pouring rain, and then his car wouldn’t start, and now Cuddy was on the warpath and looking like that.
“Good morning,” she said, and House stared up at her elegant neck and the dainty collarbones under her creamy skin.
“How many?” he asked sharply, taking the pre-emptive strike. This day was going to be a study in awkwardness and fidgeting and avoidance, anyway. He’d be damned if he let her take first blood.
“What?”
“How many clinic hours? What’s my sentence, Boss?”
She recoiled, looking hurt. “I have no idea how many clinic hours you owe. The last time I checked you were backlogged to approximately ten years past eternity, so it doesn’t make any difference.”
He nodded tightly and looked away, pondering both the physics and the etiquette of trying to stand up and beat a hasty retreat. The elevator was fifty steps away; the stairs only thirty, and Wilson might be somewhere in the vicinity of the elevator.
“I understand you’re going home,” Cuddy addressed Emily with a smile.
“As soon as my ride gets here. Thank you for everything.”
“Stay well,” Cuddy huffed. For some indiscernible reason she wasn’t her usual assuring, pleasant self with this patient. If he didn’t know better, he’d almost say that she didn’t like this patient.
Okay, so that was how it was going to be. They were reversing roles with the patient - he was interested, she was brusque - and they weren’t going to talk about anything privately, and they weren’t going to talk about anything real. He’d just sit here with an invisible bear gnawing on his thigh, be polite and brief and ignore the elephant in the living room.
“You’ll be able to make Leon’s?” Emily gave him a questioning look, but he kept his own counsel. He said nothing about the tickets. House categorically refused to be reduced to inane chatter about the weather, or to admit that he had already made reservations and asked Wilson to babysit - actually, manipulated Wilson into agreeing to babysit. He was not pathetic. He was fine.
Cuddy issued a wary glance out of the corner of her eye. “I don’t know.” She looked disappointed, and worried about him, and he wished she’d stop. He was fine.
“I promise you, you will not regret it. If your playlist is anything like House’s, her work will knock you on your ass.”
They certainly were not going to discuss the meeting, or the argument afterward, which he’d only re-lived about two hundred times so far. Every single time, he’d come to the same conclusion: he was screwed. He’d blown it.
“I’m not sure my playlist is anything like House’s,” Cuddy said dryly, almost rudely. “Or that being knocked on my ass is a recreational goal.”
What living room? There wasn’t even any such thing as an elephant, anyway.
“Saturday,” Emily said with emphasis, “I insist you come,” and House looked up at Cuddy, reminding himself that they were two professionals and they weren’t talking about prom night.
“The patient insists, Doctor,” he said, patently eager, and admittedly, pathetic-sounding. His leg ached, and he was not sure whether it was because of the damned rain or because he was remembering the shock and hurt on Cuddy’s face just before she’d turned away from him. He wondered if she cried last night. He’d seen her cry - he’d made her cry - before; her chin trembled when she cried. He wondered if she might ever be willing to give him another chance.
Then he wondered, how long, after she did, it would take for him to make her cry again. Chase was probably running a pool on that; he should try to get in on the action, if only for the self-loathing material it would provide.
Then he wondered why he wanted another chance.
“Seven thirty,” Emily was saying. She jerked her head toward him. “Bring Tall, Snark and Handsome here with you.”
Cuddy smiled, and part of the smile enveloped him.
Oh. Okay, that didn’t suck. That was nice. House’s internal sensors sounded, confused. Cuddy was a deadly combination of female wiles and nut-kicking assassin. He tried to focus on the latter. When he was trying not to explode at her for the impossible situations she just kept putting him in, he concentrated on her lithe, athletic moves and her fierce scowl, deliberately not noticing the graceful lines of her jaw or the soft curve of her lips, and that usually worked.
But when she was being teased, she looked utterly likeable. When she dropped her barriers and let herself be fully in the moment, it was easy to forget that she was a woman and an authority figure, and that he didn’t trust those. The little lines at the corners of her eyes deepened, and her uncompromising mask morphed into something he could picture himself waking up next to, unclothed and warm and … Holy Crap, she was right, this was why they couldn’t have a thing, not at work; his brain was turning to oatmeal. He could not do his job with oatmeal brain.
“You’re good at that,” he said after Emily’s friend, an anemic-looking girl wearing thick glasses and a distracted frown, arrived and wheeled her away to the exit.
Cuddy sat down next to him. “At what?”
“Being socially acceptable. You’re good with people; you take care of people. Donors throw money at you, patients trust you, your employees count on you.”
They were surrounded by the sounds of small talk and impromptu consults, purposeful conversations mingling with meaningless chatter. Elevators dinged and the front doors swished open, summer rain pattering against the glass, wet footsteps squishing the polished floor. Several dingy-looking people milled outside the clinic, and phones rang.
She gave him a dark look, as though he’d just complimented her on her ability to eat with a fork.
“I’m a second rate doctor and a power-hungry control freak with thick thighs and frizzy hair,” she said shortly. “Social acceptability is a reasonable consolation prize. Kind of like always being right is your compensation for a complete inability to behave as though you were not, in fact, raised by … autistic sharks.”
“I like your hair. And your thighs.” The clouds in her eyes were back, but with a few shafts of something that might have been sunshine breaking through. She might hate him a little less today than she had yesterday, if he was interpreting the signs correctly. Not that he ever had: for all he knew, she could still be hurt or angry or just numb.
“I don’t really need affirmation,” she said.
“You’ve seen me in action, Cuddy. Do you think I’d give it, if you did?” As often as he’d cracked wise about her body, which was, truly, a magnificent thing to behold, it wasn’t her looks that kept him interested. Her innate kindness, maybe. Her warmth. Resilience. The fact that she was so relentlessly sane, in crazy ways.
How was a man supposed to defend and protect himself against all that?
More to the point, why was he trying to?
“Good point,” she concurred with a roll of her eyes. “We’re back to the autistic sharks.”
“I could never do what you do.”
“True. Sometimes it entertains me to imagine you trying. There are people I would dearly love to sic you on.”
“You hold your own. If you can intimidate me, you can swim with the most autistic sharks, and never be eaten alive.”
“I intimidate you?” She raised an impressed eyebrow.
“Every damned day.”
“I think that’s the sweetest thing you ever said to me. How do you feel?” She looked pointedly down at his thigh.
Sulky, miserable, bitter, and unsure, he thought.
“I’m fine,” he said, perhaps a bit too loudly.
“Hypocrite,” she accused. “Brutal, uncompromising honesty at all costs, unless it means admitting a weakness. Why do you insist on holding a mirror up to everyone else’s little illusions and rationalizations, when you can’t tell the truth about your own needs?”
He was a dead man.
“I have no idea,” he admitted from the grave, mulling over the realization that despite the fact that she came on with the vulnerability and morals of a Sherman tank and the confidence of a drill sergeant, the woman he loved might be just a little insecure and idealistic.
Softly, his eyes down, he said, “You’re making a difference.”
Her chin trembled and she gave a miniscule nod. His heart lurched, and he gripped his cane so tightly it caused a cramp in his dorsal muscles.
“And I thought my professional authority - my autonomy here -- was priceless,” she said with forced lightness, and he could see her eyes were wet, but they were fixed straight ahead. “It turns out, it’s worth a down payment of a hundred million dollars up front, and thirty-five thousand dollars a month.”
“Thirty-five thousand, four hundred and eighty-eight,” he corrected, and he was rewarded with a half-hearted scowl. He held out his hand, and strangely, when she placed her much smaller, more frail hand in his, he felt safer.
“Look, I don’t expect the shark to ever learn to roll over on command and let me tickle its tummy,” she said out of nowhere. “But is it too much to ask that we share a freaking ocean? Do I have to be predator, or prey? Isn't there a third option?”
What time was it? How long had it been since he woke up this morning, how long since their fight yesterday, how long since the last time he kissed her? He’d forgotten how time worked.
“I’ve got tickets to a concert,” he said.
Friday