Unprotected, 5
Title: Unprotected, 5
Pairing, Characters: House/Cuddy established. DDX team, OCs.
Summary: A (temporary) medical issue brings up the question, what would the sharkverse House and Cuddy relationship be, (temporarily) without sex?
This chapter is fluff. I held off on posting it, assuming that it would be a welcome contrast to the finale, but once again the show surprised me.
When House staggered into the kitchen, Cuddy was mentally surveying the disaster of her workweek to come. She’d taken off most of Friday for another set of conferences and counselor appointments at Rachel’s school, and it was hard to explain, but the hospital seemed to come slightly unglued when she was not there. If she spent a day arguing with educators about IEPs and special needs accommodations instead of arguing with medical egos and bureaucrats about essential minutiae, whatever fragile set of interactions existed between all the moving parts in the machine of PPTH started to creak and jam and balk.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
“My nose is stuffy, my head hurts, my leg is rebelling, and I had weird-ass dreams all night, but I think I’ll live,” House reported blearily, and coughed.
He winced, and rubbed his right thigh. Cuddy moved toward him, and he made a fidgety shooing motion.
“Why don’t you ever let me massage that?” she asked quietly.
“Same reason you don’t ‘let’ me replace your bloody tampons.”
“You’re undergoing menopause?" She quirked an eyebrow. “Because that would explain a lot.”
Rachel appeared, barefoot, and sidled up to the table. “Is your cold better, House?”
“I do not have a cold, ” he responded, dropping a poptart into the toaster and staring at it. “I have the preternatural mucus producing lung dissolving sinus compacting scourge of death.”
“That’s too bad, House. I’ll stay home and take care of you.”
“Thanks, Fang, but I’m good.”
“I can tell you one of my long stories. You like those.”
“I do,” House agreed. Rachel’s stream-of-consciousness epics fascinated him; talking raptors and exploding machinery were frequent plot points. “But really, I’d like it more if you’d go to school without an argument.”
“I’ll stay home. I’m going to go get your heating pad.”
“Rachel -“ House started, but Rachel, her decision made, was sliding off her chair and headed back toward the bedroom.
He cursed softly and rubbed his forehead.
Cuddy sighed heavily. Rachel was not a bad child; she really wasn’t. She was good to her friends; she was eager to please her teachers; she loved her mother; she loved House. But every day, the simplest things became battles: Wearing socks. Leaving for school. Going to bed. Starting homework. Putting her towel in the hamper. Taking off her boots. Not whumping other children. Cuddy had scaled back her expectations far beyond what she was comfortable with, and Rachel still resisted, in the nicest possible way. No whining, no complaining, just simple, elegant, brooking no discussion, willfulness.
It was maddening. Cuddy had tried everything: bribery (“Dumb idea,” House had warned sagely. “She’ll get the idea that you’re in charge only because you own all the good stuff. Once she can get her hands on something worthwhile without you, that ride’s o-ver.”), time-outs, reasoning, being completely batshit over-the-top emotional, guilt, brainstorming. She’d even asked her mother for advice; she was that desperate.
House sneezed, and Cuddy handed him a napkin.
Part of the problem, as House pointed out, was that he and Cuddy just didn’t “get” Rachel. House pushed boundaries, but never with Rachel’s pleasant, in your face, good humor. Cuddy was accustomed to enforcing rules, of course, but by outsmarting her opponent, catching him in a well-designed trap, or accurately predicting and then short-circuiting his inveigling -- not with this constant, head-on repetition, forever laying down the same laws she’d been laying down for years on end.
Cuddy patted his forearm sympathetically. “You go back to bed; I’ll drag her to school.”
“You sure?”
“I can handle it. I just hate having to weigh every decision, trying to figure out whether it’s a hill I’m willing to die on,” Cuddy confessed.
“Welcome to my world,” he said.
House was talking to himself.
In fact, he was talking to himself the way Wilson usually talked to House, so he was annoying the living crap out of himself.
“The natural response to sudden, unwanted, change, is to seek tighter control over the things you do have some control over,” he said, and pointed to Cuddy’s empty side of the bed. “Like, her.”
“If you think I can control Cuddy, you’re dreaming.” House replied to himself, and rolled away. “Actually, I am. Dreaming, that is.” He really regretted letting Cuddy talk him into renting Inception.
His sanctimonious self, wearing a loose pair of track pants and,damn it, his Jazzfest ’02 t-shirt, blinked back into view. “You sure about that?”
“My leg hurts, so I’m not on Vicodin, and I haven’t had any recent skull fractures to explain hallucinations,” House replied. “So, yeah. You’re a figment of my subconscious. Shut up and let me get some sleep.”
“She does the same thing,” he continued, and pointed at Cuddy’s pillows again. “Remember when she adopted Rachel and felt all pathologically inept and overwhelmed and out of control, what a bitch she was? Setting tripwires, hiding your cane, cancelling our utilities. Or after you and Thirteen were taken hostage, how she suddenly got all up under our grill, camping out in our office?”
He wagged his finger at House. “You’ve been thinking, lately, about mortality. Mortality makes you think of your leg, which makes you think of Stacy, and that makes you think of Lisa. Stacy dumped you when you got crippled; Lisa gave up on you and ran straight into Lucas’ bed when you had a psychotic break - How much of you thinks Lisa will bolt for good when you get a really ugly terminal diagnosis?”
“Zero percent. Now go away.”
“You’re off, by one hundred percent,” his alter ego said meaningfully. “Or,” he shoved the track pants down to reveal a perfectly intact set of legs, “one hundred and eight, percent. That’s why I’m here. I represent the ‘road not taken’, the part of you that never depended on anyone, never trusted anyone -- and never got mutilated.”
“So you’re alone, then.” House snarled. “Big surprise.”
“And that would be my point: we both are.” He shrugged. “Well, except for that dead hooker in the next room.”
House sat up suddenly. “What?”
“Made you look.” He laughed at House’s panic.
“You’re an asshole,” House observed.
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, like we both didn’t already know that. “
“Look,” House argued. “Even if that blood test comes back positive on Friday, it means nothing. With the shape my liver is in, I have a better chance of dying with HIV than of dying of it.”
“Theoretically,” he agreed. “But it’s one thing to deal with a hypothetical possibility and another to have tangible, undeniable, verification. The simple fact that you were infected in her hospital, under her employ, is going to put Cuddy’s guilt-o-meter into overdrive. She won’t be able to handle it.”
“Cuddy can handle anything.”
“You thought the same thing about Stacy. You’re a bastard when you’re sick. And you are already sick.”
“What clued you in - the cough, the watery eyes, the sore throat, the snotty nose, or the low-grade fever - or that it’s winter in goddamned New Jersey? I have a virus. “
“Agreed. You just don’t know which virus,” he smirked.
“For me, you’re pretty fucking stupid, you know that?” House demanded.
“If you really thought you have just a harmless cold-flu combo,” he continued, “you wouldn’t be dreaming a diagnostician; you’d be dreaming a sex goddess.”
“Gaping hole in logic: why would I want me, of all people, around if I’m dying?”
“Because I’m the only person we trust to correctly interpret the symptomology and tell us that I’m dying.”
“If I really thought I needed advice on living with a fatal disease, I’d be dreaming Thirteen.”
“That’s another difference between us. If I dreamed her up, it wouldn’t be for words of wisdom.”
“Where’s House?” Foreman inquired, when Cuddy walked in to the conference room and handed him the patient file.
“Out sick.” She covered her guilt at Foreman’s worried expression with a surge of irritation. Getting House to stay home, thereby containing both his contagion and his bad mood, was easier than it might have been. The argument with Rachel, however, had extended all the way to the classroom door.
“And you are going to let him get some sleep,” she announced. “That goes for all of you. Do not, I repeat, do not, disturb him, unless the patient’s limbs are falling off and she is bleeding purple Martian blood.”
“Klingons have purple blood,” Taub pointed out.
“Green Martian blood, then.”
House’s assistant loomed suddenly in the door between the office and the conference room.
“Vulcan and Romulan blood is green,” Miss July said.
“What’s a Romulan?” Fizzou asked.
His girlfriend gazed upon him in abject pity.
“Fine,” Chase shrugged, taking the file from Foreman. “I’ll head up the case.”
“It’s my turn,” Townsend pouted.
“You need to finish re-calibrating the new monitor code to display Venn diagrams,” Taub countered.
“Somebody’s getting a little confused about who works for who, here,” Foreman muttered.
“Whom,” Taub and Townsend corrected together.
“Yes,” Cuddy snapped. “Someone is.” Ironically, someone, in fact, who liked to make a big deal of not wanting to be like House.
If only, she thought, House were that replaceable. Life would be so, so much easier, if she could just send out for a sarcastic genius, one with utterly unshakeable confidence and a soul-sucking, exasperating, yet soothingly vindicating refusal to consider anyone his - or her - equal, to walk beside her on days like this one. Or behind her, ogling her ass. Or, ahead of her, goading her, expecting her, to keep up. She had a fleeting vision of House running in front of her, his long legs pumping, his strong back bracing into the wind, yelling over his shoulder at her to come ooooon,, damn it.
She waved her hand dismissively. “Foreman: hide the paperwork I’ve been screaming at House about - those abstract submissions, the questionnaires about the new computer system, and the charts on your last six cases.”
“Nine.”
“Really?” Chase wrinkled his nose. “Is it December already?”
Cuddy continued, “Try putting it in the HR filing cabinet; he doesn’t know I look there, yet. Then go break something expensive. Townsend, go loaf around the clinic until the nurses chase you away, then incite a religious argument with the chaplain’s ethics committee. Start by calling them ‘the God squad.’ Chase, have lunch with Wilson, start a ridiculous rumor, and make a bet on something disruptive and stupid. Shaeffer and Stephens will take over the case, and you …. “ she pointed. “Repeat after me: ‘I hate them, I hope they die.’”
Taub blinked. Cuddy made an impatient rolling motion.
“I, er, hate them, I hope they die?” he tried.
“With a little more feeling, please.”
“I hate them, I hope they die.” Taub seemed to enjoy it that time. “I hate them,” he repeated with more relish, and rocked back on his heels. “I hope they die.”
Rachel was right: in the right context, that phrase actually was very comforting. “Make sure you’re in my office to deliver that line at ten fifteen when the meeting with Sparkman and Kohl finishes up. Bring me a frozen yogurt at around noon; say it again. And be outside the Path lab to say it again when I get finished being yelled at and condescended to by Gale.”
Foreman crossed his arms over his chest. “Except for Stephens and Shaeffer, you just assigned all of us, things that when House does them, you say they make you want to push him down an elevator shaft. Why is that?”
“Because Shaeffer and Stephens are new here.”
Trying to shed the residual mental discordance from his strange dreams, House shuffled into the kitchen, managing only a minor attempt to cough up his right lung. This was a substantial improvement in his health from the weekend, but he could not bring himself to celebrate it. A day of glorious solitude lay out before him, but taking a shower and then getting a glass of water was evidently the sum total of all he had in him to accomplish.
“Cuddy?” He leaned on the counter and narrowed his eyes at the pot on the stove. “What are you doing home?”
She wiped her hands on a paper towel. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m making soup. An old recipe, from my mother’s family.”
“Must be one of the few that isn’t at least fifty proof,” he said casually.
She didn’t appreciate that at all. “I have two recipes, all right?” she glared. “One them just happens to be my Aunt Connie’s Virus-Killing Garlic Chicken Soup.”
“Are you okay?” he asked, because she looked harried and quite a bit more homicidal than usual.
“Don’t I look okay?”
“You look like a hardened criminal who’s just been released from prison and is looking for someone small and weak to mess up. That’s just how I always want my wife to look. And, it’s only eleven a.m.”
“So, I’ll leave the soup in the crockpot for later.”
“Shouldn’t you be dominating the medical world, at this hour?” After a moment of consideration, he tilted his head. “Wait. We have a crockpot?”
“You moved it here from your old place.” She counted exactly seven Ritz crackers onto a plate and began slicing an orange.
House scratched his head. “Hunh. I’m a guy who owns a crockpot.” The revelation astounded him. “Seriously, Cuddy, you’re scaring me. Why are you here?”
“I honestly have no idea,” she said, throwing up her hands. “It makes no sense. When I feel like crap I can keep on keeping on, but when you have the sniffles, I cannot concentrate or give a damn. I was minding my own business, going through facilities management reports, and I realized, I never want to read another facilities management report again for as long as I live. The facilities don’t care if they have a management report, for God’s sake, they’re inanimate objects. There is absolutely nothing in that hospital that can’t wait until we can go in together to deal with it - or for me to deal with it while you deal with me.”
He walked up behind her and looped his arms around her waist. She let her weight fall back against him, and breathed slowly, intentionally.
“I’ll be fine,”” he said.
“You’d better be,” she said. “Or I am going to be pissed. I can’t function like this.”
Leaving the soup on to simmer, Cuddy went out to pick Rachel up from school. She actually lied to the school about Rachel having a doctor's appointment, and expressed a total absence of guilt about it. After lunch she dosed House up a with a nuclear-grade combination expectorant/antitussant/analgesic/decongestant/antihistamine elixir that Rachel referred to in an awe-filled tone as “The Purple Stuff,” and then stacked a pile of new magazines next to him on the bed: National Geographic, Car and Driver, Scientific American, Soap Opera Digest.
“Wow,” House said. “Thanks, Girls.”
“I like that,” Rachel said. “When you call us ‘Girls.’”
“You are girls.”
Rachel handed him the remote and centered the tissue box on the nightstand beside him. “I know. But it feels nice when you say it.”
Halfway through Pirates of the Caribbean III, House began to doze off. “Cuddy. Promise me you won’t ever leave me, no matter how nasty I get, no matter how much I deserve it,” he begged softly. “I can't lose my girls. Please.”
“I promise,” she said.
“HAH,” he mumbled. “I told me so. Take that, Me.”
Cuddy decided that was just The Purple Stuff talking.
Part 6: Of old dogs, learning new tricks.
Pairing, Characters: House/Cuddy established. DDX team, OCs.
Summary: A (temporary) medical issue brings up the question, what would the sharkverse House and Cuddy relationship be, (temporarily) without sex?
This chapter is fluff. I held off on posting it, assuming that it would be a welcome contrast to the finale, but once again the show surprised me.
When House staggered into the kitchen, Cuddy was mentally surveying the disaster of her workweek to come. She’d taken off most of Friday for another set of conferences and counselor appointments at Rachel’s school, and it was hard to explain, but the hospital seemed to come slightly unglued when she was not there. If she spent a day arguing with educators about IEPs and special needs accommodations instead of arguing with medical egos and bureaucrats about essential minutiae, whatever fragile set of interactions existed between all the moving parts in the machine of PPTH started to creak and jam and balk.
"How are you feeling?" she asked.
“My nose is stuffy, my head hurts, my leg is rebelling, and I had weird-ass dreams all night, but I think I’ll live,” House reported blearily, and coughed.
He winced, and rubbed his right thigh. Cuddy moved toward him, and he made a fidgety shooing motion.
“Why don’t you ever let me massage that?” she asked quietly.
“Same reason you don’t ‘let’ me replace your bloody tampons.”
“You’re undergoing menopause?" She quirked an eyebrow. “Because that would explain a lot.”
Rachel appeared, barefoot, and sidled up to the table. “Is your cold better, House?”
“I do not have a cold, ” he responded, dropping a poptart into the toaster and staring at it. “I have the preternatural mucus producing lung dissolving sinus compacting scourge of death.”
“That’s too bad, House. I’ll stay home and take care of you.”
“Thanks, Fang, but I’m good.”
“I can tell you one of my long stories. You like those.”
“I do,” House agreed. Rachel’s stream-of-consciousness epics fascinated him; talking raptors and exploding machinery were frequent plot points. “But really, I’d like it more if you’d go to school without an argument.”
“I’ll stay home. I’m going to go get your heating pad.”
“Rachel -“ House started, but Rachel, her decision made, was sliding off her chair and headed back toward the bedroom.
He cursed softly and rubbed his forehead.
Cuddy sighed heavily. Rachel was not a bad child; she really wasn’t. She was good to her friends; she was eager to please her teachers; she loved her mother; she loved House. But every day, the simplest things became battles: Wearing socks. Leaving for school. Going to bed. Starting homework. Putting her towel in the hamper. Taking off her boots. Not whumping other children. Cuddy had scaled back her expectations far beyond what she was comfortable with, and Rachel still resisted, in the nicest possible way. No whining, no complaining, just simple, elegant, brooking no discussion, willfulness.
It was maddening. Cuddy had tried everything: bribery (“Dumb idea,” House had warned sagely. “She’ll get the idea that you’re in charge only because you own all the good stuff. Once she can get her hands on something worthwhile without you, that ride’s o-ver.”), time-outs, reasoning, being completely batshit over-the-top emotional, guilt, brainstorming. She’d even asked her mother for advice; she was that desperate.
House sneezed, and Cuddy handed him a napkin.
Part of the problem, as House pointed out, was that he and Cuddy just didn’t “get” Rachel. House pushed boundaries, but never with Rachel’s pleasant, in your face, good humor. Cuddy was accustomed to enforcing rules, of course, but by outsmarting her opponent, catching him in a well-designed trap, or accurately predicting and then short-circuiting his inveigling -- not with this constant, head-on repetition, forever laying down the same laws she’d been laying down for years on end.
Cuddy patted his forearm sympathetically. “You go back to bed; I’ll drag her to school.”
“You sure?”
“I can handle it. I just hate having to weigh every decision, trying to figure out whether it’s a hill I’m willing to die on,” Cuddy confessed.
“Welcome to my world,” he said.
House was talking to himself.
In fact, he was talking to himself the way Wilson usually talked to House, so he was annoying the living crap out of himself.
“The natural response to sudden, unwanted, change, is to seek tighter control over the things you do have some control over,” he said, and pointed to Cuddy’s empty side of the bed. “Like, her.”
“If you think I can control Cuddy, you’re dreaming.” House replied to himself, and rolled away. “Actually, I am. Dreaming, that is.” He really regretted letting Cuddy talk him into renting Inception.
His sanctimonious self, wearing a loose pair of track pants and,damn it, his Jazzfest ’02 t-shirt, blinked back into view. “You sure about that?”
“My leg hurts, so I’m not on Vicodin, and I haven’t had any recent skull fractures to explain hallucinations,” House replied. “So, yeah. You’re a figment of my subconscious. Shut up and let me get some sleep.”
“She does the same thing,” he continued, and pointed at Cuddy’s pillows again. “Remember when she adopted Rachel and felt all pathologically inept and overwhelmed and out of control, what a bitch she was? Setting tripwires, hiding your cane, cancelling our utilities. Or after you and Thirteen were taken hostage, how she suddenly got all up under our grill, camping out in our office?”
He wagged his finger at House. “You’ve been thinking, lately, about mortality. Mortality makes you think of your leg, which makes you think of Stacy, and that makes you think of Lisa. Stacy dumped you when you got crippled; Lisa gave up on you and ran straight into Lucas’ bed when you had a psychotic break - How much of you thinks Lisa will bolt for good when you get a really ugly terminal diagnosis?”
“Zero percent. Now go away.”
“You’re off, by one hundred percent,” his alter ego said meaningfully. “Or,” he shoved the track pants down to reveal a perfectly intact set of legs, “one hundred and eight, percent. That’s why I’m here. I represent the ‘road not taken’, the part of you that never depended on anyone, never trusted anyone -- and never got mutilated.”
“So you’re alone, then.” House snarled. “Big surprise.”
“And that would be my point: we both are.” He shrugged. “Well, except for that dead hooker in the next room.”
House sat up suddenly. “What?”
“Made you look.” He laughed at House’s panic.
“You’re an asshole,” House observed.
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, like we both didn’t already know that. “
“Look,” House argued. “Even if that blood test comes back positive on Friday, it means nothing. With the shape my liver is in, I have a better chance of dying with HIV than of dying of it.”
“Theoretically,” he agreed. “But it’s one thing to deal with a hypothetical possibility and another to have tangible, undeniable, verification. The simple fact that you were infected in her hospital, under her employ, is going to put Cuddy’s guilt-o-meter into overdrive. She won’t be able to handle it.”
“Cuddy can handle anything.”
“You thought the same thing about Stacy. You’re a bastard when you’re sick. And you are already sick.”
“What clued you in - the cough, the watery eyes, the sore throat, the snotty nose, or the low-grade fever - or that it’s winter in goddamned New Jersey? I have a virus. “
“Agreed. You just don’t know which virus,” he smirked.
“For me, you’re pretty fucking stupid, you know that?” House demanded.
“If you really thought you have just a harmless cold-flu combo,” he continued, “you wouldn’t be dreaming a diagnostician; you’d be dreaming a sex goddess.”
“Gaping hole in logic: why would I want me, of all people, around if I’m dying?”
“Because I’m the only person we trust to correctly interpret the symptomology and tell us that I’m dying.”
“If I really thought I needed advice on living with a fatal disease, I’d be dreaming Thirteen.”
“That’s another difference between us. If I dreamed her up, it wouldn’t be for words of wisdom.”
“Where’s House?” Foreman inquired, when Cuddy walked in to the conference room and handed him the patient file.
“Out sick.” She covered her guilt at Foreman’s worried expression with a surge of irritation. Getting House to stay home, thereby containing both his contagion and his bad mood, was easier than it might have been. The argument with Rachel, however, had extended all the way to the classroom door.
“And you are going to let him get some sleep,” she announced. “That goes for all of you. Do not, I repeat, do not, disturb him, unless the patient’s limbs are falling off and she is bleeding purple Martian blood.”
“Klingons have purple blood,” Taub pointed out.
“Green Martian blood, then.”
House’s assistant loomed suddenly in the door between the office and the conference room.
“Vulcan and Romulan blood is green,” Miss July said.
“What’s a Romulan?” Fizzou asked.
His girlfriend gazed upon him in abject pity.
“Fine,” Chase shrugged, taking the file from Foreman. “I’ll head up the case.”
“It’s my turn,” Townsend pouted.
“You need to finish re-calibrating the new monitor code to display Venn diagrams,” Taub countered.
“Somebody’s getting a little confused about who works for who, here,” Foreman muttered.
“Whom,” Taub and Townsend corrected together.
“Yes,” Cuddy snapped. “Someone is.” Ironically, someone, in fact, who liked to make a big deal of not wanting to be like House.
If only, she thought, House were that replaceable. Life would be so, so much easier, if she could just send out for a sarcastic genius, one with utterly unshakeable confidence and a soul-sucking, exasperating, yet soothingly vindicating refusal to consider anyone his - or her - equal, to walk beside her on days like this one. Or behind her, ogling her ass. Or, ahead of her, goading her, expecting her, to keep up. She had a fleeting vision of House running in front of her, his long legs pumping, his strong back bracing into the wind, yelling over his shoulder at her to come ooooon,, damn it.
She waved her hand dismissively. “Foreman: hide the paperwork I’ve been screaming at House about - those abstract submissions, the questionnaires about the new computer system, and the charts on your last six cases.”
“Nine.”
“Really?” Chase wrinkled his nose. “Is it December already?”
Cuddy continued, “Try putting it in the HR filing cabinet; he doesn’t know I look there, yet. Then go break something expensive. Townsend, go loaf around the clinic until the nurses chase you away, then incite a religious argument with the chaplain’s ethics committee. Start by calling them ‘the God squad.’ Chase, have lunch with Wilson, start a ridiculous rumor, and make a bet on something disruptive and stupid. Shaeffer and Stephens will take over the case, and you …. “ she pointed. “Repeat after me: ‘I hate them, I hope they die.’”
Taub blinked. Cuddy made an impatient rolling motion.
“I, er, hate them, I hope they die?” he tried.
“With a little more feeling, please.”
“I hate them, I hope they die.” Taub seemed to enjoy it that time. “I hate them,” he repeated with more relish, and rocked back on his heels. “I hope they die.”
Rachel was right: in the right context, that phrase actually was very comforting. “Make sure you’re in my office to deliver that line at ten fifteen when the meeting with Sparkman and Kohl finishes up. Bring me a frozen yogurt at around noon; say it again. And be outside the Path lab to say it again when I get finished being yelled at and condescended to by Gale.”
Foreman crossed his arms over his chest. “Except for Stephens and Shaeffer, you just assigned all of us, things that when House does them, you say they make you want to push him down an elevator shaft. Why is that?”
“Because Shaeffer and Stephens are new here.”
Trying to shed the residual mental discordance from his strange dreams, House shuffled into the kitchen, managing only a minor attempt to cough up his right lung. This was a substantial improvement in his health from the weekend, but he could not bring himself to celebrate it. A day of glorious solitude lay out before him, but taking a shower and then getting a glass of water was evidently the sum total of all he had in him to accomplish.
“Cuddy?” He leaned on the counter and narrowed his eyes at the pot on the stove. “What are you doing home?”
She wiped her hands on a paper towel. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m making soup. An old recipe, from my mother’s family.”
“Must be one of the few that isn’t at least fifty proof,” he said casually.
She didn’t appreciate that at all. “I have two recipes, all right?” she glared. “One them just happens to be my Aunt Connie’s Virus-Killing Garlic Chicken Soup.”
“Are you okay?” he asked, because she looked harried and quite a bit more homicidal than usual.
“Don’t I look okay?”
“You look like a hardened criminal who’s just been released from prison and is looking for someone small and weak to mess up. That’s just how I always want my wife to look. And, it’s only eleven a.m.”
“So, I’ll leave the soup in the crockpot for later.”
“Shouldn’t you be dominating the medical world, at this hour?” After a moment of consideration, he tilted his head. “Wait. We have a crockpot?”
“You moved it here from your old place.” She counted exactly seven Ritz crackers onto a plate and began slicing an orange.
House scratched his head. “Hunh. I’m a guy who owns a crockpot.” The revelation astounded him. “Seriously, Cuddy, you’re scaring me. Why are you here?”
“I honestly have no idea,” she said, throwing up her hands. “It makes no sense. When I feel like crap I can keep on keeping on, but when you have the sniffles, I cannot concentrate or give a damn. I was minding my own business, going through facilities management reports, and I realized, I never want to read another facilities management report again for as long as I live. The facilities don’t care if they have a management report, for God’s sake, they’re inanimate objects. There is absolutely nothing in that hospital that can’t wait until we can go in together to deal with it - or for me to deal with it while you deal with me.”
He walked up behind her and looped his arms around her waist. She let her weight fall back against him, and breathed slowly, intentionally.
“I’ll be fine,”” he said.
“You’d better be,” she said. “Or I am going to be pissed. I can’t function like this.”
Leaving the soup on to simmer, Cuddy went out to pick Rachel up from school. She actually lied to the school about Rachel having a doctor's appointment, and expressed a total absence of guilt about it. After lunch she dosed House up a with a nuclear-grade combination expectorant/antitussant/analgesic/decongestant/antihistamine elixir that Rachel referred to in an awe-filled tone as “The Purple Stuff,” and then stacked a pile of new magazines next to him on the bed: National Geographic, Car and Driver, Scientific American, Soap Opera Digest.
“Wow,” House said. “Thanks, Girls.”
“I like that,” Rachel said. “When you call us ‘Girls.’”
“You are girls.”
Rachel handed him the remote and centered the tissue box on the nightstand beside him. “I know. But it feels nice when you say it.”
Halfway through Pirates of the Caribbean III, House began to doze off. “Cuddy. Promise me you won’t ever leave me, no matter how nasty I get, no matter how much I deserve it,” he begged softly. “I can't lose my girls. Please.”
“I promise,” she said.
“HAH,” he mumbled. “I told me so. Take that, Me.”
Cuddy decided that was just The Purple Stuff talking.
Part 6: Of old dogs, learning new tricks.