| |
justified freely by his grace
by leiascully
She fucked Stacy in the bed that Stacy shared with House, and it drove her crazy because she could smell him on the sheets. It was Stacy's hands and Stacy's mouth moving over her, but she could swear she could feel House at her back, pressing against her urgently, that twisted smile on his face as he watched his lover make his boss scream. She could almost feel the rake of his stubble over the tender nape of her neck and the heat of his breath on her shoulder as Stacy kissed her all over, using fingers and tongue anywhere she liked until Cuddy's toes curled and her back arched and she had to bite back anyone's name.
He was right. Guilt did make for good sex. She just wasn't sure if it was her guilt or Stacy's that made the difference, but there was always that little flush on her face as she watched him limp through the halls of her hospital.
It was different with Wilson. She slept with him because he was sweet, because he opened doors for her. He was what a doctor should be: intelligent but not blindingly so, caring but not overinvolved. He had nice hands and he looked good in scrubs, and then there was the boyish charm that still got to her even though she knew that it got to everyone else. When she was with Wilson, she believed she was loved. Maybe not for herself exactly, and maybe not on purpose, but Wilson loved everyone and she liked the tenderness of that. He was good in bed but he didn't drive her crazy and it was all so convenient. She didn't have time for real love, focused, committed love where you were sure who the object was and why.
When Wilson said, "Say yes," people did. And so she had. And Stacy had just been there, and lonely despite House, and Cuddy had been lonely too.
She ignored that it was House in her dreams. It was a strange balance they all lived in, a complicated mix of love and desire and friendship and jealousy. She knew Wilson had fucked Stacy, or the other way around, and that House had talked himself into Wilson's bed more than once, which made her more than a little hot and bothered for reasons she couldn't explain. It stood to reason that she would want House. He was what she didn't have. She had had a thing for him since college, when he was a grad student with the touch of God on him and she was fighting hard to be the best there ever was. He was brilliant, he was deliciously arrogant, and he was charming in an antisocial way. They had had a thing, a brief thing, one tipsy night after she had found him playing the piano at a club, and that night she had felt touched by God too.
She had left in the morning, hoping he'd been too high on jazz and weed and wine to remember that it had been her in his bed, and he had treated her afterwards with the same indifference he showed toward everyone, except that someone introduced them months later and he knew that she was first in her class, or almost. He'd given her a onceover. "Talk to me, Cuddy." He had walked away and she had trotted after him, chosen. She went to him about tricky cases she was studying and he helped her. He didn't need her, but she entertained him, she thought. They were like friends, though he was caustic and distant as a general rule. He didn't seem to remember they'd met in a club before they'd met properly. She thought it was best that way, though she still thought about the strength of his thighs and the fast murmur of his heart as they'd lain in bed together with the smoke and sweat of the club on them. She wondered if he played better when he wasn't stoned. She never found out. He kept things business between them, an academic puzzle, a meeting of the minds. He was the priest of his own holy order and she was his acolyte, lighting candles in his name. He wrote in the margins of her books and shouted when she got things wrong, but she was acing all her classes.
She fell in love the way any college girl would, but she kept it to herself. She wanted him so much she shivered at night sometimes, but she wanted to be a doctor more.
By the time she found him again, there was Stacy and there was Wilson and she was all caught up in it the way she was caught up in her hospital, working out the beginnings of structure. She thought it was almost funny that she slept with Stacy first, before Wilson, but she couldn't say why, except that if House knew, he would get that questing look on his face the way he always did when he found some new piece of information that didn't fit with what he'd known. Riddle me out, she wanted to say. Unravel all the reasons I'm fucking your girlfriend. I can't touch your skin but hers is so smooth. Find me in bed with your best friend. He's got brown eyes and a lesser measure of genius, but his shoulders are broad enough.
The unexpected thing was that she found she was a little in love with Stacy too. The wit, the compassion of the woman, the slim hips compelled. Stacy bantered, but at the end of the day, she had endearments ready, and the warmth of her arms. And then Wilson, but everyone loved Wilson. Cuddy had never been one to stand against the natural flow of things. So here she was in the middle of this complicated thing, this Gordian knot of caring, and it still didn't mean as much as being a doctor. She wanted something to.
House was The Guy who could never be The Guy and they all stood by him anyway, some kind of desperate masochistic cult of hope.
When Stacy left, Cuddy stopped fucking Wilson and she couldn't say why. She thought that House had never known, but the pull of it was gone. Wilson accepted this quietly. He wasn't fucking House either. He had found a wife. Another wife, a carbon copy of the wives before, not in looks or personality but in some indescribable way. Cuddy knew she would leave him someday, poor handsome Wilson breaking his wineglass for his absent rabbi after his big church wedding as his wife fussed that he'd stain his suit. Wilson would live. House held all their hearts and it wasn't given to anyone else to break them, which was a curse and a blessing that kept them all in a constant minor melancholy. They were saved the pains of mortal love at the price of genuine happiness. It was not a trade she had time to regret.
House grew more and more bitter and she was such an expert at not being in love with him that it was agonizing. He was the labyrinth and the minotaur and if she had any magic string, it had to go toward tying bandages and splinting broken limbs, not broken hearts. He had never asked her to find him, but she couldn't help reminding him that he was going home to empty rooms to his lonely piano, never playing the best that he could. She couldn't save him. She had always known that.
She still loved Wilson, in a way. She still loved Stacy in absentia, tied to her by the way that Stacy still loved House. House between them was too significant to put aside. Strange how one man had so much power: even the people who hated him had faith in him. The ones who loved him were lost forever. He staked an intangible, unbreakable claim.
I would leave you, she wanted to say, but there was nowhere to go and nothing she could name between them, and she had brought him here in the first place. I want you to do your job, she said instead, not saying that it (and her, and Wilson, but those were never, ever to be said) was all he had.
Inspiration made gods out of men, but gods could be tricksters. Inspiration gave him an uncanny gift of healing and laughing irony made him a bastard. Cuddy tended the altar the way she always had and surrendered to his unhappiness. It was the way of the world, to make these untouchable things, and his misery was exquisite. She fought to protect him and and she fought to redeem his humanity and he fought to stay miserable. It was an aching under her breastbone every time he popped the cap on his Vicodin, but he stayed. She had her hospital and she had her doctors. She told herself it was enough. He was irredeemable and so was she.
No one was ever really cured. They never talked about how all the patients he saved went on to die someday. They never talked about the ones he didn't save. The book she had to keep of his cases, tracking his statistics, felt like a holy text. He was praised with much praise. He was cursed for his callousness, for his failures, for his absence. He had been betrayed. He was not a messiah.
At night she still shivered, the ghosts of their youth scribbling marginalia over her life the way he'd written in her books: regrets, dreams, the smell of old smoke on her freshly laundered pillows. Across town she knew he was emptying whiskey bottles inch by golden inch, blues rattling his neighbors' windows as his hands moved over his piano the way that once, just once, they'd moved over her. She lit a candle for him and watched the little flame until her eyes burned.
+ + + +
A/N: The tensions between the four of them are just so fascinating. The title is from the Bible, Romans 3:24.
Please post a comment on this story.
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.
|
|
|