Yeah, its been ages. But still, heres Chapter 3! If you havent seen them, they should be around somewhere on my profile :)
Tell me what you think?
Cuddy arrived home from House’s apartment in a daze. It was barely seven o’clock and she was exhausted, and felt slightly guilty that she was glad Rachel had had a tiring day and had just dropped off to sleep – all Cuddy wanted to do now was to sit on her sofa with a cup of tea and try not to think too much. She saw the nanny out and locked up, before wandering down into Rachel’s room and gazing down at her daughter. As her eyes traced Rachel’s tiny features, she suddenly had a wave of sadness – Rachel’s life had been complicated enough already, and she didn’t want her little girl going off to school and questioning why her family was different to everyone else’s. Where was her daddy? Probably doing his homework, Cuddy thought sarcastically, but then reverted back to her original train of thought. A male presence in her life wouldn’t be a bad thing by any means, and as her mind drifted again to the infuriating, scruffy man she had just left, a small flame of hope ignited in her chest.
Two days later, House came back to work. He took the second day off even though his bug had passed – it would be unlike him not to milk everything for what it was worth, and he fully intended to enjoy and remnants of sympathy that came his way that day, even if it was unlikely. As his motorbike roared to life underneath him, and he pulled away from the sidewalk, his mind flashed back to the sympathy he had gotten. There weren’t many who would take time out to comfort him, and even though Cuddy had most likely convinced herself she was checking he wasn’t just skiving work, House knew her caring side came out for him, and he didn’t think he would ever understand why. He had endlessly irritated, criticised and angered her, and she still came through for him. As he flew past the traffic lights just turning red, he considered actually putting some effort into the slight headway he had made with her over the past week and a bit. House pulled up to another light that turned red before he could get by, and as he sat there, he thought that the thought itself was a step far enough for now – admitting to himself that he had always had an interest surrounding the life of Lisa Cuddy was big enough for him to deal with now.
At least until he got to work.
Cuddy hung up the phone from talking with the pharmacy to see House waltz into the clinic, turn, and promptly barge into her office.
“Did you miss me honey?” House smirked at her as she got up to get some files from her coffee table, rolling her eyes at him in the process.
“I see you made it in on time for once...Oh no look! It’s even later than normal. Celebrating something?” She quipped as she sat down on the couch. She was surprised to see House drop down beside her, but covered it quickly and carried on leafing through the papers.
“Yes actually, my miraculous recovery from the painful and unpleasant illness I just battled through,” House shot back just as quickly. She turned her head towards him and gave him a “look”, to which House just grinned at her, and settled back onto the cushions. Cuddy carried on looking at him for a couple of seconds before House sighed, and muttered “I just came to say hi.”
Cuddy blinked, and looked away for a second, fighting to keep the smile off her face. She had been trying to keep her thoughts from straying towards House while he was off, and now it looked like he was back in her life with a vengeance. She looked back up at him to see he had looked away too, and she decided not to push him any more than House allowed – he could retreat from her at any second and at any issue, and Cuddy decidedly didn’t want that.
“Oi,” she said, poking his leg with her foot. “You can’t camp out on my couch all day. Go haul your weight in the clinic for a bit or something while I see if I can find you an interesting but easy case to “ease you back in” after your traumatic experience.” She turfed him out of his seat and followed him to the door, where he turned to her, leaned in ever so slightly and said “Slavedriver.” Cuddy merely grinned and pushed him gently through the door, through which she saw him actually approach the nurses’ station and leaf through a few files before calling someone into exam room 1.
The flame in her chest grew a little bit bigger.
Clinic duty. A torture that could eliminate even the best of moods in half an hour. The patients that House had seen so far had sucked all the fun out of clinic duty that could possibly be had, and destroyed the relatively good mood that he had been in when he had left Cuddy’s office. The obnoxious, the annoying, the stupid, the cocky and the insane had all passed through the shiny glass doors of the clinic, and had all left with the displeasure of Gregory House nipping at their ankles on the way out.
House followed his seventh patient out, who was clutching a prescription and several suggestions about his wife’s fidelity to consider. He limped over to the nurses’ station to slap down the folder and take another, and as he flipped it open and looked at the age of the girl next on the pile, he sighed. He could already predict what this was going to be about – another crotch swab would return back from the lab showing another endlessly dull STD, and he had had enough. He would treat this patient and then he was leaving – he had shown willingness for Cuddy, and that was enough.
“Tracy Newman?”
The 17 year old blond girl across the clinic’s head snapped up, and she quickly shoved her phone in her pocket and grabbed her bag, before making her way over to House, who was observing her critically. All the signs of a sexually overactive teenager were there – the speedy texting back once a message popped up on the screen she had been gazing at in wait, the swagger in her walk, the overdone makeup, the slightly too short skirt and the definitely too low cut top that just screamed inappropriate for a hospital all had “STD” stamped over it. House literally felt his temper shorten at the sight of the gum-chewing girl, and he motioned her into an empty exam room.
Nurse Brenda looked up at the banging of a door.
“You jackass!” echoed out of the room before a teenage girl stalked out and over to the nurses’ station, where she stood breathing heavily for a couple of seconds before spitting out “You employ such...such...agh, just JACKASSES here. Urgh!”
Brenda opened her mouth to reply, but the girl was already storming out of the clinic doors. Brenda shut her mouth and turned her gaze over to the open door in time to see one Gregory House emerge out of it with a face like thunder. He limped heavily over to the desk, thrust the file in Brenda’s direction, and when she took it, promptly followed the girl out of the clinic doors, but headed over towards the elevators rather than the doors.
Brenda dropped the file on the stack, and flicked her gaze over to Cuddy’s office. Cuddy always made a point about wanting to know all of House’s antics in the clinic, and she didn’t see why today would be any different. Brenda pushed back her chair, stood up, and went to knock on Cuddy’s door.
House limped angrily out of the elevator and down the hall to his office. He could see some of his team in the outer office, but barely paid attention to which members were there. As he threw to door open and it clattered off the wall, he registered Thirteen and Taub startle, and gather a couple of files up before practically running out of the office, probably to shelter in their patients room for a while. He yanked the blinds closed and collapsed into his chair, part of his mind faintly amused by the fact his team were still scared of him. He shut his eyes and tried his hardest to block out the noise of the hospital he could hear echoing out from the corridor. But, all of one minute later, Cuddy threw the door open. House kept his eyes closed, but the frown on his face deepened.
“What do you want, Cuddy?” He asked brashly. Cuddy walked right up to the side of his desk and jabbed him in the chest with her finger, causing him to open his eyes and look at her.
“What I want is for you to actually do your job for once! Every other doctor in this hospital manages to survive clinic duty, and as much as you may argue against it, you ARE human, and therefore the same as the rest of us. Why do you have to do this? That girl was seventeen, House. That’s only a few years younger than I was when we met! Why do you have to make them all so ANGRY, cant you jus-“
“For god’s sake Cuddy, let it go!” House stood up as fast as his leg would allow to tower over her. His temper had finally snapped – the combination of his vaguely good mood being dragged through the dirt, the plain irritating patients and now Cuddy screeching at him about his behaviour was enough to warrant an unexpected day off for House. Maybe he wasn’t quite over his “illness” after all, and would need another day to recover, and if Cuddy would stand in his way then she was going to have to move. “It’s nothing I haven’t done before, and the patient wasn’t even that upset, she just made a remark to the nurses! If you weren’t helplessly throwing yourself at me every chance you got we wouldn’t even be having this pointless argument right now, so you need to squash that dream of having some man come along and complete your happy-go-lucky life with your new toy waiting at home to wail and spit up on you, cos it won’t happen. Not with me, not with anyone. Life sucks, Cuddy, and you need to accept that and get on with your job. That’s all I’m ever going to want from you.”
Cuddy stared at him for a couple of seconds, fighting to keep her face smooth, before turning and walking out of his office and towards the elevators. She didn’t storm away, or flounce out, just walked. As the elevator opened immediately for her and she stepped in without having to wait (thanking some God out there for small miracles), she sighed. She was stupid to have thought House would be willing to change even the slightest for her. So what if they had twenty years of history, positive and negative events swirling together to create their relationship today. That didn’t matter in House’s eyes. All he was concerned about was his own little island, not letting anyone fully in. Some people were allowed day passes, and others even were permitted longer stays, like Wilson and Stacy, but Cuddy? She was never truly let in. The brief flashes she saw of a different House, the caring, funny and human House were always eclipsed by the arrogant jackass who knew exactly where to aim for maximum hurt. As Cuddy rode down to the ground floor, she cursed House’s intuition and his genius brain. Yes, she had been feeling the absence of a male figure in hers and Rachel’s lives – but she wasn’t desperate for it. And yes, she had been thinking about him, and she had thought he had been thinking about her too. It was stupid to overreact – this was just House being House, and she shouldn’t care.
Late on that evening, House jerked awake at his phone vibrating in his pocket. He had fallen asleep on the couch again, and woke with a neck ache. He sat up slowly, and reached for his phone, which promptly stopped vibrating. He had had a brainwave mid-afternoon and had rung in the answer to solve his latest case, so he was confident it wasn’t his team ringing. Whoever it was would call again if it was urgent. He stood, and made his way down the hall to his room to go to bed – he was grumpy and tired, and simply could not be bothered with anything else. But after he had changed, turned out the lights and lay down, his mind would not switch off. Cuddy’s face kept swimming to the front of his mind, the contrast between her face that day after he had yelled at her and her face from only a few days ago as she shook him gently awake – and as he began to brood, he just hoped what he had done mid-afternoon in a fit of regret, albeit with a Housian touch, would be enough to alleviate whatever effect the words he had thrown in Cuddy’s face earlier that day had done.
Cuddy looked away from the TV down to the baby on her chest, and smiled. Rachel was fast asleep, with a tiny bit of drool coming from her mouth onto Cuddy’s top. Cuddy gently eased herself upright, keeping Rachel secure, and turned off the TV. She stood up cradling her baby girl, and for a moment was overwhelmed by how lucky she was to have Rachel in her life now – a constant presence in a life of unpredictability. Cuddy pressed a kiss to Rachel’s forehead and made her way down to her bedroom to lay her down in her crib. As she moved over to the door to switch off the overhead light, and she glanced back at Rachel sleeping softly, House’s words from earlier about her and Rachel echoed in her head. Cuddy fought off the memory, determined not to tread down that path any further, and shut Rachel’s door behind her. She stood there for a second and debated going to bed, regardless of the work she had to get done, but her administrative side won out over her the lazier person in side of her that simply wanted to sleep the day away. Cuddy fetched her bag from where she had dumped it in the hall upon arriving home, and took it into the dining room to spread out her various files into stacks that would need to be either simply signed off on, or more complex issues that would need her to review it thoroughly first. She looked down at all the papers and sighed, deciding she would need a cup of tea before getting started. As the clean-freak in her glanced over the room to find a coaster, her eyes landed on a sheet of paper sticking out of one of the piles, and Cuddy literally froze. She slowly pulled it out of the pile, and as she scanned the simple sheet of paper, her mind stopped working for a second, and then promptly went into overdrive.
Patient Discharge Form
Attending Physician: Dr. Gregory House
Summary of Case: Patient presented with...
The contents of this sheet were not unusual. One of House’s team usually filled it out at the end of a case, knowing House would never bother doing it himself. But this time, as Cuddy read through the detailed medical overview of House’s latest case, she knew that he himself had filled it out. She knew his handwriting as well as she knew her own, having seen him scrawl down answers in college to writing symptoms up on a whiteboard in her hospital over twenty years later. The way he formed his G’s, probably from writing his own name so much, was so distinctive to Cuddy, yet so unfamiliar looking on this sheet of paper. She read, re-read and then read again the medical details she already knew about House’s case, but as she read, she wasn’t seeing the words. She was seeing an apology, something that rarely came from his mouth, but occasionally in his actions. She set it down on the table after another read, and slumped back in her chair.
It was such a small gesture.
It made a difference.
Damn him.
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Tell me what you think?
Cuddy arrived home from House’s apartment in a daze. It was barely seven o’clock and she was exhausted, and felt slightly guilty that she was glad Rachel had had a tiring day and had just dropped off to sleep – all Cuddy wanted to do now was to sit on her sofa with a cup of tea and try not to think too much. She saw the nanny out and locked up, before wandering down into Rachel’s room and gazing down at her daughter. As her eyes traced Rachel’s tiny features, she suddenly had a wave of sadness – Rachel’s life had been complicated enough already, and she didn’t want her little girl going off to school and questioning why her family was different to everyone else’s. Where was her daddy? Probably doing his homework, Cuddy thought sarcastically, but then reverted back to her original train of thought. A male presence in her life wouldn’t be a bad thing by any means, and as her mind drifted again to the infuriating, scruffy man she had just left, a small flame of hope ignited in her chest.
Two days later, House came back to work. He took the second day off even though his bug had passed – it would be unlike him not to milk everything for what it was worth, and he fully intended to enjoy and remnants of sympathy that came his way that day, even if it was unlikely. As his motorbike roared to life underneath him, and he pulled away from the sidewalk, his mind flashed back to the sympathy he had gotten. There weren’t many who would take time out to comfort him, and even though Cuddy had most likely convinced herself she was checking he wasn’t just skiving work, House knew her caring side came out for him, and he didn’t think he would ever understand why. He had endlessly irritated, criticised and angered her, and she still came through for him. As he flew past the traffic lights just turning red, he considered actually putting some effort into the slight headway he had made with her over the past week and a bit. House pulled up to another light that turned red before he could get by, and as he sat there, he thought that the thought itself was a step far enough for now – admitting to himself that he had always had an interest surrounding the life of Lisa Cuddy was big enough for him to deal with now.
At least until he got to work.
Cuddy hung up the phone from talking with the pharmacy to see House waltz into the clinic, turn, and promptly barge into her office.
“Did you miss me honey?” House smirked at her as she got up to get some files from her coffee table, rolling her eyes at him in the process.
“I see you made it in on time for once...Oh no look! It’s even later than normal. Celebrating something?” She quipped as she sat down on the couch. She was surprised to see House drop down beside her, but covered it quickly and carried on leafing through the papers.
“Yes actually, my miraculous recovery from the painful and unpleasant illness I just battled through,” House shot back just as quickly. She turned her head towards him and gave him a “look”, to which House just grinned at her, and settled back onto the cushions. Cuddy carried on looking at him for a couple of seconds before House sighed, and muttered “I just came to say hi.”
Cuddy blinked, and looked away for a second, fighting to keep the smile off her face. She had been trying to keep her thoughts from straying towards House while he was off, and now it looked like he was back in her life with a vengeance. She looked back up at him to see he had looked away too, and she decided not to push him any more than House allowed – he could retreat from her at any second and at any issue, and Cuddy decidedly didn’t want that.
“Oi,” she said, poking his leg with her foot. “You can’t camp out on my couch all day. Go haul your weight in the clinic for a bit or something while I see if I can find you an interesting but easy case to “ease you back in” after your traumatic experience.” She turfed him out of his seat and followed him to the door, where he turned to her, leaned in ever so slightly and said “Slavedriver.” Cuddy merely grinned and pushed him gently through the door, through which she saw him actually approach the nurses’ station and leaf through a few files before calling someone into exam room 1.
The flame in her chest grew a little bit bigger.
Clinic duty. A torture that could eliminate even the best of moods in half an hour. The patients that House had seen so far had sucked all the fun out of clinic duty that could possibly be had, and destroyed the relatively good mood that he had been in when he had left Cuddy’s office. The obnoxious, the annoying, the stupid, the cocky and the insane had all passed through the shiny glass doors of the clinic, and had all left with the displeasure of Gregory House nipping at their ankles on the way out.
House followed his seventh patient out, who was clutching a prescription and several suggestions about his wife’s fidelity to consider. He limped over to the nurses’ station to slap down the folder and take another, and as he flipped it open and looked at the age of the girl next on the pile, he sighed. He could already predict what this was going to be about – another crotch swab would return back from the lab showing another endlessly dull STD, and he had had enough. He would treat this patient and then he was leaving – he had shown willingness for Cuddy, and that was enough.
“Tracy Newman?”
The 17 year old blond girl across the clinic’s head snapped up, and she quickly shoved her phone in her pocket and grabbed her bag, before making her way over to House, who was observing her critically. All the signs of a sexually overactive teenager were there – the speedy texting back once a message popped up on the screen she had been gazing at in wait, the swagger in her walk, the overdone makeup, the slightly too short skirt and the definitely too low cut top that just screamed inappropriate for a hospital all had “STD” stamped over it. House literally felt his temper shorten at the sight of the gum-chewing girl, and he motioned her into an empty exam room.
Nurse Brenda looked up at the banging of a door.
“You jackass!” echoed out of the room before a teenage girl stalked out and over to the nurses’ station, where she stood breathing heavily for a couple of seconds before spitting out “You employ such...such...agh, just JACKASSES here. Urgh!”
Brenda opened her mouth to reply, but the girl was already storming out of the clinic doors. Brenda shut her mouth and turned her gaze over to the open door in time to see one Gregory House emerge out of it with a face like thunder. He limped heavily over to the desk, thrust the file in Brenda’s direction, and when she took it, promptly followed the girl out of the clinic doors, but headed over towards the elevators rather than the doors.
Brenda dropped the file on the stack, and flicked her gaze over to Cuddy’s office. Cuddy always made a point about wanting to know all of House’s antics in the clinic, and she didn’t see why today would be any different. Brenda pushed back her chair, stood up, and went to knock on Cuddy’s door.
House limped angrily out of the elevator and down the hall to his office. He could see some of his team in the outer office, but barely paid attention to which members were there. As he threw to door open and it clattered off the wall, he registered Thirteen and Taub startle, and gather a couple of files up before practically running out of the office, probably to shelter in their patients room for a while. He yanked the blinds closed and collapsed into his chair, part of his mind faintly amused by the fact his team were still scared of him. He shut his eyes and tried his hardest to block out the noise of the hospital he could hear echoing out from the corridor. But, all of one minute later, Cuddy threw the door open. House kept his eyes closed, but the frown on his face deepened.
“What do you want, Cuddy?” He asked brashly. Cuddy walked right up to the side of his desk and jabbed him in the chest with her finger, causing him to open his eyes and look at her.
“What I want is for you to actually do your job for once! Every other doctor in this hospital manages to survive clinic duty, and as much as you may argue against it, you ARE human, and therefore the same as the rest of us. Why do you have to do this? That girl was seventeen, House. That’s only a few years younger than I was when we met! Why do you have to make them all so ANGRY, cant you jus-“
“For god’s sake Cuddy, let it go!” House stood up as fast as his leg would allow to tower over her. His temper had finally snapped – the combination of his vaguely good mood being dragged through the dirt, the plain irritating patients and now Cuddy screeching at him about his behaviour was enough to warrant an unexpected day off for House. Maybe he wasn’t quite over his “illness” after all, and would need another day to recover, and if Cuddy would stand in his way then she was going to have to move. “It’s nothing I haven’t done before, and the patient wasn’t even that upset, she just made a remark to the nurses! If you weren’t helplessly throwing yourself at me every chance you got we wouldn’t even be having this pointless argument right now, so you need to squash that dream of having some man come along and complete your happy-go-lucky life with your new toy waiting at home to wail and spit up on you, cos it won’t happen. Not with me, not with anyone. Life sucks, Cuddy, and you need to accept that and get on with your job. That’s all I’m ever going to want from you.”
Cuddy stared at him for a couple of seconds, fighting to keep her face smooth, before turning and walking out of his office and towards the elevators. She didn’t storm away, or flounce out, just walked. As the elevator opened immediately for her and she stepped in without having to wait (thanking some God out there for small miracles), she sighed. She was stupid to have thought House would be willing to change even the slightest for her. So what if they had twenty years of history, positive and negative events swirling together to create their relationship today. That didn’t matter in House’s eyes. All he was concerned about was his own little island, not letting anyone fully in. Some people were allowed day passes, and others even were permitted longer stays, like Wilson and Stacy, but Cuddy? She was never truly let in. The brief flashes she saw of a different House, the caring, funny and human House were always eclipsed by the arrogant jackass who knew exactly where to aim for maximum hurt. As Cuddy rode down to the ground floor, she cursed House’s intuition and his genius brain. Yes, she had been feeling the absence of a male figure in hers and Rachel’s lives – but she wasn’t desperate for it. And yes, she had been thinking about him, and she had thought he had been thinking about her too. It was stupid to overreact – this was just House being House, and she shouldn’t care.
Late on that evening, House jerked awake at his phone vibrating in his pocket. He had fallen asleep on the couch again, and woke with a neck ache. He sat up slowly, and reached for his phone, which promptly stopped vibrating. He had had a brainwave mid-afternoon and had rung in the answer to solve his latest case, so he was confident it wasn’t his team ringing. Whoever it was would call again if it was urgent. He stood, and made his way down the hall to his room to go to bed – he was grumpy and tired, and simply could not be bothered with anything else. But after he had changed, turned out the lights and lay down, his mind would not switch off. Cuddy’s face kept swimming to the front of his mind, the contrast between her face that day after he had yelled at her and her face from only a few days ago as she shook him gently awake – and as he began to brood, he just hoped what he had done mid-afternoon in a fit of regret, albeit with a Housian touch, would be enough to alleviate whatever effect the words he had thrown in Cuddy’s face earlier that day had done.
Cuddy looked away from the TV down to the baby on her chest, and smiled. Rachel was fast asleep, with a tiny bit of drool coming from her mouth onto Cuddy’s top. Cuddy gently eased herself upright, keeping Rachel secure, and turned off the TV. She stood up cradling her baby girl, and for a moment was overwhelmed by how lucky she was to have Rachel in her life now – a constant presence in a life of unpredictability. Cuddy pressed a kiss to Rachel’s forehead and made her way down to her bedroom to lay her down in her crib. As she moved over to the door to switch off the overhead light, and she glanced back at Rachel sleeping softly, House’s words from earlier about her and Rachel echoed in her head. Cuddy fought off the memory, determined not to tread down that path any further, and shut Rachel’s door behind her. She stood there for a second and debated going to bed, regardless of the work she had to get done, but her administrative side won out over her the lazier person in side of her that simply wanted to sleep the day away. Cuddy fetched her bag from where she had dumped it in the hall upon arriving home, and took it into the dining room to spread out her various files into stacks that would need to be either simply signed off on, or more complex issues that would need her to review it thoroughly first. She looked down at all the papers and sighed, deciding she would need a cup of tea before getting started. As the clean-freak in her glanced over the room to find a coaster, her eyes landed on a sheet of paper sticking out of one of the piles, and Cuddy literally froze. She slowly pulled it out of the pile, and as she scanned the simple sheet of paper, her mind stopped working for a second, and then promptly went into overdrive.
Patient Discharge Form
Attending Physician: Dr. Gregory House
Summary of Case: Patient presented with...
The contents of this sheet were not unusual. One of House’s team usually filled it out at the end of a case, knowing House would never bother doing it himself. But this time, as Cuddy read through the detailed medical overview of House’s latest case, she knew that he himself had filled it out. She knew his handwriting as well as she knew her own, having seen him scrawl down answers in college to writing symptoms up on a whiteboard in her hospital over twenty years later. The way he formed his G’s, probably from writing his own name so much, was so distinctive to Cuddy, yet so unfamiliar looking on this sheet of paper. She read, re-read and then read again the medical details she already knew about House’s case, but as she read, she wasn’t seeing the words. She was seeing an apology, something that rarely came from his mouth, but occasionally in his actions. She set it down on the table after another read, and slumped back in her chair.
It was such a small gesture.
It made a difference.
Damn him.
Sound off below! I'd love to know what you think.