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Morning Comes
by leiascully
"don't go," she says, but he's sleeping--she says it to herself: "don't go." she sees herself rising, packing a suitcase with all of her shoes. but something keeps you faithful when all else in you turns and runs. love turns 40. the morning comes.
- "Love Turns 40", Vienna Teng
She found him by accident, working late, going up for a cup of coffee. The cafeteria was closed and the little drink stand was closed but she knew House's coffee maker was well-stocked, thanks to Cameron, so she took the elevator to the fourth floor. The halls were mostly empty, just the abbreviated midnight bustle of a hospital, and she was proud of the order of it all, and lonely too. There was a light on in House's office, that twisty lamp, she thought, and went in to say hello. He was on the carpet, on his back with his feet propped on his chair, and that was fairly normal, except he had no headphones on and his cane was wedged under him.
"House," she said, going to him, and he opened his eyes blearily. His fingers curled around the pill bottle and the other hand clutched his bad thigh. "Jesus," she said, kneeling to check his pupils. "How many did you take? Three?"
"Tripped," he said raspily. "Fuck."
"That's what you get for working thirty-six hour stretches. You solved the case this afternoon. Why didn't you go home?" It was a wasted question, she knew. There were still answers out there. Books and journals lay open on the desk, and there was a pen with lip marks on it. The computer glowed, a couple of archived articles pulled up. She dragged the cane out, moved his legs so that she could brace herself and heave him up. "Come on."
He was tall and heavy, stumbling against her, but she managed to get him out of the hospital and into her car. The night nurses shot her sideways curious glances, but she'd stopped caring about the time she saw how white House's fingers were, digging into what muscle was left in his thigh. She thought briefly about taking him to her house and putting him in the guest room with its clean sheets and the little sachet of potpourri in the bureau, but he was gritting his teeth so hard she could almost hear it and she took a right at the stop light and drove into the middle of town. There was a parking place down the block from his building and they hobbled down the sidewalk together, Cuddy fishing in his coat pocket for his keys and praying that someone had salted against the slicks of ice by the curb.
Somehow she undressed him and got him into bed, and finally, finally the Vicodin were kicking in, because he managed a few lecherous comments as she stripped him and sorted through his drawers to find a pair of pajamas. He had a bruise on his bicep; she made him move his arm for her, checking the alignment of shoulder joint and muscles. He complained but flexed his arm obediently. She lay her hand across her forehead just to touch him, the backs of her fingers against the smoothing creases, and his skin was warm under her hand, but not abnormally so.
"Stay home tomorrow," she said, and lingered by his bedside, not sure if it was all right to leave, not wanting him to be damaged and abandoned with only the rat for company. He said something she didn't catch and she leaned down. "What did you say?"
"Happy birthday," he mumbled, and tears prickled in her eyes. It was after midnight: the day had changed. She had been trying not to think of it. Forty-four. Another year gone, another lonely year ahead. She loved the hospital, but she couldn't put her arms around it. It was exhausting, suddenly, the weight of her years in the world, and she sagged a little closer to him, aware of how bleak her eyes must look, and he stretched up and kissed her. She kissed him back, not thinking about it, thinking about a hundred other things, but it was House, and the immediacy of him overwhelmed her thoughts.
"Stay," he said, and by the light of the bedroom lamp, she could see all her loneliness in him. They were a matched pair, overcome by the ache of old wounds. His pupils were huge. She touched his arm and felt the narcotics dissolving in his blood. She was too tired, she was hallucinating or at least too impressionable, it was late, she should go before things got strange. Instead she leaned down and kissed him. Life would always be strange with House.
She kissed him until the muscles of his neck began to tremble, straining to hold his head up. She pushed him down on the pillows and stretched out against him. Her lips searched out the scar on his neck. Mea culpa, she whispered against the strange foreign tissue, the livid reminder of the failure of her hospital's security. She kissed the scar on the side of his nose from the chicken pox, and a scar under his chin he'd said he'd gotten in Japan, rock climbing again. He kissed the top of her head and drew her fingers to his lips. She wrestled him gently out of the t-shirt she'd just gotten him into and kissed the scar on his stomach, her lips wandering over the messy edges of it. Her surgeons had done a good job, but it was still an ugly thing. Mea culpa. She remembered him without his shirt once in college, rowing on the river. The light had been golden on his tanned shoulders and chest and the flexing of his muscles had been a beautiful sight. She thought she had fallen in love with him then. He was older now - they were both older and softer, his inactive post-infarction lifestyle having cost him muscle tone and added a few pounds, and though she was still nearly as slender as she'd been in college, here and there she was tender where she had been firm. He looked like an artistic representation of the postmodern man: exhausted, his eyes opiate-dulled and dreamy, scars to show where life had hollowed him out.
She kissed his smallpox vaccination scar. She found tiny scars without histories and claimed them. The superstitions still had hold, she thought, kiss it better. What else could she do? All she had was her hands and her mouth and her body to console him. She lingered over the unmarked skin over his heart. He stroked her shoulder and let his fingers slip down to her shirt buttons. She let him undress her. There was no point in denying her vulnerability. He was careful with the buttons, careful with hooks and lace and zippers, until her clothes lay on the floor in a rustle of wool and silk like fallen leaves, a reminder that the summer was open. He splayed a hand over her pelvis, his palm hot against the skin over the empty space of her womb, and she bit her lip and tucked her face against his neck for a long minute. His bristly cheek snagged against her hair and he ran a hand down her spine.
Sympathy sex, she thought, but who pitied whom? He cradled her breasts in his big hands that had the callous across the right palm. She ached with the regret for his need of the cane; he touched her like he knew how long it had been since she had been touched. Enough, she thought, live in the moment, and she shimmied down his body and pushed at the waistband of his pants, peeling them off carefully. Mea culpa the breath against his thigh as she traced it with her lips, I love you the whisper against the hollow where the muscle should be. His breathing got ragged. She looked up at him.
"'S fine," he said. "Not pain. Just." He squeezed his eyes closed and she kissed his knee, his thigh. He was half hard, his shaft brushing her cheekbone, and she took him in her mouth and thought, I remember a time when this was easier. And then she thought that she was deluding herself and it had never been easy, particularly with House. But he was hot and hard in her mouth, and she licked the salt from her lips.
"How?"
He struggled up into a sitting position and she braced his thigh with a couple of pillows, making sure there was one behind his back. He motioned her forward and kissed her lingeringly. She thought about crying: this one moment of romance out of the sum of moments in their friendship, and House always did have a fine sense of timing. There was no condom. House was clean, she thought, and she was bargaining with fate for a child anyway. The insemination hadn't worked. It was in the hands of G-d, and funny that it all came down to a chance encounter with the man who'd always been half a stranger, no matter how well she knew him.
She eased down onto him, hissing, and he steadied her hips. She wasn't quite ready, but she didn't want to stop. At least he was slick from her mouth, and she was damp and getting damper. It hurt a little, but she held her breath and watched him watching her, and settled her hips against his, and then things were easier. Her body remembered. She sighed and he craned his head to lip at her breasts.
"Love these," he said, and that was the House she knew. His fingers were between her legs, rubbing slow circles, and she moved her hips in a dreamy rhythm, entranced by the feel of his mouth on her breasts. It was surreal. She would never have thought that she and House would get to this point. Outside was the crisp reality of a winter night. Her birthnight. Inside they were warm, the two of them wrapped in House's Vicodin dream as she shifted above him and he moved inside her, his free hand drifting over her skin. Oh, she thought, forgive me, for I have sinned and I will sin again gladly. He was everything. He was humming, she thought, some complicated thing, humming to her and she'd never recognize the tune and title together, but she would find herself singing it off-key in the shower, she knew, years from now when it was all a dream.
"Oh," she said without thinking. "Oh, oh oh." She was high, she was floating. She braced herself with a hand against the scar on his chest. She could feel the rut of his thigh under her.
"Mmm," he agreed, his face buried in her breasts. He was gasping a little, his hips moving erratically against hers. "Liiisssse."
His fingers moved and her hips rocked and he was pulling a little too hard at her breast but she wanted it that way, wanted the pain as proof of his presence and as penance, and so what if she ended up marked? She deserved a scar, some tangible thing to show for all this silence and misery between them, something to show the passage of time. His fingers moved faster and faster, and she rocked against him as hard as she thought his thigh would allow, working and working and he was urging her on with voice and hands and kisses and oh, she was over the edge, just barely, the winter chill cutting through her, her body a blizzard of melting snowflakes, and his chin was rough against her breasts as he nipped her accidentally, groaning.
She put her cheek against his shoulder, dipped the tip of her tongue into the hollow of his collarbone. He tasted like sweat. His unshaven throat prickled against her forehead and she breathed down the planes of his chest, counting off his pulse automatically but confounding the beat of his heart with her own.
She fell asleep that way, or some way, because when she woke, she was on her side next to him instead of on his lap, and the pillows were rearranged, and her thigh was sticky instead of slick.
Don't go, she thought, not really pinned by the weight of his arm thrown over her hip. If they were going to do this, they should have started years ago. Don't go, she thought, it isn't too late, but she slipped out of bed anyway, draping his arm over a pillow. He sighed in his sleep. She kissed his forehead, half hoping he'd rouse and stop her, but he didn't wake. In the dim, she found her clothes, her shoes, and carried them out to the living room, dressing in the relative sanctuary of the piano's curve.
At home she didn't bother showering, just fell into bed: in her sheets that smelled like him, she dreamed of him, of a child, of a long affair, of candles blown out one at a time.
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A/N: This song really does bring the Huddy love. I recommend it highly.
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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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