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hihoplasticFanfic: A Series of Numbered Stars: HouseFic50: (1/1)
Title: A Series of Numbered Stars
Author: Catherine
Fandom: House, MD
Character/Pairing: Gen (subtle combinations)
Prompt: 025: Strangers
Word Count: 3220
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Stacy-arc things, references to Euphoria, Forever, Half-Wit. Nothing major, nothing future.
Cuddy does not think of a middle ground.
She has another patient, a little boy, and she’s distracted; she says no when they hand her the file, says she knows him, she won’t (can’t) treat him; she hands his file to another doctor.
Stacy never hears about an alternative, and House is in too much pain to think of it himself. She begs and cries and screams at him, that she’d love him with no arms and no legs and that she doesn’t fucking care how damaged he is.
‘I care,’ he says.
They put him in a coma but he never wakes up.
--
Wilson loves his wife.
Wilson loves his wife and he loves the nurses and he loves all his patients. He has a brilliant smile and a brilliant heart and everybody always says, ‘Oh, that James Wilson what a nice man.’
Wilson (acts like he) loves the clinic and is always the first to show new doctors (interns, nurses, residents) around the hospital. The Dean of Medicine loves him because he brings in checks with flourished signatures (and takes wonderful care of his patients).
He plays golf on Sundays with an oncologist from General, spends Christmas with his wife (‘I thought you were Jewish, Dr. Wilson,’ Dr. Cuddy says once, and Wilson only shrugs and smiles and she smiles back and they go their separate ways.). He attends seminars and speaks at conferences and everyone wants his opinion, everyone wants to say, ‘Dr. Wilson, my wife is having a dinner party; you and Julie (they know about his first two wives, but everyone just smiles them away) should come,’ and Wilson says ‘I’d love to.’ And so he and his wife dress up and sit around candle-lit tables and laugh, ‘Oh, let’s not talk about work,’ and enjoy the company of respectable doctors and lawyers, and Julie keeps her hand on his under the table all through dinner.
Some nights he works late, and Julie understands. He stays at work until the next morning (sometimes he’s doing paperwork, sometimes he’s sitting with patients, other times neither).
One time, Lisa Cuddy finds him staring out the window, says, ‘Looking for something, Dr. Wilson?’ Because for some odd reason she can read him better than the other doctors (patients, nurses, wives). He frowns, slightly.
‘I wish I had a balcony.’
--
The diagnostics department at Princeton-Plainsboro is criminally under-funded.
There’s a department head, sure, Doctor Samuel Jenkins, graduate of Johns Hopkins, second in his class.
(‘He’s brilliant,’ they said, ‘he hasn’t been in diagnostics very long’ and ‘I think he was a pulmonologist?’ but ‘regardless’ they said ‘he’s just excellent.’
Lisa Cuddy couldn’t help but ask, ‘Is he as good as Doctor House?’ and the room went silent.
‘He graduated from Johns Hopkins,’ someone reminded her after a beat, and she nodded and smiled and said she’d give his application due consideration.)
Doctor Jenkins (‘Please, call me Sam’) hired three fellows: Dave Woodside, from the Mayo Clinic, Victor Rimming from his alma-matter, and Robert Chase, because his father (‘oh, what a brilliant man’) made a phone call.
Sam is a great coach. He’s smart, enthusiastic, strict but soft and all the things you’d want in a learning environment (‘well, this is a teaching hospital,’ he says with a humble smile). He’s a wonderful doctor, too, it’s just that, well, the cases have been getting harder (Lisa Cuddy raises her eyebrows but says nothing) and his fellows are frustrated and he’s frustrated, and he didn’t think diagnostics would be so difficult.
But Sam is a great, great guy, and he does his clinic duty without complaint. Patients love him (but not as much as they love Doctor Wilson) because he holds their hands and looks them in the eye when he has bad news.
Lisa Cuddy does everything she can to keep the department running, but when most of the patients end up dead, there’s little she can do.
--
Stacy visits Greg on her lunch breaks for three straight years.
She reads him Dickens and Marx and tries to summon her college French so she can read him Molière.
The first year, she’s surprised to find out that the Dean of Medicine visits him occasionally, checks things over.
‘She does that for everyone,’ a nurse tells her, but another amends, ‘more for him.’
She’s even more surprised to find out that the Dean of Medicine is incredibly attractive, with long, thick hair and heels and her chin held high. She has perfect skin and perfect eyes and went to Michigan with Greg.
‘Oh,’ Stacy says, and shifts.
‘Actually I wanted to talk to you,’ the Dean says, casually, confidently, and Stacy tries not to narrow her eyes.
‘Our legal team could use a bit of help around here, especially with the diagnostics department’ (she has the grace to look away briefly) ‘if that’s…’ she starts, stops, decides Stacy can handle it by the way she straightens her spine defiantly. ‘Our diagnostics department sucks,’ she says bluntly. ‘They need all the legal help they can get and rumor has it you’re one of the best lawyers in the state.’
‘What makes you think I’d want this job?’
‘This is where House is,’ she says, but there’s something in her voice that softens, makes Stacy realize that this woman doesn’t love him, doesn’t really know him, but for some reason wants to help. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘the offer’s good ‘til the end of the week, then I’ll have to start looking for someone else.’
Over the next two years, Stacy learns that Lisa Cuddy really does visit every patient (with extra time devoted to the NICU and pediatrics). She learns that Doctor Wilson is a bit of a ladies man, but he’s a sweetheart nonetheless, that Doctor Samuel is kind and intelligent, but really not cut out for his job, and that Doctor Chase, the awkward British (Australian?) fellow under him is much brighter than he seems, even when he screws up.
When Cuddy finds out that Stacy spends her lunch breaks reading Nietzsche to Greg, she gives her an extra fifteen minutes and doesn’t note it anywhere.
‘You’re good to him,’ she says sometime, but Stacy’s too busy wiping tears from her eyes.
After three years, she finally walks into Lisa Cuddy’s office and says, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’
--
Allison Cameron can’t find work.
‘You’re young,’ a doctor who should have hired her says, ‘you’re good looking, and you’ve got a tight ass. No doctor in his right mind is going to hire you. It’s a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen.’ He holds the door open for her. ‘Thanks for your time.’
‘You too,’ she says smoothly, ‘You son of a bitch.’
Two weeks later she gets an offer from Yule at Jefferson and she doesn’t hesitate. He’s short and preachy and pedantic but he’s smart and she’s smart and they think well together. She climbs the ladder and hits the glass ceiling and ignores it. She’s twenty-eight and published, respected and nobody knows that her husband died and nobody knows she’s slightly bitter; no one knows she likes Monster Truck Rallies and that she doesn’t mind the occasional underhanded move to get what she wants.
She’s at a conference one year in Washington when she runs into Robert Chase (‘You work under Dr. Jenkins, at Princeton Plainsboro.’ ‘Yeah,’ he drawls, ‘Good ol’ Sammy-boy.’) They talk and laugh and he’s not really a charmer (he’s fairly awkward and a little crass) but she likes the way his hair falls in his face and the sound of his voice.
(She likes it better, she decides, when it’s muffled into her skin and drawn out into long, incomprehensible sounds.)
Five years later she’s Head of Immunology at Queen of Angels in New York, and Doctor Ratcher applies for a job in her research lab.
‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘That’s a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen.’
She goes out that afternoon with girlfriends from college, and buys them each a pair of ridiculously expensive shoes.
--
Edward Vogler is a respectable businessman.
He likes solid numbers and facts, all neatly laid out for him. He likes the way ‘new and improved’ sounds on the tongue, and the way doctors simplify and abbreviate terms when explaining things to patients.
He liked Lisa Cuddy when he first arrived. Small, feisty, full of quick wit and so very in control (he thinks another doctor he once knew, Derrick Something, would be better suited for the job, but he doesn’t tell her this, only implies it).
After a while, however, after hearing, ‘that’s extremely unethical’ and ‘this is a hospital, not a research institution’ and ‘these are patients, not guinea pigs’ and ‘I don’t care how much more the drug companies can make…’ Edward Vogler steadily begins to dislike Lisa Cuddy. He dislikes the way she commands loyalty and respect, the way she demands attention with a look, one word. He doesn’t like the way she wears high heels and low cut blouses and gets away with it.
He doesn’t like hearing her tell him ‘no.’
‘I donated a hundred million to this hospital,’ he says coldly, and she stares him down with grace.
‘My hospital,’ she corrects.
The board votes in her favor, and he doesn’t like that either.
--
Doctor Eric Foreman is going to do great things.
He’s among the top of his field, getting grants and requests and proposals and basking in it. He doesn’t really like patients and he doesn’t really care about their sob stories (‘Everybody’s got something,’ he justifies, but the nurse just looks at him funny and moves on), but he likes the puzzle and he likes being right at the end of it.
‘He’s kind of an ass,’ some patients say, ‘but he fixed me.’
Doctor Foreman knows he’s heard that somewhere before, but he can’t remember where.
--
Sometimes, James Wilson goes out of his mind with boredom.
It’s not that he doesn’t love his job, doesn’t love his wife because he does. Very, very much. ‘But there’s only so much golf and schmoozing and dinner parties I can take,’ he tries to explain, but Julie just suggests, ‘Maybe you’re hitting your mid-life crisis early.’
So James Wilson does what he’s expected to do: he buys a car.
‘Nice,’ the Dean of Medicine says, her lips curved up in a sly but knowing fashion. Wilson flushes and makes an excuse that she doesn’t buy, only takes with a smile and disappears as a click of heels.
The next day he calls in sick and drives until he can’t hear himself think.
The day after that he calls his divorce lawyer, again.
--
Stacy meets a guy named Mark, and they get married.
Two years later Mark gets sick, and when he dies, the only person she can think to call is Lisa.
--
A police officer is admitted as a patient of the diagnostics department.
He’s insane, laughing constantly, and no one can figure out why.
‘Maybe it’s environmental.’
They ask, but the cop just laughs and laughs.
‘Screw this,’ Doctor Chase mutters, takes his key and breaks in. There’s crap and it’s gross and it smells but he comes back with ‘Legionnaires Disease.’
He also comes back laughing.
‘Biopsy his brain!’ he shouts from behind the glass, banging his fist. His vision’s blurry and he’s sweaty and tired of looking at Doctor Sammy just shake his head.
‘Doctor Cuddy said no,’ he says, ‘and she’s right. We don’t know what’s wrong.’
‘That’s why we need to biopsy!’ But Sam and Dave and Victor just keep looking and looking and fighting and trying and Chase just gets sicker and sicker.
Doctor Cuddy visits once and puts her hand on the glass, whispers I’m sorry and he sighs, deflated. ‘I know,’ he whispers back, turns away so he doesn’t see her cry; doesn’t see her cry in relief when they take a shot in the dark, and it works.
A week later Allison Cameron reads an article in the newspaper about a cop who died of a parasite, and the Doctor who nearly died trying to cure him. A week after that she reads another article about the end of the Diagnostics Department at Princeton-Plainsboro.
--
The only thing Eric Foreman is committed to is his job.
He’s Head of Neurology, he’s brilliant and he knows it. He’s working on opening his own research lab, and it isn’t taking much finagling.
His girlfriend’s gone, again, but he doesn’t mind. His apartment isn’t that big anyway, and he likes his space. He doesn’t mind microwave dinners on fancy plates, or reading medical journals while he eats. He likes it that way – calm and orderly and impersonal.
Besides, he tells himself, he’s still got time. He’s smart, successful, attractive – he’ll meet someone when he wants to.
(He thinks about the other doctors he knows, the older ones, who work longer hours and have fewer friends and starts to think if any of them have someone to go home to— but then the phone rings and it’s the hospital and there’s a problem, and he leaves his microwave dinner on the table; he’ll clean it up when he gets home, eventually.)
--
One afternoon Cuddy finds Wilson eating his lunch in a coma patient’s room. He blushes slightly as she leans against the wall, arms crossed and eyebrows raised.
‘I, uh,’ he starts, expecting the wrath (he’s only heard stories) of the Dean of Medicine. But she shakes her head, almost smiles:
‘He could use the company,’ she says, and Wilson tries not to recognize the look in her eyes, just buried. (He feels that way too, sometimes, and briefly entertains the notion that two wrongs could make a right.)
But then she’s pushing off the wall with her professional smile fixed, her spine straight and whatever Wilson might have asked he doesn’t, just follows her gaze to the man on the bed.
‘You knew him, right?’ he asks suddenly as she’s halfway out the door. She looks back over her shoulder and her eyes soften again into something unrecognizable.
‘Yeah,’ she murmurs, but before he can ask where from, she’s gone.
Wilson looks at the man on the bed and then at his bag of chips and sighs.
--
Doctor Chase has had enough of America.
He gets a few offers based out of New York, Seattle, Florida. He shakes his head at all of then, hair falling in his face.
For some reason, he looks up Doctor Allison Cameron before he leaves, and pretends to run into her at a coffee shop near her hospital.
‘I read about you in the newspaper,’ she says, and he shrugs. He doesn’t care all that much about reaching the top, about fame or popularity. But he thinks if it’ll buy him one of her smiles, he might as well use it.
They meet up again when she gets off work, spend hours talking over beer and peanuts. It starts with plans for work and the latest research and ends with ‘My dad just died of cancer’ and ‘I used to be married.’
They go back to his hotel room around one and even though the kisses are soft and touches lazy, it doesn’t feel like goodbye. She smiles when the light breaks through the window.
‘What time’s your flight?’
‘Eleven thirty,’ he says softly, brushes her hair out of her face.
‘I’ll go with you.’
He doesn’t ask if she has work and she doesn’t tell him, but she rides with him in the cab and kisses his cheek on the sidewalk.
‘Well,’ he huffs, tosses the hair out of his eyes. ‘Look me up if you’re ever down under.’
She rolls her eyes and he grins and she kisses him again, lips soft and warm over his and he wonders, just briefly, if he wants to leave this behind.
‘Have a nice flight,’ she says.
He thinks about telling her that he loves her, but settles for watching the cab as it drives away.
--
Lisa Cuddy just turned forty.
Not that she’ll tell anyone, of course, and not that anyone will remember.
She sits on her couch with a bottle of wine and home living magazines, flips idly through the pages and tries desperately not to wonder how the hell this happened.
When she was thirty-two they made her Dean of Medicine, and Daniel was so proud. He took her out for dinner and dancing smiled all night long.
He smiled until ‘I’ll be home at five’ became ‘just another hour’ became ‘I’m really sorry, baby’ became eleven thirty, twelve, sometimes one and the soft click of the door as she tried not to wake him up.
‘I love you,’ he said, and she replied, ‘I love you, too’ but I love this more.
When she was thirty-five her house doubled in size and silence and she didn’t sleep for weeks.
Since then she’s had a few blind dates, some from friends and some from online. A few months ago she met a guy named Don, cute and intelligent and practical, other than his atrocious taste in sweaters. He liked her and she liked him and they tried things out for a while.
With diagnostics gone her paper work has thinned just a little, just enough to be home by eight, to take Sundays off and sometimes Saturdays too. Don liked taking her out for lunch and putting his arm at the small of her back as if to say she’s mine. Lisa Cuddy didn't (doesn’t) like feeling owned, but it was better than being alone, so she smiled and kissed him and went back to work.
They had a nice, almost-casual thing, until Don finally sighed and said ‘I like music. I like theatre and art and travel and spending the entire day inside, doing nothing.’ He touched her face, the sleeves of his coat soft against her skin. ‘I want someone who wants those things.’
She nodded and didn’t protest (like he not-so-secretly wanted her to), because she doesn’t really care about Opera and Paris and the Thursday art show. She doesn’t want that.
Lisa Cuddy wants a baby, but there’s nobody to tell.
--
On April 8th, 2007 a monitor goes off in Gregory House’s room.
Lisa Cuddy calls Stacy Warner, who comes and holds his hand until it’s cold and everything goes quiet.
Outside the room, James Wilson tries to smile and says ‘I ate lunch with him sometimes.’ Stacy says thank you and Cuddy puts her hand on her elbow; she leans into the touch, but just barely.
‘I should get back to work,’ Cuddy says softly, hesitates. ‘Call if you need anything, alright?’
Stacy nods and Cuddy leaves with a backwards glance and James stands awkwardly, watching as the nurses fold and file and clean out the room, and he feels his heart twist, inexplicably.
‘Dr. Wilson?’ He looks back at Stacy’s expectant gaze, apologizes softly. She smiles through the tears in her eyes. ‘Did you know Greg?’ she asks again, and Wilson shakes his head.
‘No,’ he says. ‘But I think I would have liked to.’
Title: A Series of Numbered Stars
Author: Catherine
Fandom: House, MD
Character/Pairing: Gen (subtle combinations)
Prompt: 025: Strangers
Word Count: 3220
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Stacy-arc things, references to Euphoria, Forever, Half-Wit. Nothing major, nothing future.
Cuddy does not think of a middle ground.
She has another patient, a little boy, and she’s distracted; she says no when they hand her the file, says she knows him, she won’t (can’t) treat him; she hands his file to another doctor.
Stacy never hears about an alternative, and House is in too much pain to think of it himself. She begs and cries and screams at him, that she’d love him with no arms and no legs and that she doesn’t fucking care how damaged he is.
‘I care,’ he says.
They put him in a coma but he never wakes up.
--
Wilson loves his wife.
Wilson loves his wife and he loves the nurses and he loves all his patients. He has a brilliant smile and a brilliant heart and everybody always says, ‘Oh, that James Wilson what a nice man.’
Wilson (acts like he) loves the clinic and is always the first to show new doctors (interns, nurses, residents) around the hospital. The Dean of Medicine loves him because he brings in checks with flourished signatures (and takes wonderful care of his patients).
He plays golf on Sundays with an oncologist from General, spends Christmas with his wife (‘I thought you were Jewish, Dr. Wilson,’ Dr. Cuddy says once, and Wilson only shrugs and smiles and she smiles back and they go their separate ways.). He attends seminars and speaks at conferences and everyone wants his opinion, everyone wants to say, ‘Dr. Wilson, my wife is having a dinner party; you and Julie (they know about his first two wives, but everyone just smiles them away) should come,’ and Wilson says ‘I’d love to.’ And so he and his wife dress up and sit around candle-lit tables and laugh, ‘Oh, let’s not talk about work,’ and enjoy the company of respectable doctors and lawyers, and Julie keeps her hand on his under the table all through dinner.
Some nights he works late, and Julie understands. He stays at work until the next morning (sometimes he’s doing paperwork, sometimes he’s sitting with patients, other times neither).
One time, Lisa Cuddy finds him staring out the window, says, ‘Looking for something, Dr. Wilson?’ Because for some odd reason she can read him better than the other doctors (patients, nurses, wives). He frowns, slightly.
‘I wish I had a balcony.’
--
The diagnostics department at Princeton-Plainsboro is criminally under-funded.
There’s a department head, sure, Doctor Samuel Jenkins, graduate of Johns Hopkins, second in his class.
(‘He’s brilliant,’ they said, ‘he hasn’t been in diagnostics very long’ and ‘I think he was a pulmonologist?’ but ‘regardless’ they said ‘he’s just excellent.’
Lisa Cuddy couldn’t help but ask, ‘Is he as good as Doctor House?’ and the room went silent.
‘He graduated from Johns Hopkins,’ someone reminded her after a beat, and she nodded and smiled and said she’d give his application due consideration.)
Doctor Jenkins (‘Please, call me Sam’) hired three fellows: Dave Woodside, from the Mayo Clinic, Victor Rimming from his alma-matter, and Robert Chase, because his father (‘oh, what a brilliant man’) made a phone call.
Sam is a great coach. He’s smart, enthusiastic, strict but soft and all the things you’d want in a learning environment (‘well, this is a teaching hospital,’ he says with a humble smile). He’s a wonderful doctor, too, it’s just that, well, the cases have been getting harder (Lisa Cuddy raises her eyebrows but says nothing) and his fellows are frustrated and he’s frustrated, and he didn’t think diagnostics would be so difficult.
But Sam is a great, great guy, and he does his clinic duty without complaint. Patients love him (but not as much as they love Doctor Wilson) because he holds their hands and looks them in the eye when he has bad news.
Lisa Cuddy does everything she can to keep the department running, but when most of the patients end up dead, there’s little she can do.
--
Stacy visits Greg on her lunch breaks for three straight years.
She reads him Dickens and Marx and tries to summon her college French so she can read him Molière.
The first year, she’s surprised to find out that the Dean of Medicine visits him occasionally, checks things over.
‘She does that for everyone,’ a nurse tells her, but another amends, ‘more for him.’
She’s even more surprised to find out that the Dean of Medicine is incredibly attractive, with long, thick hair and heels and her chin held high. She has perfect skin and perfect eyes and went to Michigan with Greg.
‘Oh,’ Stacy says, and shifts.
‘Actually I wanted to talk to you,’ the Dean says, casually, confidently, and Stacy tries not to narrow her eyes.
‘Our legal team could use a bit of help around here, especially with the diagnostics department’ (she has the grace to look away briefly) ‘if that’s…’ she starts, stops, decides Stacy can handle it by the way she straightens her spine defiantly. ‘Our diagnostics department sucks,’ she says bluntly. ‘They need all the legal help they can get and rumor has it you’re one of the best lawyers in the state.’
‘What makes you think I’d want this job?’
‘This is where House is,’ she says, but there’s something in her voice that softens, makes Stacy realize that this woman doesn’t love him, doesn’t really know him, but for some reason wants to help. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘the offer’s good ‘til the end of the week, then I’ll have to start looking for someone else.’
Over the next two years, Stacy learns that Lisa Cuddy really does visit every patient (with extra time devoted to the NICU and pediatrics). She learns that Doctor Wilson is a bit of a ladies man, but he’s a sweetheart nonetheless, that Doctor Samuel is kind and intelligent, but really not cut out for his job, and that Doctor Chase, the awkward British (Australian?) fellow under him is much brighter than he seems, even when he screws up.
When Cuddy finds out that Stacy spends her lunch breaks reading Nietzsche to Greg, she gives her an extra fifteen minutes and doesn’t note it anywhere.
‘You’re good to him,’ she says sometime, but Stacy’s too busy wiping tears from her eyes.
After three years, she finally walks into Lisa Cuddy’s office and says, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’
--
Allison Cameron can’t find work.
‘You’re young,’ a doctor who should have hired her says, ‘you’re good looking, and you’ve got a tight ass. No doctor in his right mind is going to hire you. It’s a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen.’ He holds the door open for her. ‘Thanks for your time.’
‘You too,’ she says smoothly, ‘You son of a bitch.’
Two weeks later she gets an offer from Yule at Jefferson and she doesn’t hesitate. He’s short and preachy and pedantic but he’s smart and she’s smart and they think well together. She climbs the ladder and hits the glass ceiling and ignores it. She’s twenty-eight and published, respected and nobody knows that her husband died and nobody knows she’s slightly bitter; no one knows she likes Monster Truck Rallies and that she doesn’t mind the occasional underhanded move to get what she wants.
She’s at a conference one year in Washington when she runs into Robert Chase (‘You work under Dr. Jenkins, at Princeton Plainsboro.’ ‘Yeah,’ he drawls, ‘Good ol’ Sammy-boy.’) They talk and laugh and he’s not really a charmer (he’s fairly awkward and a little crass) but she likes the way his hair falls in his face and the sound of his voice.
(She likes it better, she decides, when it’s muffled into her skin and drawn out into long, incomprehensible sounds.)
Five years later she’s Head of Immunology at Queen of Angels in New York, and Doctor Ratcher applies for a job in her research lab.
‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘That’s a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen.’
She goes out that afternoon with girlfriends from college, and buys them each a pair of ridiculously expensive shoes.
--
Edward Vogler is a respectable businessman.
He likes solid numbers and facts, all neatly laid out for him. He likes the way ‘new and improved’ sounds on the tongue, and the way doctors simplify and abbreviate terms when explaining things to patients.
He liked Lisa Cuddy when he first arrived. Small, feisty, full of quick wit and so very in control (he thinks another doctor he once knew, Derrick Something, would be better suited for the job, but he doesn’t tell her this, only implies it).
After a while, however, after hearing, ‘that’s extremely unethical’ and ‘this is a hospital, not a research institution’ and ‘these are patients, not guinea pigs’ and ‘I don’t care how much more the drug companies can make…’ Edward Vogler steadily begins to dislike Lisa Cuddy. He dislikes the way she commands loyalty and respect, the way she demands attention with a look, one word. He doesn’t like the way she wears high heels and low cut blouses and gets away with it.
He doesn’t like hearing her tell him ‘no.’
‘I donated a hundred million to this hospital,’ he says coldly, and she stares him down with grace.
‘My hospital,’ she corrects.
The board votes in her favor, and he doesn’t like that either.
--
Doctor Eric Foreman is going to do great things.
He’s among the top of his field, getting grants and requests and proposals and basking in it. He doesn’t really like patients and he doesn’t really care about their sob stories (‘Everybody’s got something,’ he justifies, but the nurse just looks at him funny and moves on), but he likes the puzzle and he likes being right at the end of it.
‘He’s kind of an ass,’ some patients say, ‘but he fixed me.’
Doctor Foreman knows he’s heard that somewhere before, but he can’t remember where.
--
Sometimes, James Wilson goes out of his mind with boredom.
It’s not that he doesn’t love his job, doesn’t love his wife because he does. Very, very much. ‘But there’s only so much golf and schmoozing and dinner parties I can take,’ he tries to explain, but Julie just suggests, ‘Maybe you’re hitting your mid-life crisis early.’
So James Wilson does what he’s expected to do: he buys a car.
‘Nice,’ the Dean of Medicine says, her lips curved up in a sly but knowing fashion. Wilson flushes and makes an excuse that she doesn’t buy, only takes with a smile and disappears as a click of heels.
The next day he calls in sick and drives until he can’t hear himself think.
The day after that he calls his divorce lawyer, again.
--
Stacy meets a guy named Mark, and they get married.
Two years later Mark gets sick, and when he dies, the only person she can think to call is Lisa.
--
A police officer is admitted as a patient of the diagnostics department.
He’s insane, laughing constantly, and no one can figure out why.
‘Maybe it’s environmental.’
They ask, but the cop just laughs and laughs.
‘Screw this,’ Doctor Chase mutters, takes his key and breaks in. There’s crap and it’s gross and it smells but he comes back with ‘Legionnaires Disease.’
He also comes back laughing.
‘Biopsy his brain!’ he shouts from behind the glass, banging his fist. His vision’s blurry and he’s sweaty and tired of looking at Doctor Sammy just shake his head.
‘Doctor Cuddy said no,’ he says, ‘and she’s right. We don’t know what’s wrong.’
‘That’s why we need to biopsy!’ But Sam and Dave and Victor just keep looking and looking and fighting and trying and Chase just gets sicker and sicker.
Doctor Cuddy visits once and puts her hand on the glass, whispers I’m sorry and he sighs, deflated. ‘I know,’ he whispers back, turns away so he doesn’t see her cry; doesn’t see her cry in relief when they take a shot in the dark, and it works.
A week later Allison Cameron reads an article in the newspaper about a cop who died of a parasite, and the Doctor who nearly died trying to cure him. A week after that she reads another article about the end of the Diagnostics Department at Princeton-Plainsboro.
--
The only thing Eric Foreman is committed to is his job.
He’s Head of Neurology, he’s brilliant and he knows it. He’s working on opening his own research lab, and it isn’t taking much finagling.
His girlfriend’s gone, again, but he doesn’t mind. His apartment isn’t that big anyway, and he likes his space. He doesn’t mind microwave dinners on fancy plates, or reading medical journals while he eats. He likes it that way – calm and orderly and impersonal.
Besides, he tells himself, he’s still got time. He’s smart, successful, attractive – he’ll meet someone when he wants to.
(He thinks about the other doctors he knows, the older ones, who work longer hours and have fewer friends and starts to think if any of them have someone to go home to— but then the phone rings and it’s the hospital and there’s a problem, and he leaves his microwave dinner on the table; he’ll clean it up when he gets home, eventually.)
--
One afternoon Cuddy finds Wilson eating his lunch in a coma patient’s room. He blushes slightly as she leans against the wall, arms crossed and eyebrows raised.
‘I, uh,’ he starts, expecting the wrath (he’s only heard stories) of the Dean of Medicine. But she shakes her head, almost smiles:
‘He could use the company,’ she says, and Wilson tries not to recognize the look in her eyes, just buried. (He feels that way too, sometimes, and briefly entertains the notion that two wrongs could make a right.)
But then she’s pushing off the wall with her professional smile fixed, her spine straight and whatever Wilson might have asked he doesn’t, just follows her gaze to the man on the bed.
‘You knew him, right?’ he asks suddenly as she’s halfway out the door. She looks back over her shoulder and her eyes soften again into something unrecognizable.
‘Yeah,’ she murmurs, but before he can ask where from, she’s gone.
Wilson looks at the man on the bed and then at his bag of chips and sighs.
--
Doctor Chase has had enough of America.
He gets a few offers based out of New York, Seattle, Florida. He shakes his head at all of then, hair falling in his face.
For some reason, he looks up Doctor Allison Cameron before he leaves, and pretends to run into her at a coffee shop near her hospital.
‘I read about you in the newspaper,’ she says, and he shrugs. He doesn’t care all that much about reaching the top, about fame or popularity. But he thinks if it’ll buy him one of her smiles, he might as well use it.
They meet up again when she gets off work, spend hours talking over beer and peanuts. It starts with plans for work and the latest research and ends with ‘My dad just died of cancer’ and ‘I used to be married.’
They go back to his hotel room around one and even though the kisses are soft and touches lazy, it doesn’t feel like goodbye. She smiles when the light breaks through the window.
‘What time’s your flight?’
‘Eleven thirty,’ he says softly, brushes her hair out of her face.
‘I’ll go with you.’
He doesn’t ask if she has work and she doesn’t tell him, but she rides with him in the cab and kisses his cheek on the sidewalk.
‘Well,’ he huffs, tosses the hair out of his eyes. ‘Look me up if you’re ever down under.’
She rolls her eyes and he grins and she kisses him again, lips soft and warm over his and he wonders, just briefly, if he wants to leave this behind.
‘Have a nice flight,’ she says.
He thinks about telling her that he loves her, but settles for watching the cab as it drives away.
--
Lisa Cuddy just turned forty.
Not that she’ll tell anyone, of course, and not that anyone will remember.
She sits on her couch with a bottle of wine and home living magazines, flips idly through the pages and tries desperately not to wonder how the hell this happened.
When she was thirty-two they made her Dean of Medicine, and Daniel was so proud. He took her out for dinner and dancing smiled all night long.
He smiled until ‘I’ll be home at five’ became ‘just another hour’ became ‘I’m really sorry, baby’ became eleven thirty, twelve, sometimes one and the soft click of the door as she tried not to wake him up.
‘I love you,’ he said, and she replied, ‘I love you, too’ but I love this more.
When she was thirty-five her house doubled in size and silence and she didn’t sleep for weeks.
Since then she’s had a few blind dates, some from friends and some from online. A few months ago she met a guy named Don, cute and intelligent and practical, other than his atrocious taste in sweaters. He liked her and she liked him and they tried things out for a while.
With diagnostics gone her paper work has thinned just a little, just enough to be home by eight, to take Sundays off and sometimes Saturdays too. Don liked taking her out for lunch and putting his arm at the small of her back as if to say she’s mine. Lisa Cuddy didn't (doesn’t) like feeling owned, but it was better than being alone, so she smiled and kissed him and went back to work.
They had a nice, almost-casual thing, until Don finally sighed and said ‘I like music. I like theatre and art and travel and spending the entire day inside, doing nothing.’ He touched her face, the sleeves of his coat soft against her skin. ‘I want someone who wants those things.’
She nodded and didn’t protest (like he not-so-secretly wanted her to), because she doesn’t really care about Opera and Paris and the Thursday art show. She doesn’t want that.
Lisa Cuddy wants a baby, but there’s nobody to tell.
--
On April 8th, 2007 a monitor goes off in Gregory House’s room.
Lisa Cuddy calls Stacy Warner, who comes and holds his hand until it’s cold and everything goes quiet.
Outside the room, James Wilson tries to smile and says ‘I ate lunch with him sometimes.’ Stacy says thank you and Cuddy puts her hand on her elbow; she leans into the touch, but just barely.
‘I should get back to work,’ Cuddy says softly, hesitates. ‘Call if you need anything, alright?’
Stacy nods and Cuddy leaves with a backwards glance and James stands awkwardly, watching as the nurses fold and file and clean out the room, and he feels his heart twist, inexplicably.
‘Dr. Wilson?’ He looks back at Stacy’s expectant gaze, apologizes softly. She smiles through the tears in her eyes. ‘Did you know Greg?’ she asks again, and Wilson shakes his head.
‘No,’ he says. ‘But I think I would have liked to.’
