The Open Road
Title: The Open Road
Recipient: dalilita
Prompt: An exploration of what might have happened if House and Cuddy had a one-night-stand mid-series, and how things might have played out.
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Written for help_lisa
Summary: Set during 5x04, "Birthmarks," Wilson isn't the one who drives House to his father's funeral.
He awakens with a stiff neck and an odd taste in his mouth, and his first instinct is that he’s had another seizure. The thought dissipates as quickly as it entered, though, when he sees her and then it’s all clear. All of this in the course of a split second that feels like hours.
“You drugged me.” His voice is hoarse. He figures he’s been asleep at least an hour. She must have used something strong based on the leaden feeling in his limbs and the bruised sensation in the crook of his elbow indicative of an out-of-practice puncture. “And then you drugged me again.”
“Forgive my lack of experience with drugging my friends. I wasn’t sure how you’d tolerate the sedative. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d been secretly building a tolerance for years.”
“My name is Inigo Montoya. Prepare to die.”
“Mandy Patinkin, you are not. And you missed a line.”
He shrugs. “Thought it was inappropriate given the circumstances.”
She glances at him, eyebrow cocked. “Since when have you ever minded being inappropriate?”
“I’m secretly hoping that if I play the ‘dead father’ card enough, I can get a pity fuck out of this.”
She ignores him, as expected. “I told your mother you’d be there tomorrow night. If you want food, there’s a cooler in the back. If you want Vicodin…ask nicely.”
“You drugged me, kidnapped me, and you’re withholding medication. I’m calling for help.”
“Kidnapping implies that there’s somebody who’d want you back.”
“Ouch.”
She shifts, and he notices for the first time that she’s not wearing her usual low-cut, high-hem power suit. Instead, she’s in dark jeans and a white shirt. He can’t quite see her shoes, but he guesses sandals. With toenail polish that’s just a little too bright for the office, her way of convincing herself she’s fun.
He loves seeing her dressed down. It’s like catching a glimpse of Jupiter when it passes close enough to see with the naked eye - captivating, impressive, impossible to look away.
Not to mention that whole red-hot, perpetual storm thing.
He rubs his thigh hesitantly, still a little bit groggy and more than a little bit hopeful that whatever she gave him had analgesic effects. No such luck. “I hope you brought marshmallows.”
“What?”
“Marshmallows. Roundish puffy things that you roast on a stick. One of three components of s’mores. Although if you want to skip the graham crackers and just lick chocolate and marshmallow off my washboard abs, I wouldn’t make you beg. Much.”
“What are you - ”
“You said we’re getting there tomorrow night. It doesn’t take thirty-six hours to get there, so we must not be driving straight through. And knowing how anal-retentive you are, you’ve already mapped out where we’ll stop for the night.” He pauses, measuring her reaction. She’s trying for a poker face and it’s not quite working. “I’m good if you want to do the camping thing. I pitch an impressive tent, if you know what I mean.”
Her eyes don’t even roll. Over the years, she’s built a high tolerance to his perverse comments. Plus, if she rolled her eyes every time he said something lewd or insulting, she’d probably end up with a couple of detached retinas. “There’s a hotel about six hours away. And you’re welcome to sleep naked, so long as you’re comfortable leaving yourself exposed to being castrated in your sleep.”
He cups his hands protectively over his crotch. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Give me a sharp knife and we’ll find out.”
They drive in silence a bit longer, her watching him from the corner of her eye, him contemplating the idea of Cuddy in the same room as his mother. He can’t decide if it bothers him that they’re polar opposites or if it’s that they have so much in common.
She swerves, and he’s jostled out of brooding fatigue to see her pressing the back of her hand up against the window, middle finger extended and accentuated by a manicured nail. “Fucking asshole,” she growls, glaring at a Hummer in the next lane. “What is it about men that makes them think having a truck proves anything except that they’re insecure?”
He doesn’t know if it’s rhetorical, and anyway, he’s more interested in her reaction than in answering. “So this is where you take out all that pent-up rage and sexual frustration.”
“I can’t exactly give the finger to every rich donor who thinks his money buys him the right to tell me how to run my hospital. Or every board member who calls me ‘dear’.”
“Which is how I know you get satisfaction out of my doing it for you.”
She sighs. “Even if I occasionally think it’s deserved, cleaning up after you always seems to outweigh any fleeting feelings of delight.”
Silence engulfs them again, and House alternates anticipating the inevitable discussion of why they’re doing this - not just that he’s going against his will, but that Wilson’s not the one driving - and regretting that he never did get the chance to hit the one man he really wanted to - John House.
---------------------------------------------
They get to the hotel before it’s even dark, and it takes him a minute to work out why they’re not just driving it straight. Eleven hours in a car, even with him, can’t be any worse for Cuddy than one of her board meetings, and stopping runs the risk of missing the damn thing entirely if they hit traffic. But then, getting there in the middle of the night would mean being there the next morning, and he realizes that Cuddy has no intention of actually attending the service.
She’s just the delivery person, and he knows it’s because Wilson refused.
He’s not really sure he cares one way or the other if she’s there, not any more than he cares whether he is. But he does care why - that’s always been the question with her. The things she does rarely surprise him, but the motivations behind them do, now and again.
Not that she’ll tell him - she probably hasn’t thought about it herself, at least enough to tease out anything beyond some bland excuse about how “it wouldn’t be appropriate” or “he needs his space.” Both of which are bullshit, because he can hardly shake her when it comes to this stuff, situations where she thinks she ought to be there for comfort and moral support and perhaps to keep him from doing anything destructive. He knows that every time he’s been in her operating room, she’s either been in the observation deck or the theater itself instead of behind her desk, doing whatever bureaucratic crap deans do. She’s shown up on his doorstep after he does something more destructive than usual - at work or elsewhere - and sniffed around for alcohol and Vicodin like she thinks he doesn’t know how to hide them from her. She has some animalistic need to provide comfort and stability, even when he just wants her to get the fuck out and leave him alone.
Especially then.
He watches her as she slings a light duffel over her shoulder and nods to a second one, which he expects contains dress clothing mined from the depths of his closet and the one set of real pajamas he owns and has never worn, a post-infarction “gift” from Stacy.
“Why are you doing this?” He grabs the spare bag from her roughly, and she stumbles slightly on the gravel path.
“Doing what?”
“Driving twelve hours each way to deliver me against my will to a funeral we both know I don’t want to go to. Running the risk that I’m going to take your keys and drive off in the middle of the night and leave you here. Rearranging whatever administrative bullshit you’ve got penciled in for the sole purpose of placating my mother. Pick one.”
She doesn’t stop walking, and somehow drags him along after her without so much as touching him. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
“He was a bastard. I’m a bastard, both figuratively and literally. And my mother’s not going to feel any better hearing me deliver that as a eulogy.”
She makes no indication that she’s heard him. “There’s a restaurant with a bar inside. I’m going to check us in, take a shower, and I’ll meet you down there in twenty minutes. If you want to run away, consider that your head start.”
---------------------------------------------
Her mind is buzzing. Or her fingers. Or is it her phone? She’s not sure. She’s not sure if the buzzing is an external reality or an internal sensation, or if it’s from three glasses of wine cushioned by what could barely pass for lawn clippings, let alone a salad.
She’s not sure, but she has a guess. She guesses it’s none of those things. More likely, the buzzing is the vibrations of every nerve and cell in her body being snapped under the weight of his mouth on hers.
“What the fuck,” she murmurs against his lips. She doesn’t know if it’s a question or a statement. It’s not a protest by a long shot, as evidenced by her hands on his belt and the way her back is arching to allow him access.
“Apparently, us,” he growls, and she feels his hands trying to get her jeans open without bothering to unbutton him. He’s either drunk, desperate, or - and she wouldn’t be surprised - finds it beneath him to follow standard procedure even if it’s getting her pants off.
His hips pin her to the door and he holds her gaze and rocks against her as he slides the key card and waits for green. By the time the door shuts, she’s decided - it’s a little of everything and a hell of a lot of need.
---------------------------------------------
It’s only later, when she’s stretched out on the bed, reveling in the ache of muscle and ligament that hasn’t afflicted her in far too long, that she allows herself to consider how she came to be this way, with House snoring softly beside her in post-coital peace.
She couldn’t remember the last time they’d sat through an entire meal together, not without work surrounding them and penetrating the possibility of any real conversation. But here, they were removed, alone with one another, and she had no complaints or questions to fill the silence. And so the air was ripe for him to return to his persistent inquiry, why was she here?
She’d hedged and given him half-answers through dinner and then they’d moved to the bar. Somewhere in the midst of another refilled wine glass, she’d reached her limit and told him: she was here because she didn’t want to give him another reason to be miserable, another regret to obsess over. She wanted him to have the opportunity to say goodbye, because she hadn’t. She’d been grounded in Houston, the tail end of a desperate rush back from a conference in Tokyo, when her own father was buried, something for which she still resented her mother today. When she’d told House that, he’d been silent, finally reached out to touch her hand. The gesture was so foreign coming from him that it felt like a shock through her body when he’d made contact. She hadn’t realized until he was already kissing her that he had remembered that he was supposed to have been in Tokyo with her.
---------------------------------------------
They don’t talk about it on the drive to Lexington the next morning. She doesn’t ask how his thigh is feeling, and he doesn’t ask if she’s on anything, a question neglected the night before. Truth be told, he doesn’t care. He’s been willing since she didn’t ask him two years before, and doubts his indifference to children would change even if he shared DNA with one.
Neither of them know what it means - she’s given him the slack to stay where he chooses tonight, with his mother or at a hotel, and the third, unspoken option - beside her in bed - isn’t something either of them would mind. It’s been a long time since she’s been with anyone, and there’s always been something between her and House to make this possibility more than just fucking. How much more, she’s not sure. She’s not sure she’d say no to doing it regularly.
For him, it’s something more, as well. Hookers and the occasional random woman from a bar are enough for him, but sleeping with her is different. It’s not simply sating a need. He’s surprised to find that he misses the warmth of her skin now that they’re separated by two cups of coffee and a stick shift. He felt something when he was holding her that he hasn’t felt since Stacy.
He’s all but terrified to find that more than anything, he wants her to be there with him at his father’s funeral.
Recipient: dalilita
Prompt: An exploration of what might have happened if House and Cuddy had a one-night-stand mid-series, and how things might have played out.
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Written for help_lisa
Summary: Set during 5x04, "Birthmarks," Wilson isn't the one who drives House to his father's funeral.
He awakens with a stiff neck and an odd taste in his mouth, and his first instinct is that he’s had another seizure. The thought dissipates as quickly as it entered, though, when he sees her and then it’s all clear. All of this in the course of a split second that feels like hours.
“You drugged me.” His voice is hoarse. He figures he’s been asleep at least an hour. She must have used something strong based on the leaden feeling in his limbs and the bruised sensation in the crook of his elbow indicative of an out-of-practice puncture. “And then you drugged me again.”
“Forgive my lack of experience with drugging my friends. I wasn’t sure how you’d tolerate the sedative. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d been secretly building a tolerance for years.”
“My name is Inigo Montoya. Prepare to die.”
“Mandy Patinkin, you are not. And you missed a line.”
He shrugs. “Thought it was inappropriate given the circumstances.”
She glances at him, eyebrow cocked. “Since when have you ever minded being inappropriate?”
“I’m secretly hoping that if I play the ‘dead father’ card enough, I can get a pity fuck out of this.”
She ignores him, as expected. “I told your mother you’d be there tomorrow night. If you want food, there’s a cooler in the back. If you want Vicodin…ask nicely.”
“You drugged me, kidnapped me, and you’re withholding medication. I’m calling for help.”
“Kidnapping implies that there’s somebody who’d want you back.”
“Ouch.”
She shifts, and he notices for the first time that she’s not wearing her usual low-cut, high-hem power suit. Instead, she’s in dark jeans and a white shirt. He can’t quite see her shoes, but he guesses sandals. With toenail polish that’s just a little too bright for the office, her way of convincing herself she’s fun.
He loves seeing her dressed down. It’s like catching a glimpse of Jupiter when it passes close enough to see with the naked eye - captivating, impressive, impossible to look away.
Not to mention that whole red-hot, perpetual storm thing.
He rubs his thigh hesitantly, still a little bit groggy and more than a little bit hopeful that whatever she gave him had analgesic effects. No such luck. “I hope you brought marshmallows.”
“What?”
“Marshmallows. Roundish puffy things that you roast on a stick. One of three components of s’mores. Although if you want to skip the graham crackers and just lick chocolate and marshmallow off my washboard abs, I wouldn’t make you beg. Much.”
“What are you - ”
“You said we’re getting there tomorrow night. It doesn’t take thirty-six hours to get there, so we must not be driving straight through. And knowing how anal-retentive you are, you’ve already mapped out where we’ll stop for the night.” He pauses, measuring her reaction. She’s trying for a poker face and it’s not quite working. “I’m good if you want to do the camping thing. I pitch an impressive tent, if you know what I mean.”
Her eyes don’t even roll. Over the years, she’s built a high tolerance to his perverse comments. Plus, if she rolled her eyes every time he said something lewd or insulting, she’d probably end up with a couple of detached retinas. “There’s a hotel about six hours away. And you’re welcome to sleep naked, so long as you’re comfortable leaving yourself exposed to being castrated in your sleep.”
He cups his hands protectively over his crotch. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Give me a sharp knife and we’ll find out.”
They drive in silence a bit longer, her watching him from the corner of her eye, him contemplating the idea of Cuddy in the same room as his mother. He can’t decide if it bothers him that they’re polar opposites or if it’s that they have so much in common.
She swerves, and he’s jostled out of brooding fatigue to see her pressing the back of her hand up against the window, middle finger extended and accentuated by a manicured nail. “Fucking asshole,” she growls, glaring at a Hummer in the next lane. “What is it about men that makes them think having a truck proves anything except that they’re insecure?”
He doesn’t know if it’s rhetorical, and anyway, he’s more interested in her reaction than in answering. “So this is where you take out all that pent-up rage and sexual frustration.”
“I can’t exactly give the finger to every rich donor who thinks his money buys him the right to tell me how to run my hospital. Or every board member who calls me ‘dear’.”
“Which is how I know you get satisfaction out of my doing it for you.”
She sighs. “Even if I occasionally think it’s deserved, cleaning up after you always seems to outweigh any fleeting feelings of delight.”
Silence engulfs them again, and House alternates anticipating the inevitable discussion of why they’re doing this - not just that he’s going against his will, but that Wilson’s not the one driving - and regretting that he never did get the chance to hit the one man he really wanted to - John House.
---------------------------------------------
They get to the hotel before it’s even dark, and it takes him a minute to work out why they’re not just driving it straight. Eleven hours in a car, even with him, can’t be any worse for Cuddy than one of her board meetings, and stopping runs the risk of missing the damn thing entirely if they hit traffic. But then, getting there in the middle of the night would mean being there the next morning, and he realizes that Cuddy has no intention of actually attending the service.
She’s just the delivery person, and he knows it’s because Wilson refused.
He’s not really sure he cares one way or the other if she’s there, not any more than he cares whether he is. But he does care why - that’s always been the question with her. The things she does rarely surprise him, but the motivations behind them do, now and again.
Not that she’ll tell him - she probably hasn’t thought about it herself, at least enough to tease out anything beyond some bland excuse about how “it wouldn’t be appropriate” or “he needs his space.” Both of which are bullshit, because he can hardly shake her when it comes to this stuff, situations where she thinks she ought to be there for comfort and moral support and perhaps to keep him from doing anything destructive. He knows that every time he’s been in her operating room, she’s either been in the observation deck or the theater itself instead of behind her desk, doing whatever bureaucratic crap deans do. She’s shown up on his doorstep after he does something more destructive than usual - at work or elsewhere - and sniffed around for alcohol and Vicodin like she thinks he doesn’t know how to hide them from her. She has some animalistic need to provide comfort and stability, even when he just wants her to get the fuck out and leave him alone.
Especially then.
He watches her as she slings a light duffel over her shoulder and nods to a second one, which he expects contains dress clothing mined from the depths of his closet and the one set of real pajamas he owns and has never worn, a post-infarction “gift” from Stacy.
“Why are you doing this?” He grabs the spare bag from her roughly, and she stumbles slightly on the gravel path.
“Doing what?”
“Driving twelve hours each way to deliver me against my will to a funeral we both know I don’t want to go to. Running the risk that I’m going to take your keys and drive off in the middle of the night and leave you here. Rearranging whatever administrative bullshit you’ve got penciled in for the sole purpose of placating my mother. Pick one.”
She doesn’t stop walking, and somehow drags him along after her without so much as touching him. “Because it’s the right thing to do.”
“He was a bastard. I’m a bastard, both figuratively and literally. And my mother’s not going to feel any better hearing me deliver that as a eulogy.”
She makes no indication that she’s heard him. “There’s a restaurant with a bar inside. I’m going to check us in, take a shower, and I’ll meet you down there in twenty minutes. If you want to run away, consider that your head start.”
---------------------------------------------
Her mind is buzzing. Or her fingers. Or is it her phone? She’s not sure. She’s not sure if the buzzing is an external reality or an internal sensation, or if it’s from three glasses of wine cushioned by what could barely pass for lawn clippings, let alone a salad.
She’s not sure, but she has a guess. She guesses it’s none of those things. More likely, the buzzing is the vibrations of every nerve and cell in her body being snapped under the weight of his mouth on hers.
“What the fuck,” she murmurs against his lips. She doesn’t know if it’s a question or a statement. It’s not a protest by a long shot, as evidenced by her hands on his belt and the way her back is arching to allow him access.
“Apparently, us,” he growls, and she feels his hands trying to get her jeans open without bothering to unbutton him. He’s either drunk, desperate, or - and she wouldn’t be surprised - finds it beneath him to follow standard procedure even if it’s getting her pants off.
His hips pin her to the door and he holds her gaze and rocks against her as he slides the key card and waits for green. By the time the door shuts, she’s decided - it’s a little of everything and a hell of a lot of need.
---------------------------------------------
It’s only later, when she’s stretched out on the bed, reveling in the ache of muscle and ligament that hasn’t afflicted her in far too long, that she allows herself to consider how she came to be this way, with House snoring softly beside her in post-coital peace.
She couldn’t remember the last time they’d sat through an entire meal together, not without work surrounding them and penetrating the possibility of any real conversation. But here, they were removed, alone with one another, and she had no complaints or questions to fill the silence. And so the air was ripe for him to return to his persistent inquiry, why was she here?
She’d hedged and given him half-answers through dinner and then they’d moved to the bar. Somewhere in the midst of another refilled wine glass, she’d reached her limit and told him: she was here because she didn’t want to give him another reason to be miserable, another regret to obsess over. She wanted him to have the opportunity to say goodbye, because she hadn’t. She’d been grounded in Houston, the tail end of a desperate rush back from a conference in Tokyo, when her own father was buried, something for which she still resented her mother today. When she’d told House that, he’d been silent, finally reached out to touch her hand. The gesture was so foreign coming from him that it felt like a shock through her body when he’d made contact. She hadn’t realized until he was already kissing her that he had remembered that he was supposed to have been in Tokyo with her.
---------------------------------------------
They don’t talk about it on the drive to Lexington the next morning. She doesn’t ask how his thigh is feeling, and he doesn’t ask if she’s on anything, a question neglected the night before. Truth be told, he doesn’t care. He’s been willing since she didn’t ask him two years before, and doubts his indifference to children would change even if he shared DNA with one.
Neither of them know what it means - she’s given him the slack to stay where he chooses tonight, with his mother or at a hotel, and the third, unspoken option - beside her in bed - isn’t something either of them would mind. It’s been a long time since she’s been with anyone, and there’s always been something between her and House to make this possibility more than just fucking. How much more, she’s not sure. She’s not sure she’d say no to doing it regularly.
For him, it’s something more, as well. Hookers and the occasional random woman from a bar are enough for him, but sleeping with her is different. It’s not simply sating a need. He’s surprised to find that he misses the warmth of her skin now that they’re separated by two cups of coffee and a stick shift. He felt something when he was holding her that he hasn’t felt since Stacy.
He’s all but terrified to find that more than anything, he wants her to be there with him at his father’s funeral.