eight encounters
by greensilver
--
For Christmas one year, her parents get her a stethoscope, and that's it; she wants to be a doctor. It isn't even a toy stethoscope, it's a real one, and when she hooks it into her ears and presses the round metal piece to her cat's stomach, she can hear a deep, rumbling purr and a wet, even heartbeat. She spends the first two weeks of January listening to the heartbeat of every animal she can get to keep still, and in week three, she graduates to people; parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and her baby cousin from down the street, anyone who'll let her put that metal piece to their chest.
Grandpa Joe is a friendly man who always smells like toffee, and ordinarily, she can't really be bothered to spend time with him; she's an overactive eight-year-old with a wealth of toys, and he can't keep up with her or make any of the toys work. But when she puts the metal piece up to his chest, she hears something that isn't like the rapid pat-pat-pat of cat heartbeats or the heavy thud-thud-thud of dog heartbeats, and isn't exactly like the even thump-thump of people heartbeats, either. Grandpa Joe is apparently somewhere between a pet and a person, and it scares her a little, but she keeps listening anyway.
"What's so interesting in there, kid?" he asks, when she puts the metal piece to his chest for the fifth time.
She starts to tear up, because Grandpa Joe is going to get real mad at her when she tells him he doesn't have a people-heartbeat. "I didn't mean to do it, Grandpa-"
"There's not a whole lot you can do just by listening, Lisa." He smiles. "Heard something funny in there, did you?"
She nods, eyes wide, wondering how he knew.
He just laughs, and rumples her hair. "You're going to make a great doctor someday, kid."
He dies when she's ten. It isn't until med school that she learns the word tachycardia.
-
When she gets to high school, it becomes apparent that she isn't particularly good at math or chemistry. She aces every biology class she can take, but no Ivy League school is going to accept a C-average student with A grades in biology, so she develops a pattern of studying her ass off and ignoring everything else.
For awhile, that pattern works for her, but sophomore year she gets a B+ in Honors Algebra II and spends the next week having a quiet nervous breakdown in her bedroom. The first couple days, her mom thinks it's the flu, but eventually the chicken noodle soup stops coming and parents start looking a different kind of worried.
"We just want you to be happy, Lisa," her dad says. "Maybe you need a hobby, sweetheart. Something that isn't all books and homework, like horseback riding or cheerleading."
In the interests of familial harmony, she decides to pretend he didn't suggest that she quit her studies and take up cheerleading. Instead, he takes his advice as he meant it, and tries to find something other than books and homework to occupy her time.
She tries softball, which is about as much fun as having balls thrown at your head could possibly be. She tries volleyball, which is the same story but even less interesting, if that's possible. She even tries golf, because surely all doctors play golf, and at least that would be useful someday.
Near the end of her first golf lesson, the instructor says in a loud, exasperated voice that isn't quite a yell, "Lisa, it's golf, not tennis."
She doesn't go back to the golf lessons, but for the next several decades, her tennis racket is never far from reach.
-
She's three days into Freshman Orientation at the University of Michigan when a tall, scruffy guy runs into her at full tilt as she rounds a corner. The textbooks stacked up in her arms go flying, as does an already-chipped red mug and an enormous wave of coffee.
She apologizes on reflex. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry-"
"Oh, for Christ's sake," the guy says, turning away from her to retrieve his mug. There's coffee all over his sweater, and some in his hair, and when he bends to pick up the mug, coffee drips down onto her scattered textbooks. "Don't you ever look where you're going?"
She was just starting to think that he was really rather attractive, but now she's not so sure. "Hey, you ran into me!"
"Don't be ridiculous." He surprises her by crouching down and scrubbing the coffee off of her textbooks with one corner of his sleeve. "What, did they let finally let the Freshmen loose?"
"It's orientation week," she says, now totally unsure of what to make of him. He hands her up the books, one at a time, and when he stands she hugs the books to her chest in an unabashedly defensive gesture. "Look, I'm sorry about your coffee-"
"It was shitty coffee anyway," he says, his tone indicating that he's being abnormally gracious to her at the moment. "Well, it's been grand, but I'm sure you have classes to go to, pom-pons to wave, that sort of thing-"
"I'm pre-med," she interrupts, sounding every bit as pissed off as she feels. "I've never waved a pom-pon in my life-"
"Pre-med?" He looks her over, giving her an uncomfortably slow visual examination that lingers on her chest. "Yeah, they'll love you in the clinic."
He walks away, chuckling at his own joke.
She's itching to storm after him and kill him in as many different slow, painful ways as possible, but then she'd be late for her next orientation program.
When she turns around, there's a small cluster of students watching from a safe distance, all varying degrees of surprised.
"He was really nice to you," says an older girl in a lab coat, her eyebrows climbing higher with each word. "I mean, wow."
Lisa jerks a thumb over her shoulder. "You call that nice?"
The girl in the lab coat shakes her head a little. "For him, yeah. That was Gregory House."
It never crosses her mind that someday he'll be working for her. If it had, she might've given serious consideration to liberal arts.
-
Her first serious college boyfriend unofficially breaks up with her by neglecting to return her calls, so she officially breaks up with him on his answering machine and proceeds to throw his stuff out the window of her dorm room. Neither action is as cathartic or even as distracting as she'd hoped, until she somehow manages to accidentally nail a passerby with one of her ex-boyfriend's textbooks as she clears the last of his junk out of her bookshelves.
"Oh, God, I'm sorry," she shouts out the window, already reaching for the first aid kit on the bookshelf. "Don't move, I'll be right there."
When she gets outside, her victim is sitting on the curb with the textbook balanced on his knees. He's flipped to the appendices, and he's casually browsing the full-color plates in the back, looking at cutaway sections of femurs and tibias.
"I'm really sorry," she says again, approaching with caution, the first aid kit clutched in one hand. "How is your head?"
He looks up, and casually touches the easily visible lump above his right ear. "I'll heal."
"I dropped a book on your head," she says, a little surprised that he isn't more angry.
He glances back at the building, smiling slightly. "From the second floor."
"Still." She sits next to him on the curb and opens the first aid kit on her lap, digging out her pen light to examine his injury. "Are you experiencing impaired vision? Dizziness, nausea, weakness in any limbs?"
"It's just a paperback," he says, and closes the book. "Let me guess - pre-med?"
She stares at him, startled. "How'd you know?"
He squinches up his eyebrows, looking very deep in thought. "You're examining my skull with a flashlight."
She lowers the pen light, feeling a little sheepish. He hands the forensics book to her, and before she can pitch it into the street, he grabs her wrist and shakes his head.
"You should sell it back at the end of the semester," he says, and grins. "Might as well make a little cash off the bastard."
She doesn't bother to ask how he guessed that; there are men's clothes scattered across the lawn for yards in either direction.
She snaps her first aid kit shut, stands, and offers him a hand. "Come on. I'll get you some ice for your head."
The day before she leaves the University of Michigan for med school, he asks her to marry him.
She almost says yes.
-
Her med school roommate is a tiny Asian girl with an incredibly filthy vocabulary and a promising future in oncology. The two of them don't get along particularly well, not at first, and they make a point of avoiding each other as much as possible.
Then one of her instructors takes her aside and says, "Lisa, have you considered hospital administration? I think you'd find that you have a real knack for it."
She stares at him, truly bewildered. "Administration? Is it - is it that you don't think I'll make a good doctor?"
"I think you'll make a fine doctor," he assures her. "It's just a thought."
Not great doctor, not even good doctor - just fine, and he could not possibly have said it with any less enthusiasm.
She goes home and cries for a solid hour. She might've cried longer if left to her own devices, but after an hour her roommate comes to the rescue with chocolate bars and classic movies, and then all the crying is reserved for Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy.
Halfway through From Here to Eternity, her roommate leans over and whispers, "I think you'll be a great doctor."
By the time Lisa graduates from med school, she has a vocabulary that makes grown men flinch and a best friend who never falls out of contact, not even when they wind up on opposite sides of the country.
-
She comes to Princeton-Plainsboro to work in the clinic, and by the end of her first year, she's running the clinic in all but name. The current administrator is less interested in the clinic than he is in high-profile patients with lots of money, and he doesn't pay much attention when the nurses start complaining less, when more patients start coming in, when the specialists start actually filling their clinic hours instead of blowing them off for yet another week.
The clinic becomes her baby, and by the time the administrator deigns to notice, the clinic is running like the well-oiled machine it always should have been.
"I'm glad you're showing initiative, Lisa," the administrator says, in a private meeting with his door shut. "Which is why I'm sorry to have to pass this along, but the Board is concerned that you haven't brought any money into the hospital."
She wants to rip his head off and stuff it somewhere uncomfortable, but she opts for cool composure instead. "What are we talking, research dollars? I'm a clinician." She doesn't say, I'm a fucking clinician, but the word is there, blatantly obvious for all that it's unspoken.
"This is a teaching hospital, Lisa. No one is just a clinician here." He leans back, steepling his fingers. "We hired you because you had some very interesting ideas-"
"All of which I've implemented here, in the clinic," she points out, keeping a tight leash on her temper. Why does he keep using her first name? Is he physically incapable of calling her 'Doctor'? "And I don't think I'm being egotistical when I say that every one of those ideas is working, and that the clinic is at least twice as efficient as it was before I got here."
"We were hoping for something publishable, Lisa, not for-" He makes a vague gesture with his hands, and shrugs. "If you're not going to publish, the Board would at least like you to teach a class."
Her fists clench over the arm rests on her chair. "I'm not an instructor, I'm a physician. I like working with the interns, but I'm not going to teach a class! You don't make the other doctors teach-"
"So - I don't know, take on a project," he says, frowning. "Give us something, Lisa."
She stands up, abruptly enough that her chair skids back a bit on the carpet. "I'm going back to my job now, if you don't mind."
"Lisa!" His voice halts her at the door. When she turns around, he's half-risen from his chair, looking incredibly frustrated. "I think you've forgotten who pays you to do your job, dammit."
"Page me if anything important comes up in your chit-chat with the Board, Bob," she says, backing through the doorway.
Two years later, she's sitting behind his desk.
-
Running a teaching hospital is difficult enough, but running a teaching hospital that employs Gregory House is more work than any one woman should ever have to take on.
She likes all of her doctors in different ways, but at the end of the day, she still gets pissed off when one of them tries to stir her shit - and House in particular is incapable of not being a shit-stirrer. By the end of his third month on staff, she finds herself ending more days in a blatantly pissy mood than not. Every tennis ball has his face mentally transposed over it, and her game is better than it's been since high school.
But for the most part, House is managable - because he's miserable, and he antagonizes every other person in the building just by breathing the same air.
Or so she assumes.
One night she comes back to the office after a fundraiser, still wearing her slinky red dress and matching high heels, and is caught completely off-guard by the sight of someone apparently hanging out in House's office.
She pushes the door open and leans in, raising an eyebrow at the pair of them. "Dr. House ... Dr. Wilson."
Both of them eye her up for longer than is really required to appreciate her dress, and then Wilson says, "Hi, Dr. Cuddy. Just getting back from the fundraiser?"
House raises his eyebrows in mock-surprise. "There was a hospital fundraiser? Why, Dr. Cuddy, I don't remember receiving my invitation."
"Yeah, like you would've gone," she says, playing with her necklace to minimize the amount of cleavage she has to flash at the two of them.
"I have a very nice tux," House says, rocking back in his chair. "I could even have given a speech."
"Yes, you are quite the orator," Wilson says, rolling his eyes.
"I come by it honestly." House twirls his cane in the air and smirks at her and Wilson in turn. "I killed in Julius Caesar."
She'll believe that around the same time the man runs to the window and flies away. "I didn't know you were in Julius Caesar."
"He wasn't," Wilson says. "He's pulling your leg."
House eyes Wilson suspiciously. "Pulling her leg? Was that a cripple joke?"
For a space of five seconds, Wilson looks abashed.
Then House grins at him, and Wilson makes an annoyed face in return, and Cuddy's imagined advantage over House dries up before her eyes.
Wilson walks her back to her office, probably as an excuse to get away from House. They get halfway to her door before she says, "I didn't know the two of you were friends."
He shrugs. "I didn't know the two of you were friends, either, but he says he's known you since college."
There's a slight lift on the end of that sentence - it's a question, not a statement. She hesitates for a moment, not sure how to respond. She's definitely known him that long, but even so, are she and House really friends?
"We were both at the University of Michigan," she says, opting for a safe, neutral answer.
His expression is a little bit guarded, like maybe he's wondering if it's against the rules to be friends with House, or maybe he's even a little bit embarrassed to be caught at it.
She pats his arm. "I'm glad you're friends. House is a great doctor."
He gives her a dubious look softened with a smile, and heads back in the direction they came, back toward House's office.
The next few years are one House-sparked crisis after another, and the path from his office to hers becomes one of the most well-tread areas of the hospital. Four times out of five, Wilson is there when she opens the door - and before long Wilson is the youngest sitting member of the Board, and House is rarely entirely without back-up, no matter what the crisis.
And even if she'll never, ever admit it, she is glad - for House's sake, and hers; Wilson keeps House out of her hair, as much as any one person ever could.
-
Cameron is helping Lisa rearrange her office when one of her desk drawers tumbles free, spilling a heap of junk out onto the floor.
"Dammit - there's something every time," Lisa says, kneeling to shovel everything back into the drawer. "Last time I rearranged this place, Dr. Wilson accidentally dumped my office supplies out the window."
"Out the window?" Cameron crouches next to her, helping her cap pens and stack index cards. "How'd he do that?"
Lisa smiles up at her, brushing her hair back behind one ear. "You don't want to know."
Cameron smiles back, and the expression is as sweetly naive as everything else about her. The girl drives Lisa nuts sometimes with the sweetness and the sincerity, and that tells Lisa that she's probably been around House for far, far too long.
Cameron fishes something out of the pile and stretches it between her hands, holding it out toward Lisa. "Hey, is this your stethoscope? It looks ancient."
Lisa takes the stethoscope and slings it around her neck, giving the instrument a light, fond pat. "Christmas present. I was eight."
"Oh." Cameron smiles. "For me, it was a chemistry set."
"Yeah?" Lisa stands, giving Cameron a hand up. "And that was it for you? Doctor, all the way?"
"That was it," Cameron says, with a fervency that Lisa hasn't felt since med school. "Doctor, all the way."
Later, when the office has regained some semblance of order and Cameron is off battling House in Diagnostic Medicine, Lisa sits back in her chair and coils the stethoscope up in her hands, letting her mind wander as her thumb strokes over the worn plastic tubing.
Maybe she'll put in a few hours in the clinic today. After all, she is a great doctor.
--
Author's Note: Written for ijemanja in the Female Gen Ficathon.
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