Work Text:
She’s late for lunch.
On most days, Cuddy only has time to snack on something in the afternoon to tide herself over until dinner, but there’s a bi-weekly reservation for Thursdays at 2 PM in the hospital’s cafeteria with her name on it.
The clock on the wall points its hands to 1:57 PM. It only takes two minutes from her office to the cafeteria if she cuts through the lobby instead of going through the clinic, but Stacy likes to be seated, food in front of her on the hour, and the lines are still long, even past the noon rush.
Walking past the elevators, Cuddy starts thinking of plausible explanations that would excuse her for the tardiness. The Board has been threatening budget cuts and a hiring freeze, and it’s been tasked to her to find a solution that makes everybody happy. Stacy understands additional responsibilities; she’s the constitutional lawyer who is now providing counsel in a teaching hospital.
Maybe if she gets Stacy to complain about her job first, she’ll forget to get on Cuddy for being late.
She opens the door to the cafeteria at 1:59 and immediately gets behind an exhausted junior resident, who takes up a few precious seconds to respond to the line moving up. Looking around, she spots Stacy at their usual table along the far wall with two trays of food and ducks out of the queue.
“Knew you were going to be late,” greets Stacy. That’s all the acknowledgment she gives Cuddy before she starts talking again, soup spoon in hand.
“Greg’s been fired from General. Idiot gave experimental treatment to a patient, circumvented the attending physician, and got slapped with another med-mal suit.”
Briefly distracted by the waving spoon, it takes Cuddy a few beats to remember that Greg is Stacy’s boyfriend. Another moment to connect Stacy’s Greg with Doctor Greg House.
She blinks. Stacy goes back into her soup. Cuddy’s tray has a garden salad, hunk of bread, her own bowl of broccoli cheddar soup, and a water bottle. There’s a frosted sugar cookie on the side, sitting on a file of papers halfway between the two of them.
“You know I hate cucumbers,” Cuddy replies, tearing off a piece of the bread and dunking it in the soup. “Did he save the patient’s life?”
Stacy swaps her soup spoon for a fork and starts fishing out the cucumber slices from the top of Cuddy’s salad. “Of course he did. He always does,” she says. “Patient doesn’t care, and admin doesn’t want to keep dealing with him.” A moment to chew on the cucumber. “He’s a money pit for General.”
She offers Stacy a non-committal hum and takes the chance to tuck into her soup-soaked bread. She left it in for too long; the bread practically disintegrates the instant she puts the chunk in her mouth.
Stacy continues her rant. “You know, this is the fourth time Greg has been fired. I don’t know what hospital is going to want to hire him with so many black marks.”
“St Sebastian’s is probably hiring. Their turnover rate for doctors is ridiculous,” Cuddy says.
“Won’t let him do diagnostics, even on the side,” Stacy says, shaking her head. “New York Mercy is probably his only option, but he doesn’t want that commute.”
Cuddy hasn’t been to Brooklyn in a while. Frankly, she hasn’t left Princeton since she got the VP position. There’s no reason to leave when the job is here. Everything else will come soon enough; Stacy’s living proof it will work out.
“It’s not that bad,” she says because she has always been willing to do whatever it takes for her career. A ninety minute commute can be worth it. She picks at the salad, and a piece of lettuce falls from her fork. “This salad is so wet.”
Stacy offers up a napkin like it could do anything. Cuddy scrunches it up and throws it at the empty bowl on the other’s tray.
“Greg is lazy,” Stacy says, exasperated but still fond. Maybe the bread wasn’t as soggy as she thought because something catches in Cuddy’s throat. Her stomach seems to react too. She’ll have to tell Stacy to go light on the salad dressing next time.
“Enough about him. How are you doing, Lisa?” Stacy asks. She has finished her lunch, and all of her attention is on Cuddy now.
She basks in the eye contact. “Budget cuts,” she offers, left hand gesturing aimlessly, “the usual.” Her right hand is gripping the fork, but she hasn’t made another attempt at the salad. “Hargreaves wants another attending in Internal to replace Campbell, but we barely have enough money to hire a resident.”
No comments, so she continues, “They’re thinking of a hiring freeze, and some of the departments might get merged, redundant jobs.”
The two of them are intimately familiar to the workplace politics of a hospital by now. It doesn’t escape their notice that Cuddy is the only woman in admin or how attendings always presume Walcott will represent them in court, even though Stacy is general counsel, and Walcott is a 2L.
“Maybe Walcott will get laid off,” Stacy points out, but they both know it’s more likely for him to get an offer letter, regardless of limited funds. “What happened with the Bridge donation?”
“New MRI machine. And Neville’s malpractice insurance premiums went up,” Cuddy answers easily. She knows where every last penny of the hospital’s accounts have gone that she can recite them in her sleep. Sometimes, she wishes there was someone in her bed at night that can quiz her.
Stacy doesn’t have that problem, but she is trying to remember what Doctor Neville did to earn those rates. It clicks for her, eyes lighting in recognition, and she points to Cuddy in excitement. “The cardiac surgeon who tripped on his own boots in the OR—”
“And back-flipped, broke his own wrist, and stabbed his patient in the calf,” Cuddy finishes, equally amused. “That might be the strangest story I’ve heard from this hospital.”
“You get used to wacky stories when you’re talking with Greg.” Cuddy might be staring at the sun because Stacy’s eyes seem to shine even brighter than before. “I don’t know how he gets into some of the situations he says. He doesn’t even like meeting the patients.”
The salad dressing and cheesy soup swirls in Cuddy’s stomach. She puts up a thin smile and remarks, “I don’t doubt it, but I hope I never have to see it for myself.”
“He always saves their life,” Stacy reiterates.
“My hospital is busy enough,” Cuddy says, “I don’t need your boyfriend running around making a mess that I have to clean up.” The lies come out easy. Stacy doesn’t point out that it’s not her hospital (yet), or that she knows Cuddy always puts patients lives first, too. She’s handled enough cases with her.
A glance at the cafeteria clock shows that it’s 2:16. When she turns back to look at Stacy, she’s already draining her water bottle, cleaning up her tray. “It’s always work talk with us, Lisa.”
“That’s our life,” Cuddy shrugs. She doesn’t mind that aspect of their conversations. Her own tray has nearly all of the soup left and half of the salad wilting away. She ate all of the bread, but she reaches for the sugar cookie anyway. “You want to share?”
Stacy shakes her head and slides out of the booth. “That’s for you,” she says as she grabs her tray. “I should go call Greg. He gets all pissy cause he’s alone at home during lunch now, and his best friend won’t pick up his calls.”
They agree to meet again in two weeks, same place and time. Stacy heads out, and Cuddy tackles the cling wrap around the cookie. She’s chewing through her first bite when she remembers that the stack of papers still on the table isn’t hers. That will be another minute tacked on her route back to her office as she takes a detour to Stacy to drop them off. A twenty-four minute lunch break can be excused.
She grabs the file to see what wasn’t important enough for Stacy to remember. If they are hospital briefs, Stacy can’t possibly be mad that Cuddy is looking when she had them laying around unprotected.
Cuddy flips the pages over, and in bold, capital letters, the heading reads GREGORY HOUSE, M.D. The words Curriculum Vitae are right next to it, and there is contact information immediately below.
Of course Stacy left her unhireable boyfriend’s CV for Cuddy at their bi-weekly Thursday lunch. It can never be just them.
She dumps the file into the wastebasket by her desk the second she gets back to her office.
By the end of the day, Cuddy is stepping out of the elevator in the parking garage when she realizes she should have shredded the papers. A sigh escapes her, and she hopes nobody is witnessing her go right back into the elevator and walk towards the hospital again.
The file remain where she tossed it, and a fleeting thought of luck reminds her that the janitor’s nightly rounds don’t happen for another twenty minutes. Cuddy grabs the file, tucks it into her bag, and finally leaves for home.
Her bag is left on the table in her entry hallway. She washes her hands, changes into more comfortable clothes, and reheats a quick dinner that has no taste. An overseeing doctor would cringe at these habits, but the only doctor that currently resides in this apartment is checked out for the day.
She doesn’t want to sit in front of the television as she eats dinner, so she stands at the kitchen counter and stares at the curtains covering the window. They’re an ocean blue with bright fish designs swimming throughout; she got them for a splash of color in the otherwise unremarkable apartment.
The window rests above the sink, and she dumps in her single empty plate of leftover food and used glass. Two dishes and a fork isn’t enough to turn the dishwasher on.
Cuddy runs the tap and squirts dish soap into the sponge. The neon yellow, lemon-scented soap still looks fluorescent in the dimly lit kitchen. The artificial lemon might be the first thing she has been able to taste tonight, and it makes her gag.
The clock on the microwave flashes a time close to midnight. It’s off by eight minutes; she’s been meaning to fix that.
She prepares the outfit she’ll be wearing tomorrow for work. There are no investor meetings on the agenda, so the purple low-cut blouse won’t be necessary. HR wants to check in on the applicants for new interns, and Gerrard in opto wants her to confirm his reservation at the Annual AOA Congress next month.
The blue turtleneck is always a good choice. It brings out her eyes.
With nothing left to do, she should brush her teeth and go to bed. Instead, she walks over to her bag and pulls out the file once again. It’s almost a surprise to stare at the black ink on white paper and realize nothing has changed since the last time she’s looked at these sheets earlier in the afternoon.
She sits down on her couch and starts reading. The address listed is a fifteen minute drive from PPTH.
Right away, she can tell it’s a CV that gets sent immediately to the reject pile the moment a recruiting manager lays eyes on it. Usually, applications go through HR, who sifts through and sends the best candidates to Cuddy.
All of the applicants she sees are impressive. This one is full of unexplained gaps. Under the education section, it states that Doctor House got his medical degree from the University of Michigan in 1986. Below that lists his experience at Johns Hopkins as a medical student and undergraduate. If Cuddy didn’t know better, the transfer from Hopkins to Michigan would have raised red flags and had the application immediately tossed out.
Unfortunately, she does know what happened, and this isn’t an official application for any of the minuscule openings the hospital has right now. This is just a favor for Stacy.
Two fellowships in nephrology and infectious diseases, but the work experience is much worse. The man can’t seem to hold down a job for longer than a couple of years. There are four separate hospitals listed from three different states along the East Coast. The most recent, Princeton General, states that it’s an ongoing job, even though Cuddy knows he’s been fired.
The research experience is thin, and the teaching experience only lists a background from undergrad. Being a lab TA for an introductory mechanics class might have been beneficial for the undergraduate physics degree, but it’s near useless for the teaching role every doctor at PPTH is required to do.
In fact, most of the details are from House’s Hopkins days. The experience beyond 1985 is superficial and complacently written.
By the end of the fourth page, she’s gone through his licenses and awards and left completely baffled by how he’s earned the reputation he has in the medical community. There’s none of the expected leadership positions or committee service typical attendings have.
Cuddy turns to the next page, which has the header “Publications.” The list of published works under House’s name extends for the next six pages.
He doesn’t have first authorship in any of the recent works, but every article is published in a significant medical journal that doctors around the world are dying to be notarized in. They’re substantial works, information that should have been presented at international conferences.
She flips back to the earlier pages to see if she missed any presentations, but the only mention of a lecture is an appearance at a convention in New Orleans in 1991.
The most recent articles describe general diagnostic cases, and she can track the evolution of his fellowships and work experience through the reverse chronology of the published papers. It’s substantive; it’s good work.
House should be fielding calls non-stop about potential employment, even in spite of the rest of his CV. It makes Cuddy think she’s missing something, that there is a blind spot she is ignoring or overlooking because of how compliant she is to the idea of hiring House.
It irritates her how susceptible she is to Stacy’s schemes.
Eight languages are listed, all at professional working proficiency. There’s only two references at the bottom, neither of whom have worked with House in a professional capacity. One lists an oncologist from a hospital House has never been employed by. The other is Stacy’s contact information, including her PPTH extension.
The last page is a cover letter. Cuddy is surprised he’s reaching out to her until she looks at how the address lists a place in Minnesota. As she reads through the paragraphs, she realizes it is for a post-grad Mayo Clinic internship from eleven years ago. It’s more useless junk that she has wasted her time on.
But the sentences are convincing, earnest and thinly shielded hunger in a way Cuddy is intimately familiar with.
She should have let the night janitor take these papers to the dumpster. Stacy would have understood. Instead, Cuddy rearranges them into the neat stack, tucks them into the file, and places it back into her bag.
It’s another task to be dealt with tomorrow.
The traffic on her Friday morning commute was minimal, and the assistant to the Dean left her an extra coffee on her desk. It was still hot by the time she got in and was able to drink it.
Cuddy spends most of the morning sorting the hospital’s mail and filling up her outgoing box. A quick check in with HR tells her that they’ve received fewer applications this quarter, and next year’s interns might not get their usual raise. She wonders if laying off someone from HR might free up their budget.
When she gets back in her office, the clock reads 11:37 AM. She cracks open the books, takes out her desk calculator, and starts figuring out a way to keep the hospital afloat and the Board satisfied.
The calculator can barely keep up with how fast she is punching in the numbers.
By 5:04 PM, she’s filed the appropriate motions as well as schedule three meetings with possible investors who are known to be generous with their wealth. The only thing left before she clocks out for the weekend is to deal with the file still wedged in her bag.
Cuddy takes it out and leaves it on her desk. She starts packing up the rest of her stuff because she knows this task will only take a couple of minutes. Either she will make a perfunctory phone call announcing a possible job opening, or the papers will finally make their way to the shredder, and Cuddy will never have to think about Greg House again. Or until Stacy brings up her grievances with her boyfriend.
She starts flipping through the pages once more, debating if it will be worth it to this hospital if someone like Doctor House was to be employed.
Cuddy is reaching over to turn on the paper shredder when the door to her office suddenly springs open, and a man strides in.
“Hello,” he says, “Doctor Gregory House. I assume you got my resume?”
As he walks up to her, Cuddy quickly tempers her shock and looks him over. House is wearing grey slacks with a matching blazer and a blue dress shirt. A brown tie completes the look, although it’s hung loosely around his neck. It’s a far cry from the hoodies and sweatpants he used to show up to lectures in, but the starch stiffness of the suit suggests he isn’t used to these clothes either.
She doesn’t know if he remembers her, so she offers him her hand and introduces herself as, “Doctor Lisa Cuddy.” As they shake, strong grip, familiar callouses, she says, “Actually, Stacy dropped off your CV and a cover letter for the Mayo internship, dated 1985.”
House gives no reaction to her name nor the name drop of his girlfriend. In fact, he starts smiling and makes himself comfortable in the chair that sits across from her desk. He crosses his legs like he has all the time in the world, and she can see the red car design of his patterned socks.
“What are you doing?” she asks, not sure if she’s questioning his presence in her office or his reappearance in her life.
“’85, ‘96. Rochester, Minnesota, Princeton, New Jersey. It’s all the same really,” he says, ignoring her question. “I’m here for my job interview.” His voice is newly guttural, as if he swallowed a bag of rocks before he came in.
It’s an audacious presumption, and Cuddy knows that this brief interaction with the man has confirmed her decision to shred his papers and never hire him. She grabs the stack and moves towards the shredder, meeting his eyes as she slowly drops his CV into the machine. The sounds of the sharp blades eviscerating his life’s work is a better response than anything Cuddy could say.
The two of them stare at each other as the machine churns through the pages. She takes the opportunity to look at his face close up for the first time in ten years. House remains smiling, although a smirk would be a more accurate description. He’s still an arrogant son of a bitch, and the years have only added to his roughness.
His hair is longer than she remembers, almost curling and unruly. A five o’clock shadow covers the bottom of his face, but it ends almost neatly right above his Adam’s apple, stopped by a thin scar. It’s surgically precise and extends nearly the entire width of his neck. Barely noticeable, could be mistaken for a skin crease, except Cuddy has been up close before, and it wasn’t there the last time she had seen him.
The paper shredder finishes, and an awkward silence threatens to erupt. She gets up and wonders what changes he has noticed about her, if she was noticeable in the first place.
“You don’t have a job interview, Doctor House. I’m leaving.”
He is unphased by her words and slouches back into the chair. “Aren’t you a little too old to be bar hopping in New Brunswick and getting drunk off your ass on a Friday night? You aren’t in college anymore, Cuddy.”
The rage that ignites in Cuddy’s chest at his assumptions is met with the excitement she knows her face is threatening to break out in at the acknowledgment that House remembers her. She tries to shut it down quickly, but she can tell he sees right through the blank mask.
She tries to shut him down instead. “What I do is none of your business. You don’t know me.”
It is infuriating how none of her words get through to him. Cuddy is standing over her desk, and House is slouching in his chair, and it’s like a re-enactment of a headmaster administering discipline to a trouble-making student, unrepentant.
“You’re still the same girl you’ve always been,” he leers. “Chip on your shoulder is keeping you up. Not like it’s hard to keep a small thing like you up.”
The shamelessness is nauseating. Cuddy goes to pick up the phone and says, “This is entirely inappropriate.” She briefly feels a pang of concern for Stacy, that she is trying to get her boyfriend a job after being fired again, while he is off with wandering eyes and a wicked tongue. “I’m calling security.”
“Heroin chic is so last year,” House continues, cattily. He reaches over and stops her from dialing the extension for security. Her stare does nothing to combat this, but House is batting his shiny blue eyes at her, and she finds herself putting the phone back in its receiver. “Come on, just give me a chance.”
You already had your chances, and you blew them, she thinks, but she finds herself sitting back in her chair anyway.
“At least let me tell Stacy that I actually tried, and you’re the one who wouldn’t hire me,” he offers, strangely mirthless. Cuddy doesn’t believe him, but she also doesn’t see a fault in his argument.
She decides to give him the chance.
“She’s going to see through you anyway.” They’re going to have a full debrief at the next lunch date. Cuddy makes a note in her mental calendar to set aside an extra sixteen minutes in her schedule. “We’re not hiring right now.”
House seems to relax at her replies. She hadn’t noticed at first because his posture was quite terrible, but his shoulders had been tensed, as if he was bracing himself for her rejection. His smirk comes back, though not nearly as pointed as it had been before. He must be taking this far more seriously than she thought.
His words try to hide this effort, however, as he says, “Just ask me about my weaknesses and the last time I disagreed with a colleague at work.” Before Cuddy has a chance to refute this line of questioning, he is already continuing with sarcastic comments.
“My weakness is that I work too hard and am just too committed to my craft.” He makes a sawing motion with his hand, a pantomime of surgery.
The contradictory nature of House confuses her; the oscillatory conversation leaves her head spinning, and she wants the pendulum back in her court. “Why were you fired from General?” An attempt to strike first.
A raised eyebrow in return, an easy deflection. “Stacy already told you why,” House says. He doesn’t seem ashamed of his actions, despite the strife it has caused him.
“Maybe I want to hear it from you,” Cuddy concedes, and it is the truth. She has no doubts that Stacy told an accurate summary of what happened, but she wants to know if House can recognize his mistakes and accept the consequences of his behavior. If House is going to be work at this hospital, he needs to be willing to defer to the hierarchy put in place.
He stares at her for a second, assessing her motives. Cuddy remains assured, and he shrugs. “It’s not very interesting. My patient,” he stops and corrects himself, “The patient was exposed to inhalational anthrax. I started him on a course of levofloxacin, and he was fine. Ungrateful idiot found out it’s not FDA approved and filed a malpractice suit against me. PG had to settle, my third settlement this year, and I was fired.”
There is not a hint of remorse in House’s body. He was almost indignant when talking about the patient, but Cuddy can tell he would do it again in a heartbeat if the same situation had arise.
“Wouldn’t you have done the same, Doctor Cuddy?” he asks.
“It’s an unfortunate situation,” she replies without hesitation. “But yes, I would have fired you.” They both know that wasn’t the question House was asking. She thinks he knows she would have wanted to use the levofloxacin too.
The interview continues. She digs deep into her grab bag of questions and pulls out, “Tell me about a time you demonstrated leadership skills or adapted your teaching style to accommodate the needs of a particular student. I noticed you didn’t have a teaching statement.” A gesture towards the paper shredder.
The shock from passing the first question morphs into a recoil of disgust from House as he listens to her talk about teaching.
“Why the hell would I have that?” House responds, face twisted in mock confusion.
“This is a teaching hospital,” Cuddy patiently answers. “Senior physicians are required to directly supervise a cohort of med students and residents, and we hold weekly seminars in the lecture halls.”
His attention is off her face now and on the desk organizer that holds her pens. He pilfers the neon orange highlighter and starts spinning it between his fingers. Cuddy can barely follow its movement with how fast House is twirling the pen.
“That’s stupid. I don’t want to teach,” he whines, wrapping the highlighter around his thumb and jerking it into the air.
Cuddy would take great delight in catching it before him or knocking it out of his hands. Stop the childish antics, and write in big, bright orange letters I’m not hiring you. Instead, she continues the farce of an interview. “Where do you see yourself in 5 to 10 years?” This job is nothing but placating immature men to get what she wants, and Cuddy wants to be the one to turn House away this time.
He stops spinning the highlighter and starts waving it around like a magician’s wand. Cuddy can’t help making the connection to Stacy’s behavior with the soup spoon from yesterday.
“Working at this hospital, of course,” House starts with. “Department head salary,” jabs the air with the highlighter, “tenured,” another jab, “my own parking space right by the entrance when I’m not getting personally escorted by a chauffeur,” jab. He puffs out his cheeks and pops it with a jab from the highlighter.
It’s enraging. She replies without thinking, “Well, you’re not getting tenure track, so that’s already wrong.”
He notices her mistake. “So I’m getting hired, then?”
House eggs her on, edging on the boundaries of her breaking point. “Come on, Doctor Cuddy.” He stretches out her title, making it sound like an exaggerated Mafia boss. Doctah Cuddy. “Ask me the real questions. What do you really want to know?”
“How did you get that scar around your neck?”
A long range shot, a desperate heave to get back into the game. It circles around the rim.
“Late night. Collar. You get the idea,” House says, with a salacious wink.
The ball tips into the net. Cuddy has found something here, and she needs to keep digging. There is gold within striking distance, and it will make this entire exhausting conversation worth it if she can unearth the truth.
“Job interview. Professionalism. Even the undergrads can do it,” she replies evenly. She can’t let him know that she’s onto him. This has to be just banter.
House stills for a bit, clearly thinking of an adequate response. It’s almost unnerving to see him without movement, not playing with the highlighter or slouching in the chair. A glitch, a frozen screen. Cuddy doesn’t stop staring, waiting for the scene to unpause.
“It was a thyroidectomy. For hyperthyroidism,” he finally says, flat and deliberately unaffected. “I was sweating my balls off in March, and the goiter made me look like a whoopie cushion.”
A surgical scar, then. She was right. Cuddy nods, willing to accept the answer and move on until she notices that for a flash, House was stuck again. For a brief moment, all of his energy was concentrated in a piercing gaze. He was looking for her reaction. He was looking to see if she believes his lie.
That was still not the truth. Cuddy redirects her line of thinking. “Stacy never told me that.”
“Why would Stacy talk to you about my medical issues?” His surprise seems genuine, like he never considered that they were close enough to casually chat about their personal lives like that.
The truth is, Cuddy and Stacy are not that close. Stacy is one of her only friends, but they are simply friendly coworkers. It’s something she finds hard to admit sometimes, that her career has put so many relationships on hold, losing touch with her sorority sisters and straining the tetchy familial ones. Meeting and befriending another professional woman, one of the few at this hospital, was a fortunate experience that Cuddy was glad to have, even if she wishes they were closer sometimes.
“I specialize in endocrinology. She knows that.” Cuddy wonders if House remembers. “She would have gone to me if you were having problems with your thyroid.” A bluff. Her relationship with Stacy is on the line here.
House believes her. He knows he’s been caught lying, but he doesn’t go anywhere near remorse. In fact, he looks almost impressed by Cuddy’s deductions.
She swallows the guilt at having to stoop down to his level. “You haven’t been telling the truth,” she reiterates plainly.
He extends a facsimile of a smile. “Everybody lies, especially during a job interview.”
They’ve reached a stalemate. Cuddy hasn’t gotten the story of the scar from him, but House no longer has the upper hand in their back-and-forth. If she digs her feet in, she will be able to wrench it out.
“This concludes the interview.” But it’s also important to know when to let go. She doesn’t want to keep risking her friendship and career to keep entertaining this madman, to hear lies after lies that cover up some tedious story. “Thank you for your time. We’ll reach out with our decision in the upcoming weeks.” She will never have to see him again. “Maybe months. Don’t wait up.”
It’s a clear dismissal, one he had to be expecting because House gets up, gives her a somber glance, and proceeds to walk out of her office without a word. Strange, but it is 5:56 PM on a Friday night, and she wants to go home.
She watches him leave and as he grabs the door handle, Cuddy sees a flash of bright orange in his other hand.
“My highlighter, please,” she says. An unremarkable phrase will be the last thing she says to House.
He turns the handle without acknowledging her but then lets go. Cuddy gets prepared for a projectile to come launching at her head, end over end. Rather, House spins away from the door and walks back over to her desk. It’s nothing like his earlier intrusion; this time is a slow gait that resembles more like a fish being dragged along the deck.
The highlighter is placed back in her holder.
Cuddy is still sitting at her desk, and House is now the one physically looming over her.
Apropos of nothing, he croaks. “After graduating med school, my dad took me out on a fishing trip. We had only gone once before, when I was five.”
She frankly does not care about this meaningless distraction and starts to get up; she’ll physically push him out of the hospital if she has to.
House continues. “He caught a 12 pound carp that time. It was about 28 inches long.” He moves his now empty hands apart to mark the distance.
She doesn’t care.
“I wanted to catch something bigger this time. I took his 0.4 millimeter monofilament line, it should have held up to 20 pounds. I got a carp to bite, maybe 2 pounds max, started reeling it in.”
This is the most unguarded House has been all evening, and Cuddy doesn’t fucking get it. Why is he telling her this fishing story.
They’re both standing now with Cuddy’s desk in between them. She catches a better view of his scar from this angle, the thin one along his neck. Maybe a half millimeter slice.
She doesn’t interrupt.
“The line snapped, and the fish got away. My dad was pissed at me for fucking up his lines. When he was packing up the boat and gear, I swiped the line from the tackle box.”
The pieces are starting to click together, but she is still missing the vital connection.
“I had to prove him wrong, that the line should’ve held.”
In her second year of residency, Cuddy was performing an intubation in the ICU when air conditioner coolant started to drip from the ceiling. The desperation to get the patient to breathe mixed with the urgency to get everybody away from the leak. It’s a head rush Cuddy hasn’t felt again until now. She fights off the urge to reach out to House, to stop him from speaking like how the patient couldn’t.
“I wrapped the fishing line nice and tight around my neck,” he says casually, like this is still the father and son bonding trip he was recounting. House mimes the tying, gift wrapping his head on a platter. “Right there,” he motions at his scar.
“And pulled.” Both hands are held up around his neck, clenched in fists like he’s currently gripping the fishing line. He extends them outwards, and Cuddy can hear the way his neck snaps.
Half millimeter fishing line. Surgical precision on something as sensitive as the human throat. House is in a department store suit, but she swears there are rivulets of blood running down the collar of his blue shirt right now. All she can think about is how he kept pulling the line, tighter and tighter against his esophagus, and it didn’t break. She’s begging for the fishing line to break; a two pound fish was able to pull against it. Why couldn’t the line break for Gregory House?
He must have been so desperate to be right.
“It nicked my vocal cords.”
He survived with such minimal damage. Cuddy recalls all the muscles of the neck and throat, the ones used for speaking and eating and breathing. House was left with a voice of gravel and a barely noticeable scar.
His hands drop. “He was the one who stopped me,” House says with resentment. The bitterness of a son who was wronged.
He’s not looking at her anymore, just like how she hasn’t found a word to utter in reply. What can she possibly say to him. House turns away, story complete, and she can’t help seeing him as that fish on the deck again. A collar of fishing line around him that unspools back to her desk. It leaves a bloody trail, filament mixed with muscle tracking over the office’s carpet.
House doesn’t hesitate at the door this time, and there is nothing for Cuddy to call him back for. She is left alone again, but the stench of cauterized skin and plastic remains in the air. Collapsing back into her chair, Cuddy holds her head in her hands.
The average human head weighs eleven pounds. The fishing line could support twice of that. House knew that, but he had to be right.
She reaches for the phone for the third time that evening and nearly flinches at the sight of the coil cord. It’s 6:13 PM, and HR is long gone by now, but she leaves a message for when they get back into office on Monday.
“Hi, Paul. It’s Lisa from Admin. Can you get started on some hiring paperwork for me? His name is Doctor Gregory House. He’s a nephrologist, he’s going to be Hargreaves’ new attending in Internal. Don’t worry about the salary, I have it all handled. Thanks.”
She clears the lump in her throat. Stacy owes her one.