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fight me like you do
by leiascully
He hated Cuddy after the surgery, because he couldn't hate Stacy who was still in his house with her eyes perpetually full of unshed tears and her lip that trembled as she tended to him. He fucked Stacy at night hating Cuddy, and he woke up hating her too. At the hospital he avoided her. Just seeing her brought the bitter taste of the Vicodin to his mouth, and the nauseating ache of dry swallowing the pills. He'd be damned if he was going to show any weakness and carry around a bottle of water.
Truthfully, even the slosh of water in a bottle threw off his balance and he wanted to kill himself. But there was Stacy with her immense love for him and her immense guilt, and it meant he could get away with anything. So he lived, and he began to recover.
It was the hatred of Cuddy that got him through the physical therapy. It gave him energy. He thought of the day he'd be able to throw her up against a wall and crush her mouth with his, taking out his wrath in rough kisses, showing her he wasn't as broken as she had made him. Fuck you for doing this. Fuck you for interfering. Fuck you. It was a need to be recognized. He didn't want to injure her, just to prove his point. Force seemed like the answer. Cuddy had her integrity; she would not be browbeaten by his insults or thrown into misery by his refusal to talk to her. He had no way of getting through to her. She was too reasonable, not swayed by passion.
Cuddy of all people should have trusted him. Cuddy knew the medicine behind his choice, and Stacy didn't, and of course Stacy would be spooked by the chance that he wouldn't recover, but Cuddy should have known the odds didn't mean it wasn't the right thing to do, or at least his goddamn choice. Instead, she'd gone the middle way and given Stacy the hope that had condemned him to a life of shuffling and pity. It was the goddamned pity he couldn't handle. He hoped Cuddy felt guilty the rest of her life. He left out the part where he knew that Cuddy had been following his wishes by putting him in the coma in the first place.
He was miserable and angry and the pain was a constant radiating agony that spread until he thought his eyes would fall out. He choked down more Vicodin and tempered it with whiskey, sitting in front of the piano unable to play, too stoned to see straight. Every word he spoke to Stacy was barbed. He didn't speak to Cuddy at all. Wilson sat silent with misery in his brown eyes, trying to bridge the gaps, but if he couldn't save his own somewhat functional relationships, he would never be able to save House, alienating people with more sophisticated methods than he had as a three year old sulking behind his blocks. The thought satisfied House. He raged to Wilson because Wilson would do nothing, keeping quiet for the sake of their friendship. He filled the unhappy silences with sotto voce invective and the aching strains of jazz played from old records.
Stacy left amid the rasp of the blues, holding her head high so that the tears wouldn't fall, one last kiss that he barely registered. He hated her too, more after she left, when he could really blame her for making the decision, when she wasn't the only comfort in his life. He hated her for staying and seeing him in his pathetic state. He hated her for leaving. He hated her for choosing the surgery, taking the safe route with its known consequences. Cuddy had just showed her what could be done. It was Stacy who had lit the fuse to destroy his life and he had pushed her away.
It was funny that even as his blinding hatred of Cuddy dissipated into a vague dislike, his need to kiss her didn't fade. Don't go easy on me, he wanted to say, but she didn't. She fought him every inch of the way and he found he liked it in some fierce way. She should have fought him this way over the leg. Maybe she had tried and he hadn't noticed.
Cuddy never left him. She was always there, standing at his shoulder, standing toe to toe with him shouting about her hospital, her voice on the other end of the phone exasperated with telling him where he'd gone wrong and asking why. He gloried a little in making her miserable, trying to goad her into giving him a reason to hate her again. It had been easier hating her.
Fuck you, he thought at her, you and your low-cut blouses and your constant effort to take on the responsibility for the whole world, but there was no venom in it anymore. Disliking her was an academic effort and his heart wasn't in it. She had stood by him. She had been a good doctor to him. She was a pain in his ass, but she was loyal, protecting him from himself the way Stacy hadn't been able to. She had brought him back to life, and if he couldn't be grateful, he couldn't despise her either.
It was inevitable, he thought, that there would be a day when he didn't hate Stacy anymore, inured by the distance that time had put between them, but on that day he was surprised to find that he wanted to be gentle with Cuddy, who was still behind his shoulder waiting for Stacy to leave again. The thought of her constance braced him up. Old hate turned back to love was difficult to break, but he had Cuddy's sense of right with him.
Tough love, he realized, wasn't just a figure of speech. It was ten years of showing up. He had told Cuddy to leave a thousand times and she was still there. He only had to tell Stacy once. Stacy had never known when a fight wasn't over.
He limped down to Cuddy's office in the middle of the night and stood with his forehead pressed to the glass of her door in the empty clinic. She was gone for the day. It was just as well. He wouldn't have found the words to thank her.
How did you love someone difficult? You argued them through it. You respected them enough to haggle over every last detail. You pressed whatever buttons it took to keep the conversation going, so that when the important words came, you would hear them.
In the morning she would order him around and he would piss her off by taking chances and she would fight him, and that was the sum of their romance, but not the end. He saw that now.
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A/N: Title from the Metric song "Combat Baby". Oh, House, there may be a Great Wall of China between love and hate, but even Great Walls can be breached, and it's clear you don't hate Cuddy.
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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