peg22 | New House Snippet: "After"

So, here's my entry into the fray of the House finale, "Wilson's Heart." It was inspired by this picture:

and for some inexplicable reason, it's actually House/Cuddy AND House/Wilson.
It's the aftermath. Susan says it's angsty - but in a good way.

(thanks to nekocat for the screencap!)

After

by Kaye

House thought moving in with Cuddy might just be the worst idea he’d ever had. The warning claxons had commenced the minute she began the instructions about the furnace and the hot water and the trippy hall light that apparently comes on for no reason at 4:10 every morning. He stood in her dining room, his head throbbing, his left hand trembling. The new disability. The one he got after . . .

He nodded as if he understood and she frowned and hugged him. Again. If his brain had any motivation left, he might’ve been able to calculate all the times she had hugged him since . . . had embraced him after . . .

After. A lonely preposition that needed no clause. Everything was after now. Before didn’t matter because after had turned all the before into a lie. The only truth remained here, on Cuddy’s chenille quilt in Cuddy’s guest room, in the Cuddy harsh reality of after.

After a week, he started sleeping in her bed. With her. Just the fact she didn’t protest, not even that first night when the demons had chased him into her locked liquor cabinet, leaving him blubbering into her lacy bedspread, should have been another warning. Of something wrong. And nothing right. But one of the casualties of after turned out to be the absence of before. Which contained all the baselines. The place where the reset button sent everything back to.

Some nights she curled around him so tight he could barely breathe. Other nights he clung to her, careful not to bury her under the weight of his legs, hiding his tremor under her hips, his face in her hair, his guilt tucked somewhere down around the end of the bed, where the covers never quite reached his feet.

After a month, the sleeping together turned into something else. They never talked about it. Another casualty of after was the complete lack of or desire for communication. One night he turned and she turned and they stared at each other in the almost dark of three in the morning and he trailed a finger down her chin and she sighed and they stepped off the cliff together. For twenty minutes nothing else mattered and a singular thought – that there might be an after after the after – swirled down and melted into the rhythm of her hands kneading his back, her legs wrapped around him, pulling him deeper, his mind finally quiet when his body tensed and she pitched against him as they desperately fought to stay, even as gravity and biology pulled them back to earth.

After two months, he went back to work. One morning he showed up at her breakfast table with sunglasses and a jacket and followed her out to her car. He rested his hand on her thigh the whole way, wondering how he could convince her to turn around, go back to her house, let him disappear back into her bed and her warmth and the hollow of her neck.

Instead, she let him off at the Emergency Room door, where Cameron waited. For just a moment, he allowed himself a snapshot of before and wondered if Cameron would always wait for him. If maybe he should have moved in with her. And then the idea of snuggling down between her and Chase every night made him shudder and he felt Cameron's small hand on his back and he leaned heavily on his cane, closed his eyes and knew he couldn’t do it. He swayed and Cameron led him to a chair, told him not to move, and disappeared.

Then Chase appeared, with water and a pat on the shoulder, and then Cuddy was there and they all whispered behind their hands about “is he ready,” “he wanted to come,” “too soon,” “brain scan inconclusive”, “has he said anything yet” and it all mixed together until everything stopped completely because the dark blob at the periphery suddenly turned into Wilson.

House struggled to his feet and all the protests and the hands and the reasons this was an even worse idea than moving in with Cuddy fell away and Wilson walked toward him, already grimacing, as if he thought it was a bad idea, too, and then he was there and they stared at each other and the before and the after collided somewhere above Wilson’s left eyebrow and then Wilson reached up and fingered the scar on the side of his head and he jerked away, stumbled back against the chair, and escaped to his office, where he locked the door and closed the blinds and watched six straight hours of CSPAN.

That night he moved back to the guest room. Cuddy slipped in beside him right before dawn, and draped her arm around his chest and told him he needed to go home. He pulled her onto him, slid her out of her nightshirt, twisted his hands in her hair and tried to drown himself in her smell and her taste, his need filling all the space, sending them too close to the edge, over and over. She shouted and raked at his chest when she came, long, fierce marks. He could almost hear The Doors screeching in the silence that followed.

After she disappeared into the shower, he lay back on the pillow and felt the raised edges, trying to remember Jim Morrison’s lyrics. Lost in a roman wilderness of pain and all the children are insane . . . this is the end, beautiful friend . . .

He picked up the phone on the nightstand, marveled for a moment at its pinkness and dialed a number. Hung up before the second ring, leaving the phone on his chest, on his scratches. War wounds. Heard the shower turn off, listened for the clicks and the swishes and the sighs that were part of the Lisa Cuddy morning ritual.

She drove him the opposite direction from his apartment. He barely noticed and didn’t care. They didn’t speak until she pulled up in front of a duplex, right behind Wilson’s car.

“He’s waiting for you.”

She leaned over and pulled him close and kissed him on the cheek. He got out and then turned back and stuck his head through the open window.

“Cuddy . . .”

She stopped him with a raised hand. “No. I know.” She nodded toward the window of the duplex, where the curtains suddenly tugged closed. “Just don’t fuck it up.”

He stood and watched as she pulled away and disappeared into traffic. And then turned toward the open door where Wilson stood, hands on his hips, his hair falling over his eyebrow, his eyes dark. He looked older and thinner. And heavier. And the last bit of House’s heart shattered against his chest. Aftershock. To be expected.

Wilson closed the door behind them and the subtle shift of the universe, where after turned back into a compound word, created a breeze that caught up to Cuddy, sitting in her car in the parking lot of the hospital, convincing herself not to cry.

fin