Twelve Days, Day 11

[readingrat]

Olivia:
Blame not this haste of mine. If you mean well,
Now go with me and with this holy man
Into the chantry by: there, before him,
And underneath that consecrated roof,
Plight me the full assurance of your faith;
[Twelfth Night, Act 4 Scene 3]

May 27, 2010: Day 11
(Eight days after the crane disaster in Trenton)

10 am

When House ambles into Cuddy's office bearing a Styrofoam cup of coffee and a blue patient file, she's on the phone, haranguing a patient's lawyer. She looks up and smiles, the smile widening as he pushes the cup over to her side of the desk. He sits down opposite her, placing the file in front of him and tapping out a complicated Bach fugue on it as he waits for her to finish the conversation.

"Mr Baker, your client's medical malpractice suit is without any foundation. You know it and I know it. Your client withheld important information from us. We can hardly be held liable if ..."

"Of course we can. Everybody lies. It's our job to check their information."

Cuddy covers the mouthpiece of the telephone. "House, shut up!" She returns to the phone. "Mr Baker, I'm sorry, but I have to terminate this conversation. We have a medical emergency over here. Perhaps you can contact our legal department. Thank you."

She puts the phone down and gives House her full attention. "Ass," she says affectionately. "Of course he's got a good case, but I'll thank you not to tell him so."

"What! You lied to the lawyer?" House says in mock horror.

"Everybody lies, I'm told. What do you want, House?"

He taps the file, tipping his head slightly to one side. "I was thinking that we should get married."

Cuddy props her elbows on the desk and rests her chin in the palms of her hands, smiling up at him. "Sweet," she says. "A cup of coffee and a marriage proposal before lunch - I could get used to this. To what do I owe such gallantry: the 'mind-blowing' sex yesterday, your misplaced chivalry trying to make an honest woman of me, or the completely outrageous procedure that you mean to con me into permitting you to do by charming the pants off me?" She stretches out her hand for the file. "What is it? An utterly insane brain surgery on your patient or an experimental treatment that has shown great results on rats, but has never been tried on humans?"

He hands over the file in silence. She opens it, studies the single sheet of paper in it with puzzlement, her smile slowly fading, turns it over, studies it again ... "House, what is this?"

He limps around the desk until he is right behind her. Leaning over her shoulder, he picks up a pen from her desk to use as a pointer. "A marriage license application form. You sign here ... and here. Then I go and hand it in at the registrar's office, and we can be married by noon tomorrow."

She swivels around in her chair, almost knocking him off his feet. He backs off slightly, perching on the edge of her desk. After she's mustered him carefully, she says, disbelief tingeing her voice, "You're serious!"

"Would I joke about such things?" He fidgets around with the things on her desk until she lays a hand over his, stilling it.

"House, would you give me a short summary of our relationship?" she asks.

The tense tone catches his attention. His eyes flicker over her face, noting her expression - she fears he may be hallucinating again, projecting something into their relationship that isn't there. Her paleness tells him that it would not be a good idea to jerk her around by feeding that fear with some extravagant fantasy. Getting her back up probably isn't a wise idea anyway.

So he says, "Let's see: about a week ago you broke into my apartment to tell me you have the hots for me. We spent the next three days yelling at each other until you fled to Seattle. I ignored your phone calls for five days, so on your return you performed a really hot strip-tease for me and, um, we had ...," he scratches his chin reflectively, " ... the best sex I had this past year." Which isn't even a lie.

To say that relief is stamped across her face is an understatement. But she just says, "Well, I'm glad one of us had a good time yesterday!"

He narrows his eyes and cocks his head, smiling in his turn. "Come off it! You'd sacrifice any number of breath-taking orgasms for the opportunity to hold that over my head the rest of my life."

"So you think we should just skip dating, cohabiting, getting engaged?" Cuddy asks, eyeing the file as though it exuded a bad smell.

"Yes!" He nods with the enthusiasm of a child trying to scrounge a cookie just before dinner. Cuddy takes a deep breath. House decides that he doesn't need to hear her objections - he doubts she can verbalize any that haven't occurred to him. "I'm crap at dating, the last time I asked you to move in with me you fired me and your last engagement lasted a total of twenty-four hours, give or take."

She has a retort on her lips when a look of horror crosses her face and she practically dives into the top drawer of her desk. Finally, she re-emerges, flustered and flushed. "Shit!"

"What?" He thinks he has a good idea, though.

"The ring. Lucas's ring. I forgot to return it to him before I left for the conference, and now I can't find it. I was sure I'd left it in the desk. Oh, damn!"

"Ah, the ring," House rasps, "I, uh, ..."

"House, you took the ring?" He nods, bracing himself for the storm. "Where is it?"

"I returned it to Lucas." It sounds sheepish, even in his own ears.

"Thank god!" There is a pause.

"You're not mad at me?" he ventures.

"I am mad at you, but for the moment I'm going to enjoy the relief of not having lost a ring that Lucas couldn't afford to buy in the first place."

"He could have, if you'd married him."

"Well, I didn't."

"So now you can marry me," House says, returning to his original agenda.

"House, please enlighten me: what is this about?"

"Christ, Cuddy, you were going to marry that poor kid just because he got you an overpriced ring! Why do you need a reason to marry me?"

"I was not going to marry him because of the ring. Our relationship was moving that way." Cuddy is now visibly annoyed. Well, he hadn't reckoned with anything else.

"So is ours," he returns.

"What, after seven days?"

"Eight," he corrects reflexively. Cuddy waves his correction aside, but he continues undeterred, "We've known each other for over twenty years - no more surprises for either of us. If you're hoping that I'll change miraculously from a frog into a prince, forget it! Not going to happen."

"The thought of throwing you against a wall is certainly tempting. ... House, are you worried I'll ditch you?" She moves over to him, an arm out to touch him. He doesn't need Psychology 101, he needs her signature. Two signatures, to be exact. He'll have to tighten the thumbscrews a bit.

"You'd known Lucas for barely a year when you accepted his proposal. How long are you going to make me wait?"

"I'm not discussing Lucas with you," she says with asperity.

Diplomacy is wasted here; he'll have to change his hunting mode from camouflaged traps to open pursuit and capture.

"Fine, change of topic," he snaps. "What about Mowgli?"

Cuddy isn't following him, so House elucidates, "I'm informed that the village people want their man-child back. And by village people I don't mean Wilson's favourite band."

Cuddy turns her back to him, staring out of the window at the garden outside. "Yes, but I don't see how that's any concern of yours," she says, her voice a semblance of her usual calm.

He sinks down on the visitor's chair, props his legs on her desk and clasps his hands behind his head. He isn't fooled by her seeming calm. If she dislikes having her ex-fiancé brought up, she positively hates having her daughter dragged into the equation. He can't blame her: his opposition to her adoption plans and his initial animosity towards Rachel did more damage to their friendship than his addiction or his subsequent break-down.

"If you lose your garden gnome, then you get all pissy and I don't get laid. Big concern of mine. Hence it's my duty to my dick to support you in the battle ahead."

She turns away from the window and looks at him sprawled out across her office. It's difficult to see her face against the light, but her long silence indicates that she's mulling over something. The first tender shoots of hope push against the crusty layer of his innate pessimism. There is a faint chance that her fear of losing Rachel will outweigh her common sense.

"No," she says.

"Why not?" The green shoots wilt, scorched by the ultraviolet rays of anger she's now emitting.

"I'm not going to paint a false family idyll for the judge. If he chooses to give me custody for Rachel on the basis of my merits as a mother, then that's fine. If that isn't enough, if what Rachel's father can offer is worth more than that, I'd be selfish and uncaring to deprive her of it."

He increases the pressure. "You're not going to fight for her? You're going to let some stupid narrow-minded judge decide what's best for her based on a bunch of papers, a hearing and a paternity test?"

"No, House, that's not what I said. I am going to fight for her and I appreciate your quixotic attempt to support me in this, but we, our relationship, could blow up in a few months or years. If it takes a marriage based on ... I don't even know what it would be based on ... to convince the judge, then maybe I don't deserve to keep Rachel." She snaps the blue folder shut and throws it onto his lap. "And I certainly won't let you bully me into something this preposterous."

It's a pity that her desperate need for independence is able to overcome her protective instincts. He'd anticipated that she wouldn't like marriage as a means of retaining Rachel, but he'd banked on making a bit more leeway with her - a few plucks on her heartstrings, a bit of boyish charm was what he'd hoped to get by with. Now he'll have to get nasty. He swings his legs off her desk and leans forward.

"I can see how this is to your own benefit - no need to commit yourself to a screw-up like me - but it beats me how you can fool yourself into believing that growing up with a teen who doesn't know how to spell 'parent', let alone act like one, will serve your child's best interests! Are you going to hand her over to him like some FedEx package that was sent to the wrong destination?"

Cuddy's eyes widen. "Excuse me, but you were the one who advised me to return her and 'no damage done' when I had problems bonding! What has suddenly changed for you?"

"Cuddy, don't pretend to be an idiot! Her situation has changed." His voice rises - this is gaining an impetus that he can't control any more. Damn it, can't the woman just say yes and trust him to know what he's doing instead of begging to be skewered by his logic? "Had you returned her eighteen months ago, she would have found a perfectly suitable suburban foster-family - mom, dad, dog - and if our Paulie Bleeker was desperate for a kid he'd have to impregnate some other stupid sophomore. Now it isn't a choice between you and another suitable parent any more. If she's taken away from you, Simple Simon gets her."

"If Natalie had lived, she'd have kept her, I'm sure," Cuddy says, the quaver in her voice indicating that though she is still arguing rationally, she is on the verge of cracking. "Lots of teens raise children; there's no reason to suppose that Simon won't make an adequate father."

"Maybe he will, maybe he won't. But your thumb-sucker needs more than just 'adequate' and you know it. Do you think Bleeker can hold down a job to support the kid, get her to physiotherapy, speech therapy, doctors' appointments ..."

"You hacked her medical records," Cuddy states, eyes flaming with accusation.

"Do credit me with the ability to do my job! When you dumped the sloth on my rug, it didn't move the entire time you were gone. The only sounds it articulated were 'ah' and 'gah', and it still has the Moro reflex. Does that sound like the normal developmental status of an eighteen-month-old? Given the circumstances of its birth - hypoxia - and probable alcohol abuse during the first trimester of pregnancy, I'd say: cerebral palsy. This isn't about you any more, much less about me. Your cub needs to be protected and you're the one who has to do it."

"That's ripe, coming from you. What do you know about it?"

She's alluding to his lack of children, but her words tear open a drawer of his mind that he normally keeps tightly shut: his father abusing him while his mother took his father's side or studiously ignored all signs that didn't fit into her illusion of the perfect family. No, he'd never enjoyed unconditional protection, but then, he hadn't needed it as much as Rachel, had he?

"You're ... good at this mother thing. What her father is like is anyone's guess, but if she isn't to turn into a vegetable you'd better not risk finding out. "

Cuddy gives a choking laugh. "Right. I parade you in front of the judge and let him listen to you referring to Rachel variously as 'it', 'sloth', 'parasite', 'demon-spawn', 'rug-rat' - did I miss any of your affectionate diminutives? - while Simon's lawyer pulls a few delectable titbits from your past out of his hat. That's bound to convince everyone that you'll make a better father-figure than Simon.”

"Exactly! If Simon's lawyer brings me up and the judge hears that your claim to familial stability consists of one year-long affair while mostly you've had this on-and-off thing with an addicted employee, you're sunk."

"Excuse me, but we don't have an 'on-and-off' thing!"

"Ask anyone at the hospital and that's what you'll hear. Apparently we've been screwing these past ten years. ... Don't look at me like that - you never bothered to stop any of the rumours. You enjoyed the flirting as much as I did!"

"While getting married turns us both miraculously into ideal parents?"

"Then it's a decade-spanning romance that was just awaiting my recovery from addiction for its consummation." He invests his voice with mock pathos. "When you adopted Rachel, I finally realized that I had to buckle up so I went to Mayfield. After I proved my commitment by staying clean for a year, you agreed to marry me." His fable is such a heady mix of truths, half-truths and outright falsehoods that it's difficult to find fault with it.

"But that still doesn't make you a model parent."

"Nothing will. But it makes you look like a saint instead of an easy lay."

He should have skipped the last half-sentence, of course. The animation that is lighting up Cuddy's face as she searches his story for loopholes fades at his final words, all emotions, even anger, draining out of her as though sucked out by dementors. Her eyes are dark in her pale face as she stares at him in shock. Within the bat of an eyelid, she drops her gaze onto her desk, biting her lips while her fingers fiddle with paper clips.

House shifts uneasily. He doesn't exactly feel guilty; after all, he's spoken nothing but the truth. She had quite a reputation in med school - he'd enquired about her after the first endocrinology class. Later her dates might have been fewer and further between, but she was neither particularly choosy (as far as he could make out) nor especially reticent about sharing her favours. Why she's choosing this particular comment to get riled about beats him. She knows he's a jerk, for goodness sake! If she means to get upset every time he gives his tongue free rein, they'll be history in no time. This is exactly why he and Cuddy will never work! If he threw a comment like that at Wilson, it would glide off him like water off a duck's back. Cuddy, on the other hand, soaks up off-beat remarks like that as nourishment for her various complexes. For a person of her elevated position she has an amazing lack of self-confidence.

Cuddy speaks slowly and softly, still not looking at him, "According to your logic, I'd have done best to have stayed with Lucas so as to demonstrate my ability to abide by a commitment."

There are things he can't lie about. "Yes."

"Too bad I didn't know I was heading for a custody battle when I left him, otherwise I'd have done the right thing and tricked him into a loveless marriage with a special-needs child as part of the package." If she means this to drip with sarcasm, then she's failing miserably. It only sounds pathetic.

"Right for Rachel. As for Lucas, you wouldn't need to trick him. He's pathetic enough to take you back in the knowledge that it's only for the kid's sake." It's a compliment - if one filters it enough to recognize the core message.

"Not even Lucas is sweet enough to take that," she says with cold emphasis.

Nice: trying to piss him off by calling Lucas 'sweet'. House's evil demon makes him push further. "He said so himself."

"He doesn't know Simon is challenging the adoption. I only found out myself the day I left for Seattle." Something in House's expression stops Cuddy short. "You told him!" she accuses.

House barely registers her words, let alone her expression. He is focused inward, processing the information he has just gleaned. "No, I didn't," he contradicts absently. "He told me. The question is," he stares into space, eyes narrowed, chin jutting out, "how did Lucas know?"

Cuddy, however, is off on a different tangent. "So this is what yesterday was about." House's attention snaps right back to Cuddy. She is mustering him with dawning comprehension, but her epiphany is not of the 'Joy to the world and goodwill to all mankind' type. Or, to stay within an Old Testament frame of reference, he is not cast as a cherishing Boaz spreading his mantle over Ruth. Judging by the murderous gleam in her eyes he is Haman, found guilty of plotting against her well-being and that of her race, and about to be strung high in the market place.

"You and Lucas had a talk from buddy to buddy and arranged a little trade-off, huh? He gets to keep me and you get to feel noble. How archaically romantic! But guess what? I'm not some Trojan war booty that you tough warrior types can divide among yourselves. I'm not a hooker you can pass back to her pimp once you're done with her."

That's his remark about her being an easy lay rebounding with a vengeance. He knows he should apologize for last night or at least explain what he was trying to do. No, he didn't feel noble at all - he felt like crap pushing her away and hurting her, which was probably why he didn't follow through the way he should have. He'd thought it would be easier for him considering that he'd successfully practised the same arts on Stacy, but he'd miscalculated heavily in his estimate of his own motivation: noble inclinations, as it turned out, were no adequate substitute for the righteous anger at Stacy's betrayal that had carried him through that episode of his existence.

Cuddy, however, doesn't give him the time or peace he needs to put something as complex as an apology into words. "Gregory House, you are one hell of a coward. This isn't about Rachel, or even about me; this is about you. You're worried that somewhere down the line I'll look at you and think, 'This is what I gave up my daughter for, this miserable wreck of a man!' And rather than exposing yourself to the danger of being a disappointment and a failure, you'd push me away now straight back into Lucas's arms if you could. Well, I'm sorry, but it isn't going to work!" She swallows convulsively. "I can live with a lot of things - that you don't respect me and that you think I'm a crappy mother. I'll get used to you discussing anything to do with us with your male buddies rather than having it out with me. But there's no way that I'll put up with you trying to run my life according to some wild scheme that you've concocted in that insane brain of yours!"

She's trembling all over as she pulls him off the chair by his arm and pushes him towards the door of her office. "Go!" she says with finality. One look at her white face, the eyes enormous and moist, the lines sharply etched, the lips thin and trembling, and he decides that there are about three dozen places in the hospital that he'd rather be than in Cuddy's office.

Two hours later

He's in his Eames chair, feet up on the ottoman, buds in his ears, reading a medical journal when something hits his chest with a thunk. His hands come up instinctively to catch it as his head jerks up - he's clutching this morning's blue folder while Cuddy is already on her way out of his office.

"Wait," he says, ripping the buds out of his ears. "You signed." It's an educated guess - she wouldn't bother coming up all the way to his office with the file if she hadn't. Naturally he never doubted that she'd sign and he's had no problems whatsoever shutting up the voice in his head that suggested that he escape from the hospital as soon as possible to get utterly wasted in the next bar. He takes off his glasses and puts them aside.

She turns with one hand on the door frame and sighs. "Your reasoning was solid. Marrying you improves my chances of keeping Rachel."

Somehow being told that he's right doesn't fill him with the accustomed satisfaction. "That's all?"

She takes a few steps back inside, mustering him with a slight frown. He isn't sure what he expects from her – after the things he threw at her in her office, a declaration of undying love and insurmountable passion probably isn't on the agenda. And yet he'd like some sort of confirmation that he's more than a short-cut to the finalization of her adoption plans.

His former strategy for situations in which he'd done something to get Cuddy's back up, namely doing nothing and waiting for his interactions with Cuddy to return to normal, won't do any more, not if Cuddy, her appendage and he are to enjoy a semblance of functional family life. Previously the worst that could happen was a yelling and extra clinic hours that he never absolved anyway. Ahead of him loom the clouds of meals eaten in silence and nights spent on a cold couch listening to the kid cry itself to sleep because it is scared silly that its parents will get divorced, unless he can figure out how to set things right when they go pear-shaped.

He has nothing to apologize for, he tells himself, and Cuddy doesn't expect an apology anyway. But what does she expect? A look at her face – she's tired, sad and drained - tells him that she doesn't have any expectations whatsoever. She just wants to get out of his office with minimal damage to her pride. He supposes he could at least make sure they're okay before he lets her leave.

"It wasn't lust for my steamin' hot bod that guided your hand?" he says with a suggestive leer, clasping both hands behind his head in a manner guaranteed to show off his well-defined biceps and broad shoulders to greatest advantage, a ploy which masks his real aim, namely to move his feet unobtrusively to one side of the ottoman. It works: with a shake of her head and a sigh, she instinctively sits down in the space vacated by House's feet. House closes his eyes briefly, letting his satisfaction at her proximity surface in the merest indication of a smile.

"You do know that those glasses are sexier than anything your physique has to offer."

"Huh?"

"Even the clinic nurses who hate your guts want to jump you when you wear those. They've taken to filling out the forms in tiny handwriting whenever you're on duty just to see you wear them."

"You're kidding me!" He always takes them off whenever anyone comes in because he thinks they make him look old. It isn't that he's vain - that's Wilson, not him - but there's something grandfather-ish about wearing reading glasses ...

"I'm so not! I know, because I suggested it to them when they complained that you don't wear them enough."

He's still mulling over the weirdness of female taste and the deviousness of the female mind when she asks seriously, "What are we doing, House?"

"It's just a piece of paper, Cuddy, stating what everyone will know sooner or later - that we're screwing each other. Wilson collects 'em; he'll be getting his fourth one soon." A thought strikes him. "Unless, of course, you weren't intending to do me any more after last night's fiasco."

Cuddy hears the real query behind that. "House, I do want to be with you," she defends herself, "but ..."

"But you wish you didn't. Yeah, I got that a week or so ago." He draws a tired hand over his eyes.

"House, it's complicated ..."

"I know. You've got the hospital, you've got the kid, and I'm a hazard to both instead of a help. This isn't the fairy-tale ending you've been dreaming of ever since you were a little girl. No matter how hard you chuck this frog against the wall, he isn't going to stop croaking and jerking you around."

She squeezes his knee gently. He gazes down at her hand. "There are other fairy tales," she says. "Take Shrek: he kisses his princess, only to discover that she's really an ogre."

"Like him." He's staring at her, mesmerized.

"Like him," she assents.

"And they live happily ever after?"

"We-ell ..."

"Does that mean I get laid tonight?"

She gives his leg a playful slap before she rises. "You're an ass."

"But you love me nonetheless," he calls after her as she sashays out.

---

A/N: Getting married in New Jersey requires a period of three days between obtaining the licence and tying the knot (unless one is called Wilson and is re-marrying an ex-wife). I took the kind of licence the show takes when it ignores the time required for lab tests and other chemical reactions; I figure I'm in good company.

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Comments

[avidreadergirl.livejournal.com]

this is awesome! I've been avoiding fanfic because I had spoiler fear, and I'd been resisting yours because 12th night was never my favorite shakespeare play.

But I started reading last night, while still high on "Now What?" and I'm sorry I waited so long to begin, you've done an awesome job with the story and I'm looking forward to the next installment.

[readingrat.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much! I've been in a frenzy of self-doubt, because I don't really like the fic myself (I prefer my Midwinter Nightmare) and no one has commented on the last few installments, so I figured people were hating it ...

Day 12 is up, but I haven't linked it yet.

[mephistolove.livejournal.com]

I've been lurk-reading your fic, it's wonderful! I've never read Shakespeare's 12th Night, so I'm just taking the stoy as it comes. It really is good, don't have doubts!

And link the last chapter =P.

[readingrat.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much! It's good to know that it's readable even if the original is not known.

The last day is linked now.