Epic Fail
One.
But when he doesn't look up, doesn't notice her standing outside his office, she loses her nerve to enter and walks (just walks) until she is somewhere near the pediatrics wing.
Two.
It is what it morphs into, the number of times it takes her to walk into his space, to be alone with him since he has come back.
He wears Mayfield like a mask; he is no longer House the brilliant diagnostician but House, the recovering drug addict and psych patient.
She watches as his shoulders slump as she comes in, still not looking at her. Loss fills her just as much as him and silence bears down upon them. Words seem irreverent and hollow because everything has changed and she doesn't know how to acknowledge it. Acknowledge that she knows.
Boxes sit at his sides, half packed, half forgotten. She wonders what this is about, wonders what this could all mean because this is the first time she has seen him since he has returned.
“How's your team doing?” she questions.
It was a start, as good as any. He shrugs and pushes his computer to the side.
“I don't know.”
“You don't know about your team? I find that hard to believe,” she scoffs but then was plagued by guilt. The old role tends to be so easy to fall into but it is not the one she needs to be playing.
“I don't know what the hell I'm doing here,” he mutters.
He stands and grabs his jacket from the back of his chair. She watches him jab his arms into the sleeves and he breezes past her, never once meeting her eyes.
“House,” she stops him with a hand on his shoulder. “Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Are you sure you're ready to be back? Is this about Mayfield?” she feels herself blurt out.
“It's always about Mayfield,” he whispers, “And more.”
She finds herself taken aback by the uncharacteristic move of complete honesty, vulnerability. The blue of his eyes seems dull like the rainy backdrop behind him. He is looking at her but she knows he is somewhere else, somewhere she doesn't know how to find him yet.
He drops his gaze from her and she lets him leave without holding him back.
-
“I can't risk coming back here,” he tells her, a strange concoction of emotions swirling around in him.
Nothing had changed. Nothing except for him and it felt as though the walls shook a bit when he walked in. As if by somehow returning, he were altering the very makeup of space that had learned to function without him, had never even missed him.
But he stands here, looking at her and trying to read the past three months on her face because he'd always been decent at reading her like a medical text.
Slightly furrowed brow and minimally slanted eyes to indicate empathy. Stepping forward, not away which meant courage. Hands gripping the chair, just to have something to hold - the action screaming a loss of balance, loss of an ideas about tact. Mouth agape, loss of words.
He hadn't wanted her pity nor concern. Neither indulgences offered by his second in command; Foreman remains seemingly unaffected and uncaring about his news,never once unfolding his hands or shifting from his seat in her office chair.
“Okay,” she tells him and he nods and leaves them alone, no doubt to talk about him being back.
-
She is at his door and smiling but he can't really comprehend it or grasp it because a few months ago, he was in a mental health facility all because she was in his bathroom and in his bed and in his mind.
There is sticky dough somewhere beneath a layer of flour on the tips of his fingers and he can't really keep her out in the hall because he has a project going on in the kitchen which he finds himself desperately needing to get back to for his sanity's sake, to busy his hands with something, so he invites her in.
“I'm making gnocchi,” he tells her, as if she cares or it matters.
Instantly, he worries that she will think it is a dinner invitation and then he scolds himself because before, he would have never worried about what he said. It still feels like there are too many voices in his head and he has to claw for dominance to make sure the voice he really hears was only his own.
She follows him and he limps toward the woman leaning over a steaming pot on the stove. From her spot, the tiny Asian woman glances at him for a moment and then turns her attention back to Cuddy.
“Oh, I didn't mean to intrude. I just...” Cuddy begins.
“Cecile's in my cooking class. She doesn't speak English,” he lies, jokes.
He exchanges a few words with his partner in her foreign tongue, all the while focusing on the dough beneath his hands. The rolling pin flattens it, spreads it across the counter top until it is as thin as skin. Beside him, he grabs a palm full of flour and sprinkles it on the cutting board and presses it into the mixture lightly, painting smoke-like strokes across the dough.
“You bake the potatoes instead of boiling them. Less moisture, pure gluten bonds, lighter gnocchi.”
He has always been good at thinking through processes, explaining them. If she isn't interested, she doesn't act like it or let on. Instead she just smiles.
“You seem good,” she says, leaning against the door frame.
“Feeling better.”
He folds the dough over the small spoonful of potato, making sure to crease the edges and seal all of the holes so that it doesn't seep out into the boiling water. It is so much easier to focus on this rather than her standing in the same space and wanting to talk, which he has never been that great at.
“House, I need to talk to you about leaving the hospital,” she finally tells him.
“I do love a good groveling, but my decision is final.”
“That's fine,” she says, stepping forward so that she is right across the counter from him now. “As long as I'm not the reason for it. I know that sounds completely narcissistic but...”
“Yeah...but it's not,” he stops her. She makes a face and he shakes off her thought with a head nod. “We flirted, we kissed, I fondled. I hallucinated a night with you and yelled it from a hospital balcony. You're not a narcissist.”
He wonders what she thinks of his confirmation, of his admitting to seeing her when she wasn't even around. The pain in his leg spikes a little and he reaches a dirty hand down about to massage his limb, but then retracts it and goes back to his creation below him.
“Then what am I?”
The words stop him and he isn't sure to answer.
“Not the reason I'm leaving,” is the only thing he can safely tell her, something that he knows.
“House,” she stops. He hears her struggle by the inflection in her voice. “I'm gonna miss you.”
“Lady, either kiss him or leave. We've got work to do,” Cecile says, breaking the skit.
He watches as Cuddy leaves without a taste of his lips, without a reminder of the past. As she disappears around the door frame, something inside of him shifts and he isn't sure if he is grateful or mourning the loss of someone he never had.
-
“You weren't on vicodin,” she tells him in the elevator.
“I told you I wasn't,” he grumbles, flipping through a file.
She fidgets and lets silence envelop them. Several people enter and leave before they get to the bottom floor and into the lobby. He stands in the opposite corner and throws her a look before the ding of the elevator sounds and opens the door into another floor, another world.
“So who took the urine sample and tested it?” he calls back to her as he hobbles toward the front desk. She falls into step behind him, never once coming to walk beside him.
“Wilson,” she admits and stops when he turns to face her, their bodies almost clashing together by the sudden halt in forward movement.
“I'm not taking drugs,” he tells her, perhaps as an enforcer to confirm what she already knows. He leans his cane against the reception desk and browses through his message slips.
“I'm sorry I didn't trust you,” she whispers, her face smeared with clouded apologies.
He shrugs like she had just done nothing. The nonchalance of his nature sends a ripple of anger through her body until he opens his mouth again.
“I don't blame the two of you,” he concedes, throwing the pink scraps into the nearest trash can. He reaches across her body to grab his cane and wraps his fingers around the handle. “I wouldn't trust me either.”
She watches him walk away, asking herself if she even knows him anymore.