Chapter Text
When she hired him, she knew it would lead to unmeasurable difficulty. For her, for him, for the rest of the staff, for the patients. Everyone . And yet she did it anyway.
She knew him from college first. Later, she’d know him from the articles he wrote and edited. Those articles had been everywhere, in every major medicine publisher’s magazines and newspapers. It had taken a while for her to get the connection between the young boy at her college and the famous doctor co-writing and publishing all of those articles. She can still remember that bitter anger she held toward him at the time. She had hated him from a distance, for his acceleration in his career and his clear genius. The worst of the envy was rooted deep within her time with him in college.
He was so young in those days, and yet he would walk right past her everyday on campus. She had taken the SATs three times for the results she wanted, had stayed up late studying, had poured more time and thought into her college application essays than she ever did in her English classes at school; she even worked after school and on weekends for the money necessary to send in the application. She pasted University of Michigan stickers on her water bottles and hung flags in her room. And she had finally made it.
And, yet, so did he—that gangly teenager who held the arrogant air that only someone who thought they were much smarter than you could hold.
He was a tall, really quite alarmingly thin boy. He must’ve been sixteen, maybe seventeen. His voice was still breaking on every seventh word and he could only grow small patches of facial hair and she truly doubted that he had any chest hair. He had this particularly dark shade of mousy hair that was permanently messy, never the same style each day, and always sticking up in the back from how he slept. His thin lips, typically pulled into a small frown, quirked up into a smirk when he saw her. His piercing blue eyes latched onto her until she was completely behind him, and his head never moved once.
She knew he could see the bubbling disbelief within her, hot with rage. She didn’t make any attempt to stifle it after a while. Faux politeness wouldn’t work on him like it did with the other guys who thought they were geniuses, she sensed. She felt that this one might’ve been the real deal—a truly intelligent boy, smarter than the rest of the arrogant men that polluted her university.
It took an entire semester before Lisa actually spoke to him. She knew his major already, assuming it had something to do with medicine since he was always bumming around that part of campus. So, she asked the next logical thing, the thing that would immediately soothe most of the intense part of her jealousy, the thing that gave her the most grief out of anything when she saw him: “How far into your Pre-Med program are you?”
She herself was in medical school, having already completed graduate school. He was in college, yes, but she found it flat-out ridiculous to think that he could have finished his Pre-Med degree by now. He was very clearly at least beginning that, and must be taking more advanced classes that were just near the real medical degree classes. This, Lisa knew, she could hold over him, even just in the recesses of her mind.
“Finished Pre-Med. I’m getting my full certification,” he said. There was a twinge of humor in his voice.
Lisa’s heart dropped through her intestines and lodged itself deep within her stomach. Are you fucking kidding? This twerp ? This scrawny, arrogant asshole?
He had seemed excited, Cuddy remembers, when he picked up on her frustration, because a small grin rose to his thin lips. Very small, like it was somewhat foreign for him to exercise those muscles.
“What’s your name?” She sounded more annoyed this time, a new edge to her voice. She wasn’t sure if it was his progress in his degree or his pleasure at her misfortune that was pissing her off more.
“Gregory House.”
“Lisa Cuddy,” she had replied, even though he hadn’t asked.
Lisa had been planning her next sentence when he suddenly said, “You’ve got a chip on your shoulder.”
“ What ?” she asked. The nerve of this kid was astounding. “What do you know about me ?”
“Well, you have a full schedule. You’re doing over the amount of necessary credits. Also, you’re taking Swan’s classes, and nobody takes his classes unless they’re trying to prove something, because Erickson teaches the same courses as Swan, but gives out less work. Are you working outside of school too?” The way Greg asks the question implies he already knows. Lisa doesn’t dignify him with a response, so he continues. “What, do you hate having freetime or something?” He pauses, then, with a cruel grin, says, “I bet you hate your mom.”
Outraged, Lisa scoffed. “You don’t know a single thing about me or my mother. You know what? I bet you’re lonely. Nobody talks to you, because you’re clearly younger, and everyone I’ve asked about you hasn’t even known your name. You were probably bullied all through school, and so now you hate the world.” If anyone else heard them, she might have been embarrassed—back in those days, she hadn’t understood that aggression would be necessary for her advancement in her career. But Greg smiled—a real smile, not a smug smirk—and moved a little closer.
“You ask people about me? Don’t tell me you have a crush.” His voice, only in the midst of dropping but already sounding like it won’t be very deep by the end of puberty, is tinged with a teasing humor.
Lisa scoffs again, but this time much more good-naturedly. “I don’t crush on little boys. Nice try, though, Greg.”
And then, as if moving under the same rules, they promptly kept going on their own paths without wondering if now was the right time to go. Neither of them had looked back to the other.
It wasn’t until she was seated at her normal table in the dining hall with her friends that she had realized how strange it was that she’d been annoyed at him, and then only moments later befriended him. She was beginning to look forward to talking to him again, until the next day, when they crossed paths again, and he pointedly ignored her.
Anger had risen within her again.
But that was a long time ago, and most of Cuddy’s jealousy had ebbed away by the time House was publishing articles in the New England Journal of Medicine. She would pick up a few subscriptions to medical journals during this time, to read what he published. She had bought it with her own money, even though Princeton-Plainsboro had its own subscription she could’ve been using. It felt more personal this way.
They had called, sometimes. Lisa would ring him up and ask about his new articles or new cases or jobs. Despite his clear genius, it seemed harder for him to maintain a job for long, and many of their calls were filled with his constant ranting and strong declarations of hatred for his colleagues.
Lisa knew the risks of hiring him. She knew she had hated him in college, until they had come to a tentative friendship a few semesters after their first conversation. She knew that she hated him now , sometimes. But he was so young, and so smart, and that was exactly what the hospital needed.
So when she got promoted to running the place, her first decision had been to extend a job opening to House. To be a department head.
…
Lisa could spend all day reminiscing on college with House, on those days when he’d show up in strange places—parties she couldn’t believe he got into, her own classes sometimes, or one memorable time she found him in the library, actually studying (later she found out he was staking out, waiting for some girl to walk in). Or how, in the years after they had both graduated, they maintained loose contact, mostly through email and sometimes calls. She could even berate herself for her hiring of House despite all these years she knew him. Or , she could do something productive and get his scrawny ass into his office to assist his employees in covering a “case,” as he insisted they would call patient files.
“House,” she said, in that all-too-familiar tone, a mix of exasperation and desperation to get him to listen. He perks up at her voice from where he was seated in the waiting room for the clinic, reading a thick novel. Gone with the Wind , she reads, when he shifts it just the right way from her position at his shoulder. For some reason, this upsets her even more. “Get upstairs. You can’t blow off work forever.”
House smiles a little, before he nestles back into his chair and reopens his book. “You never would’ve noticed I was blowing off work if you hadn’t been blowing off work too.”
“I was not ‘blowing off work,’ I was trying to find you. Wilson said he saw your fellows in there alone, doing the work by themselves,” explained Cuddy, trying to stamp down her annoyance. She learned long ago that annoyance will do one of two things with House: either it will fuel his antics with a newfound passion, or it will make him shut down entirely in the worst way possible.
She’s moved to stand in front of him now, and watches as he quirks an eyebrow. “Well, that’s no good. Those morons won’t be able to diagnose the patient at all.” Still, he makes no move to leave.
“You have ten seconds to get up and go upstairs. Or else I’m not going to let Wilson eat lunch with you today.”
A threat as old as time, and so sweet on her tongue. Cuddy watches with glee as House sighs, shuts his novel, and begins the trek up down the hall. Before he’s totally gone, he shouts out, “This hospital is a prison!”
Cuddy, under the safety of his back being fully turned to her, allows herself a small smile. House won’t fight back against that threat; not after it had been fully acted out against him for an entire week. Wilson dutifully ignored House’ pages, texts, even calls to his work and personal phone, even when House threatened to get him back ten times harder. He was the boy who cried wolf, and so Wilson refused to listen to Cuddy’s ominous warnings that he really would enact revenge—When Wilson showed up the next week with green hair, Cuddy felt a twinge of guilt, but couldn’t help but laugh right in his face.
…
Cuddy sits at her desk, contemplating an email she’s received from Wilson. It’s nearing eight at night, which means many of her staff members are already gone, or else are clocking out. The fact that House is still in his office proves his dedication ( finally ) to the case he was assigned, but also dignifies Wilson’s email. Which, really, is unfortunate, because Cuddy was planning on ignoring his concerns so long as House stopped giving reasons for it.
All doctors need doctors. This is a fundamental fact that all doctors need to come to terms with. The biggest matter is finding a provider you trust enough to agree with their diagnoses and treatments. Lisa’s is a doctor who works at an entirely different hospital, and who knows very little about her. Wilson’s is a doctor at Princeton-Plainsboro, but who he rarely ever sees unless for check-ups. And House’s is Wilson.
Since the infarction, House has only ever allowed Wilson to complete check-ups on him—due to a mixture of guilt and relief, Cuddy has never argued against this. Unfortunately, though, it’s become increasingly obvious over the past few weeks that House has been hiding something from his doctor. Meaning, he’s hiding something from Wilson.
Apparently, during his last check-up, House refused to take off his shirt for the scoliosis check. Wilson admitted that it wasn’t entirely suspicious for him to do so, because House has always been uncooperative in their appointments, but what was really worrying him was that House pointedly won’t wear anything other than his button-downs, now.
They all knew House’s past drug abuse. His cocaine benders and, in the harder moments of his life, even heroin use were large sources of concern for both Wilson and Cuddy. But since starting the Vicodin (heavily monitored by both of them), House seems to have stopped most other drugs. Well, okay…sometimes his apartment smells like weed. And, yeah, every once and a while his eyes are all glazed over and he gets spaced-out, like he’s on some other drug that probably isn’t prescription. But generally , the recreational drug use has tapered off.
The only times House has refused for them to see him in states of undress have been when his drug use was worse. When Stacy was still around—Cuddy grimaces a little; she tries not to think about the days House was so much happier, and in so much less pain—when Stacy was around, though, marks that implied sex would be displayed proudly. Hickeys, scratches, whatever. And House wasn’t necessarily self conscious over his body, to put it lightly. There’s been a few nights, both pre- and post-infarction, where Cuddy’s had to wrestle him in or out of the shower, either due to pain or intoxication. But House’s heroin use was always something he seemed more ashamed of.
The fact that he’s refusing to undress in front of Wilson, seemingly because of the state of his arms, is alarming. For a man who would strip down naked at any moment in the halls of the hospital to prove a point, modesty is something to view with suspicion.
Cuddy leans back in her desk chair, frowning. Okay, so House isn’t taking off his shirt. Whatever. That can be overlooked, if she chooses to ignore all history of drug abuse. But his dedication to the case is something else to hold with concern.
Lisa wants him to be interested in the cases he takes. She wants him to have something to focus that giant brain of his on. She even wants him to get into that obsessive state where the case is almost the only thing he can think about, even at the expense of eating or sleeping (as long as it doesn’t go to extremes). He needs it, and that much has been clear for years now. And while it’s typically a good sign that he’s getting into the flow of a case and staying late, Wilson’s email also mentions that House has been considerably distracted during the differentials. His fellows have picked up on it, growing increasingly aware of his oddities, and knowing that this isn’t one of them. Chase led them to Wilson with their concerns, and now, Wilson has brought them to her.
House is only distracted from a case when something larger, and usually something with huge pains attached to it, is pressing down on him. The last time his parents were in town, for example, or—well, here it is again—when Stacy left. His normal leg pains or other daily stressors can be forgotten in the midst of a case. The big things linger. He can stay late all he wants, miss as many meals as it takes to get the diagnosis, but so long as he’s even the tiniest bit distracted from the case, it’s clear something is wrong. Even when simultaneously meddling in Cuddy or Wilson’s affairs, he can focus enough on the case to get the work done. Distraction from the diagnosis is not something Greg House is apt to fall into.
Factoring back in the drug use, this is a serious issue.
Resigning herself to the full weight of the problem, Cuddy heaves out a breath and slumps forward in her chair. She should probably reply to Wilson now, huh?