A Prank Too Far

Okies, this was hammered out in two hours flat because EVERYBODY and their raunchy aunts have been asking for an update on this and FINALLY inspiration struck (like a fucking pick-axe I can tell ya) at about six this morning (hey, who needs that fabled sleep thing anyway).

So after a long day of work, getting caught in the sodding arctic weather, going to the cinema and then squelching my way home, I sat down and beat this puppy out on the keyboard in time with Snow Patrol’s ‘Chasing Cars’?

*if I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lie with me?
And just forget the world?*

I dunno if that’s the right title but that was the song. Dunno if it came out in this, but I think it did. A lot towards the end. I’m quite pleased with this and I think the ladling of Nair Snark I gave it trimmed down the fluff a bit.

Unbeta’d all mistakes are mine and I hope ye like.

Phew!

Chapter 18: Like It Or Not


“So, how long have you been together?”

Cuddy nervously gripped her mug of steaming tea between her palms and sat across the polished dining room table from one of the largest and most terrifying looking men she had ever seen. She should have known that Tawny McQueen’s husband would be nothing less. She had called him, not knowing what else to do with the unconscious employee on her couch and he had arrived in short order in nothing less ostentatious than a fully military specified Hummer. The massive tank of a vehicle was now taking up both her driveway and half of her neighbours. Somehow Cuddy doubted that Mr Meekle would be out to curmudgeon about it though. Michael McQueen was tall, Maori, tattooed, pierced, ex-Marine and oddly quite beautiful in a purely masculine way.

He also liked tea but seemed to dislike conversation.

“Married or known each other?” This was by far the longest sentence that had come out of his pierced lips. He had a single ring through the middle of his full lower lip and a large bolt through his tongue. He had a habit of rattling the bolt along his teeth between sips of tea.

“Either.“ Cuddy shrugged helplessly. It was incredibly rare for her to be caught wrong footed by someone but opening the door to see this hulking man standing on her doorstep like some kind of tribal warrior lost in the wrong century had certainly thrown her. He arched a brow, tattoos rippling and the silver ring there winking in the light. A very large hand went to the perfectly straight raven black hair that hung over his shoulders and down his back. He tunnelled his fingers through his hair, hair that Cuddy knew most women would kill for, and huffed out a breath.

“I’ve known her for nearly…twenty years. We’ve been married for five.”

“So Lorcain is…?” Cuddy clapped her mouth shut. Talk about prying.

“Oh, he’s mine. I just didn’t know about him for the first ten years of his life.” Michael’s huge fingers that were doing a marvellous job of engulfing the largest mug that Cuddy had, tightened on the thick ceramic until Cuddy thought it might crush to powder. “Tawny doesn’t necessarily believe in sharing. Not when she feels she doesn’t have to…or when she thinks it would be a ‘burden’.” He glanced up and through the archway to the living room, where they could both see Tawny still curled on the couch under the angora throw that Cuddy had found for her. He turned back to Cuddy with a slightly bitter smile. “I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have to listen to this.” He sat back in the solid mahogany chair that looked as delicate as matchsticks under his ranging frame.

“Helps to talk about things.” Cuddy looked down into her tea and swirled it in her cup. “At least, so I’ve heard.”

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.” Michael smirked at her and Cuddy lifted her eyes and smiled back. He was scary as hell, but once you got past all the ink, muscles and metal accoutrements, he seemed like a genuinely nice guy.

“Alright…” Cuddy glanced to the side, wondering how much she should say. How much she could say, then decided to just say it anyway.

“I’ve found myself in an usual position where I have to turn to a colleague for a very odd kind of help.” Michael looked at her with piercing whisky toned eyes and Cuddy found the next words spilling from her before she could stop them. “Basically, I’ve become addicted to an aphrodisiac and he’s the only one I trust enough to sleep with to keep the symptoms under control.” Michael’s brows shot for his dark hairline but Cuddy had started and now she couldn’t stop. “On top of all that he’s one of the most difficult bastards in the world to deal with and, just when I found myself thinking that maybe this wasn’t just some kind of god-awful oddball kind of ‘therapy’ to him, I find out he thinks I’m a cold hearted whore who may or may not be carrying his child though he has no wish to ever be a father or become attached to another member of the human race for anything more than the going rate for a hooker and a blowjob.” Out of breath and out of courage, Cuddy brought her cup to her lips and gulped her tea down in an attempt, if not to just stop her talking, then maybe to drown her too.

“Well, that’s…certainly a pickle you’ve got yerself in there, love.” Michael sipped his tea.

Cuddy smiled at the understatement of the year. “Isn’t it though?” Another gulp of tea. “Your turn.” She demanded and he had the grace to look discomforted.

“My wife’s fighting a battle that’s killing her from the inside out and I don’t know how to help her or even if she’ll let me.” He gusted all the words out on one cavernous sigh and Cuddy’s chest ached a little for him. It was one thing for her and House to be having these kinds of problems, they weren’t a couple, they hadn’t really chosen to be together, but Tawny and Michael were married to each other and Cuddy had the feeling that they were both ‘till death do we part’ type.

“Do you know when it started?” Cuddy asked gently.

“About a year ago. She went to Bosnia on her tour of duty, her last tour she’d said. I don’t think she retired from her last stint on the job quite the way she planned.” Michael looked down at his large hands. They were nice hands. Callused and work worn, but strong and capable. The kind of hands other people put their lives in. “Something happened on the Op, something went wrong. Bad information or some cock up in administration had them dropped down in the middle of a fucking war zone. From what I could beat out of her XO, they were taken to a POW camp and…and they were tortured. For information they just didn‘t have. They were there on a recon mission. Part of a peace keeping patrol, handing out bloody food packs of all things!” A muscle ticked in his strong jaw. “I never got the details. She never let me have them. She wouldn’t even let us into the hospital to see her in recovery, she had armed guards keep me out. Can you believe it? I’m her husband and she wouldn’t even let me be there for her.”

“Has she ever talked about it, or tried to?”

“Never. I think she’s ashamed.”

“Of what?!” Cuddy’s voice was louder than she had intended and she quieted herself but asked anyway. “Surviving?”

“I think that’s part of it. Mostly I think that she thought it was weak to have been caught, to have suffered, to have let her team down. She doesn’t think she’s strong enough anymore and it kills her.”

“Michael,” Cuddy looked down at her tea again, like it might offer some answers. “This might be hard to hear, but Tawny needs help. Professional help. These…behaviour patterns she’s exhibiting are indicative of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and while it’s early stages, the night terrors, the destructive tendencies, losing her sense of place…it’s going to get worse if we don’t do something about it now.” Her voice was gentle but firm. She wasn’t backing down on this. As a doctor, employer or…as a friend. She liked Tawny, liked that she had gone out of her way to help Cuddy despite Cuddy having not really welcomed her with open arms. Tawny deserved her help and Cuddy was going to give it whether she liked it or not.

“We?” Michael looked at her somewhat warily.

“What, did you think I wasn’t going to help?” Cuddy snorted into her tea. “I worked too damn hard getting that woman’s pay cheque to not get my money’s worth.”

Michael smiled gently, seeing through it without preamble.

“She’s not going to make it easy.” He warned her.

“I doubt that woman has ever done anything the easy way in her life.” Cuddy glanced over at Tawny’s still sleeping form. She narrowed her eyes a fraction. “Like someone else I know.”

“She won’t respond well to threats to tote her off to the loony bin.” Michael scrubbed a hand over his jaw thoughtfully.

“Not referring to it as that might be a good start.” Cuddy pointed out wryly.

“I’m just saying, I know her, the harder you push her, the harder she pushes back.” He shrugged. “She doesn’t do suggestions.”

“How about orders?” Cuddy mused almost to herself and Michael straightened in his seat.

“You can do that?”

“I’m the Mean Queen Dean, I can do whatever I want.” It was Cuddy’s turn to shrug. “Revoking her surgical rotation would be a start, but there are a million and one other ways I can go about persuading her to see things our way.” She glanced at Michael and saw his hopeful but sceptical expressions warring on his face.

“She’s going to get better. We’ll see to it.”

“Must be nice to be so sure. I wonder if you’d feel the same way about your…colleague if he was going through something similar.”

Cuddy glanced at him sharply and her fingers tightened on her mug.

“He already does.” She spoke tightly. “Every day. Maybe he’s never going to get better and maybe I’m deluding myself in thinking that I can ever be any help but…”Cuddy let that sentence tail off and thought hard for a moment, wondering if she was bullshitting Michael or, worse, herself and then made a decision. Her jaw tightened in determination and she looked back up to Michael with flint hard eyes. “But I’ve decided I’m not going to stop trying. He’s stuck with me interfering in his life and keeping him from going completely off the deep end whether he damn well likes it or not.”

Michael sat back in his chair and an odd little smile curled his lips.

“You know, I almost feel sorry for the bloke.” His smirk widened to a smile. “Almost.”

“Here’s to that.”

Cuddy lifted her mug and Michael toasted her back with a clink of ceramic meeting ceramic.

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House limped back and forth in his apartment. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. He lapped the coffee table, the couch, right through to the kitchen, gripping the worn planks of the table hard enough to crack his knuckles then back to the floor to complete another circuit. He’d been doing this for hours. Hours and hours of searing, agonising, leg-chewing-itself-off mind breaking pain that splintered him from the inside and had him bleeding from his own ragged edges. If the pain hadn’t robbed him of any faith he might have had in any of the Gods above or below that might still be jaded enough to be listening to a tiny mortal, he might have prayed for it to stop. Dropped to his knees and begged for it. Pounded the floor until his knuckles bled and shouted at the ceiling in true evangelical zeal until his throat was raw with it.

But he didn’t believe. Couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t, whatever, he didn’t know anymore. All he had was the pain. His constant fucking companion, no matter what, no matter where.

His breath hissed out from between clenched teeth and he tried desperately to cling to some semblance of reason, some sliver of logic that would afford him refuge. Let him escape it for some handful of precious seconds.

But he couldn’t.

Because of her.

She’d wrecked his reasoning. Stripped it from him and cluttered his Occam’s razor of a mind with needy thoughts and wants that he couldn’t afford. It was a matter of survival. His. He needed his rational retreat, his little island of crunching the numbers and playing the statistics that allowed him to save lives and be good at his job while failing miserably at everything else. Just like he’d failed with her.

How fucking stupid to believe, for one second, for one moment, for one heartbeat, that he could have lasted with her. That the thing burgeoning between them could have been anything but a passing fancy. A butterfly caught in a jar, bright and vibrant one day and then suffocated, wilted and dying the next. He had smothered it, that thing between them, the thing he couldn’t even name because he didn’t want to or was to afraid to, with his clumsy conclusions and mistrustful jabs at the truth. He’d made a mistake, fucked it up, stomped all over it and muddied it to boot. He’d hurt her and she’d rightfully pushed him out, locked him out of her life. Probably this time for good. No more reeling him in and protecting him from himself, no more putting up with him, no more standing between him and the board.

Damn her. Damn her for insinuating herself into his life like this. For taking care of him when he didn’t want it. When he wanted nothing more than to be left alone. Damn her for forcing humanity on him. For keeping him in contact with that swarm of stupidity that he so loved to loathe. For feeding him puzzles and titbits and keeping him interested in life when he should have long since been left to die.

Damn her.

And damn him for needing her.

House’s leg abruptly buckled under him and he went crashing to the floor. He grunted in pain and clutched at the warped scar seething in molten hot pain that he couldn’t claw out even if he wanted to. He lay half under the coffee table and ground his teeth together until he thought they were going to squeak out of his skull. He opened his eyes and, through the fuggy haze of pain, made out the shape of his phone, knocked askew from its cradle by his ungainly crash landing. He reached blindly for it and, after a couple of failed attempts, snagged it and clutched it down to his chest. Even that small effort cost him. Sweat beaded on his brow and slid down past his eyes and temples like tears. Maybe it was tears, difficult to tell when his entire nervous system seemed to have migrated to his thigh, poured gasoline all over itself and set itself alight.

He fumbled for the numbers, trying to dial, knowing he needed help now. He always called Wilson when it got like this. Too hard to stand, too difficult to fall and even worse to try and get up again. He knew this old dance between him and the agony well enough to know when he needed someone to cut in and take over dancing in the iron hot shoes for a while.

He fumbled for the number but his body betrayed him again when they refused to remember the number. He tried for several minutes. Trying to shakily punch it in, but it refused to work because…because…

Because he didn’t want Wilson.

House smeared a hand over his face and tried desperately to think of something, anything, to talk him out of what he was about to do. He thought frantically. Tried again to clunk out Wilson’s number…but his fingers refused.

“Fuck it.” He let his hands have their way and stamp out the number that they seemed so desperate to dance to. He dropped the phone against his ear and turned his face to the side so it lay along his jaw and both hands could go back to holding on to the wild ride that was the pain in his leg. He listened to the burring rhythm of the ring tone on the other end and wondered if she’d even spare him the time to answer.

God, he hoped so.


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The knock on the door came a bare half hour later and House still lay on the floor, phone abandoned just over his shoulder and panting through the pain. He twisted to look at the door. It might as well have been miles away. He could make out the twin shadows of feet on the other side.

“It’s open.” He husked out into the darkness and another knock sounded. She hadn’t heard. “It’s open!” This time was barely louder than the first, but she must have heard him because her hand went to the handle and she pushed it open. He turned away from the light she spilled into his apartment and squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t stand to look at her face. To see another set of disappointed emotions flourish over it. He heard her step into the apartment, hesitantly at first, not sure where he was. Felt her eyes land on him and listened, pathetically warmed when she slammed the door behind her in haste and hurried to his side, dropping to her knees.

“House.” He turned back to her, eyes opening as her hand landed on his cheek. Ugh, he was so pitiful. He could rail, shout, scream, throw tantrums and insults and jibes at her and he’d always cleave to her. Always turn back to her. He couldn’t help himself.

“Hi.” As opening segues went, it wasn’t fabulous, but it was the best he could manage.

“Did you fall?” She was cupping his head in her hands, fingers questing through his hair. Checking for damage. He lost himself in that for a moment and then remembered to answer.

“Just once. Didn’t hurt anything except my ass. Wanna kiss it better?”

“Shut up, I’m still mad at you.” She had her fingers at his pulse, watching her watch on her other hand.

“Then why’d you come?” The question was out his mouth before he could stop it and he noticed she lost count and had to laboriously start again.

“Because…you needed me to.” She shrugged one shoulder and muttered something to herself that sounded oddly like ‘whether I like it or not’. She lifted his head onto her lap and looked down at him from upside down. Her hands rested on his shoulder and put all his focus into those points of contact to better distract him from the pain. “How bad?”

“We’re sitting at a comfortable twelve at the moment.” He closed his eyes as her hand came down on his forehead.

“You’re burning up.”

“With my face this close to the honey-pot it’s hard not to.” He opened one eye and saw her smile despite everything. Good to know her sense of humour hadn’t perished with her tolerance of him…but she was here wasn’t she?

What did that mean?

Did he want to know?

Could he stand to know if he didn’t like the answer?

“Nice to know that you’ll always be an ass.” She slipped her arms under his shoulders and grunted a little with the effort of helping him up into a sitting position. He grasped at the couch and helped her to lever him up as best he could. He hated this. Being a cripple….being a cripple without her to help him would be worse though. He had to fix this. He didn’t know how though and he wanted to howl in rage at it for being so fucking difficult. He wasn’t good at this. He was good at being cold. Being remote and making decisions that other people couldn’t, but that came at a price. That thing that other people had, that class that they’d all taken to get good at this kind of thing, he’d missed it. He’d been off getting high or, dissecting something or being better than someone. He didn’t know if it was too late to learn it, or even if he was brave enough to try, but the other options scared him even more, so what choice did he have?

“What can I say? Yours is so huge that I just thought I had to keep it company.” Oh yeah, real smooth, step in the ol’ right direction there!

“Okay, shut up now, or I’m going to drop you just to see if you bounce.” She lifted his arm and tucked her head and shoulders under it. “Come on, up.” She commanded him and he scrambled, for once, to do as he was told. It was hard, harder probably because he didn’t want to lean on her too heavily at the risk of crushing her or dragging her down with him if he fell.

See, he told his thumbs, this was why they should have called Wilson, he at least could haul his crippled ass up off the floor without risk of personal harm.

She snagged her bag up off the floor. He recognised the clink of glass vials coming from within and wondered what she’d brought with her to knock him out. Because that was what it was going to take. His Vicodin might as well have been tic tacs for all the good they did him.

They winced along the hall to his bedroom, it took them a while, mostly because he was mindful of not leaning on her too much and crushing her if he crashed again. She lowered him to the bed and he flopped back onto it with a long relieved groan. He was aware of her helping he legs up onto the bed and tugging the sheet over him. He tried to make some kind of comment about her mothering him but choked on it when he remembered what their last fight had been about. She sat beside him, oblivious to his inner panic at the mere thought of…that, and extracted a sterile syringe and a glass vial.

“So, what you giving me, doc?” House tried to keep things funny. It was either that or cry and he hadn’t done that since he was eight so that was pretty unlikely. “The good stuff.”

“Nah, this fell off a truck from Mexico. Got it on discount from eBay.”

“Tax free?”

“Super Saver delivery too.” She set the syringe aside and his eyes tracked it. Relief just on the other end of that needle. Hell, he was so pathetic he burned from it but the pain burned even hotter so he had no choice but to give in. Give in or get burned to nothing. She wrapped a tourniquet around his bicep and tightened it a little harshly. His head rolled back to face her and he was struck with the sudden need to touch her. Without giving too much thought to the hair-raising prospect of rejection, he reached out with his free arm and cupped her neck. She stiffened in surprise and turned into his thumb as he rubbed it against the corner of her jaw. Their eyes met and, after a torturous moment, her eyes softened a fraction.

“Sorry.” He blurted.

“For what? I’m the one that’s about to stab you.”

“You know what. Just…sorry.”

She smiled then, a tiny smile, but it was there. She leaned her cheek into his hand, for a fraction of a second, and then reached up to pull his hand down.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.” She looked at him, saying it a little firmer that time.

“You don’t want to…talk?”

“Not when I’m about to pump you full of Dopamine, no.” She suited action to words and speared the needle into his vein in one fluid practiced move. Any comments about her harpooning him like a drunken whaler died at the simple proficiency of it. She released the tourniquet and the freezing sensation of the menthol numbing drug clawed its way up his arm. If he’d had a choice, he’d have probably chosen anything but Dopamine, but it was probably the best thing she had to hand. She wouldn’t have given him it otherwise. She might have been mad at him, but she wouldn’t stick it to him like that (literally as it may turn out). He felt the cool numbness spread through his body with every beat of his heart in the deep freezing process of the drug.

He shivered and she watched him carefully in the lamplight, clearing away her things. She reached snapped her bag closed, smoothed her hand over his forehead one last time and then rose to leave.

He grabbed her before he’d made the conscious decision to do so.

He lunged across the space separating them, wrapped his arms around her waist and tugged her back down onto the bed. She made a muffled sound of surprise and her hands landed gently on his shoulders as he shamelessly clung to her, head resting on her lap and turned away from her, but his hand gripping his wrist vice-like behind her back. Now that he had a hold of her, he didn’t know if he could let go.

“House, I have to…” Her hands went behind her back to his wrists, intending to pull him away.

“Lisa.” His voice was muffled against the material of her skirt, his face turned from her and his arms tightened a fraction around her middle.

It was just her name.

Nothing more. No blazing compiling of reasons why she should stay, no level headed argument of why it was a good thing, no rational anything in it.

Just two slightly gasped syllables and a silent, desperate question, wedged in between them.

She was still for a long moment, just breathing around him.

Her hands moved from his wrists, skating up his arms and back around her body to his shoulders. Sliding down the line of his back and pulling her torso down after them until her cheek could rest on his shoulder blades.

“Greg, you want me to stay?”

His eyes snapped open and his hands relaxed at the small of her back, opening to splay palm first to her skin, slipping under the back of her sweater desperate for some skin-to-skin touching. He tried to say it. He really did but something else came out instead.

“I’m really cold.”

“I know.” She was still bent over him. They were both wrapped in each other so tight it was nearly difficult to breathe. She rubbed her hand in a small circle over the back of his heart.

“Keep me warm?”

“I don’t have pyjamas.” He could feel her smile against his back.

“Birthday suit is fine with me.”

“Not with me. Not tonight.” His arms tightened around her again.

“I have shirts. Tee shirts, sweaters, whatever, take one, take five. Have them all.”

She was quiet another long interminable moment and he thought he was going to have to padlock his arms around her just to keep her here because there was no way he was letting go any time soon.

“Any shirt I like?”

“Hmm.” Well, he didn’t know about that. “I demand visitation rights.”

“Days or nights?”

“Nights, weekends and holidays.”

“Doesn’t leave a lot of me and shirt quality time.”

“I’m difficult that way.”

“Yeah, you are.”

“Deal or no deal: one shirt in exchange for electric blanket services.” He was beginning to shiver now. Man, he hated dopamine.

“Okay, but I get to pick.”

“Hmm.”

She sat up and he slowly, cautiously, released her a little. She didn’t immediately up and away so he braced himself on his arms, hands planted on either side of her hips and looked into her small, slightly wistful looking smile and lent into her hand when she cupped his stubble roughened cheek. As soon as she let go he felt afloat in an arctic sea. Numb and frozen from the inside out. The bright side was his leg was down to a muted throbbing, the dull side was that he felt like he had ice water in his veins and an uncomfortably disembodied feeling wafting about in his head. He carefully sat back in the middle of the bed, feeling his way with hands that didn’t strictly feel his own and easing back, propped against the headboard.

He watched her move to his chest of drawers, toeing off her heels with bare feet and little pink polished toenails resting on the floorboards. She rummaged unabashedly through his clothes, picking out and then rejecting shirts out of hand, she dug down, obviously looking for the answer to life, the universe and everything down there and finally tugged something dark out of the very bottom of the drawer.

“Not that one.” He told her. She glanced over her shoulder and smirked at him.

“I like this one.” His argument died in his throat when she stripped her sweater over her head, shimmied out of her skirt and dropped her bra over the foot of the bed. He was afforded a flash of luscious curves before they were covered by the dark grey tee shirt that engulfed her smaller frame and hung to mid thigh on her. The bright yellow lettering proclaiming ‘I’m With Stupid’ curving around her breasts since she dipped in and out where he didn’t.

Not that he was complaining.

At all.

She padded across the floor towards the bed and crawled up over the side, tugging the duvet down and wriggling under it. She reached down to the foot of the bed and tugged the throw up over them too. House fumbled his way down the bed until he was cocooned up to his neck in covers and burrowed in pillows. She reached over and switched off the light.

In the dark, he could just make out the sensation of the mattress dipping as she wriggled towards him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and slid her leg over his hips. His limbs were heavy and cold on the inside, but he looped them around her until they were practically the same body, a tangle of limbs and a unity of breathing that made it difficult to tell who stopped where and when the other started.

House buried his face in her hair, inhaled deeply and let the familiar scent warm him from the inside out. With such pleasing company, he shut his eyes, felt the region in his chest around his heart thaw that little bit more, and drifted down into the inky black of deep, dreamless, peaceful sleep.