Disclaimer: House & Co. belong to David Shore & Co.

Rejection

"No." Cuddy stared up at him from her doorway; her arms hugging her robe to her chest as one bare foot crossed atop the other in an attempt to keep the cold from seeping into her body.

House tilted his head and studied her. He waited a beat.

"What's different about this time?" His voice was quiet, punctuated only by the white mist of his breath in the cold winter air.

Cuddy's eyes narrowed a fraction, "House, I can't deal with this right now."

She shifted, tightening the robe across her body. He could see the resolve in her stance; the tension of her neck. Her voice had been firm. He noted the strain around her eyes and the way her lips pressed against each other forming a thin, pale line beneath her red tipped nosed.

"I'm tired. It's late." She looked over his shoulder, unable to maintain eye contact. "You should go home." She implored him, her hand moving to the cool metal of the doorknob as she attempted to step back into her home.

House looked away, exhaling before he shuffled forward and stepped into her space. Cuddy did not flinch. She did not respond at all. She could feel the heat from his body as he moved in closer to her, watching as his hand lifted towards her. His eyes tracked his own hand, following the index finger as it grazed across her jaw and slipped down her neck, stopping to press at her pulse point before it slid down and settled in the indent between her breastbones.

"No."

Repetition

Cuddy gave House a key to her home during the second month they were together.

That was four breakups and three years ago.

They argued and they yelled and they cut each other with painful truths; they hurt each other and in doing so they hurt themselves. No matter how hard they tried, or didn't try, they could not break their pattern. Each fallout, was slightly harder to come back from than the last, but never so much that they did not find themselves repeating their respective moves and hoping for a different outcome. They rarely apologised and though there were willful omissions from both parties they tried not to lie to each other.

This was a scene that they never acted out:

Here is your key back, I no longer want to be part of your life.

Give me my key back, I no longer want you in my life.

These would have been lies coming from either of their mouths.

So he never returned the key and she never asked.

Release

She had been dating Jacob for five months.

She accepted the first date because she could not deal with House anymore. She was tired of being drained by the juvenility of their relationship. Yes, there was passion between them. Yes, there was love. There was also pain and anger and sadness. She wanted to act like the adult that she was. She wanted a functional, happy relationship.

She found that with Jacob.

He was a great guy and there was the potential for a future there. There was not pain or anger or sadness (at least not from her relationship with him; those emotions came when House stared at her in that penetrating way he had or she found herself remembering them in their better moments). There was not love or passion with Jacob either, but she was happy with the contentment she felt with him and was sure that the former would come with time.

She resolved to maker her relationship with Jacob work and masked with animosity and indifference her internal struggle to rid herself of the strings attaching her to House.

House knew she was seeing someone else. He could tell the first date was about him and her desire to stop playing their game of go fish – they were constantly reeling each other in and then releasing, only to recapture each other again. He was not troubled; they always came back to each other.

As the months began to pass the worry crept in like a soft, cool fog. At first he was angry at how easily Cuddy had replaced him. He drank himself into stupors and chased away his grief with Vicodin. Eventually, he began resigning himself to a life without her, but sometimes he found himself staring at her and he remembered how she had made him feel like his life had been worth living.

The days kept passing and soon neither their silences in her office nor their arguments held the subtext of emotional or sexual tension that had always been their constant. Cuddy never betrayed a hint of the feelings she still had for House. Not with the slightest flicker in her eye or the lingering of fingers as she passed him a file. Never.

Her mask worked too well.

The morning of her first anniversary with Jacob, Cuddy walked into her office and hung her coat on the rack by her door. She turned towards her desk, her step faltering when she registered that a key was laying squarely in the center of her desktop. She willed herself to be implacable. Instead, she struggled against the way her heart clenched at the sight of the tiny piece of dull metal and blinked back tears as she rounded the desk.

She sat down, dropping her bag to the ground before she reached out and traced her finger over the key. She lifted it off the desk, palming it and pressing it into her flesh. The ridges cut into her skin as she slid her chair back and opened her desk drawer to drop the key in.

The metal hit the wood with a muffled thud.

Cuddy stared at the key several minutes before she closed the drawer. Her hand found its way to her mouth and pressed against her lips in an attempt to keep at bay the tiny sobs that wanted to escape from her inside throat.

House had let her go.

Recapture

House sat on a park bench staring at nothing in particular; his coat unbuttoned and a blue scarf hanging loosely around his neck. He always liked autumn. The way the leaves changed and fell to the earth appealed to him; the cycle of death more intriguing because it was so bright and colorful.

He closed his eyes and remembered how he had played with her key, running it through his fingers as it lightly weighed down his pocket. He had passed silently through the front doors of PPTH and made his way across the lobby to Cuddy's office. His one goal being to get the action over with, a part of him hoping that the message would be clear to her – that he would hurt her as much as she had hurt him. .

He had been on the bench for over an hour, cocooning himself inside his pain. His head was thrown back and his earbuds looped the strains of I've Been Loving You Too Long through his head. He thought about the finality of what he had done. He wanted to mean it, for his actions to mirror his feelings, or more accurately he wanted her to think that he meant it.

He sensed another presence near him and blinked his eyes open. The world around him was tinged with a purplish blue haze as he focused his eyes on the figure in front of him.

Cuddy stood a few feet away from him; her hands were tucked into the pockets of her coat and a slight breeze played with a few tendrils of her hair, brushing them about her face. They stared at each other for several moments. She looked into the blue of his eyes, slightly more brilliant because of his scarf, and tried to read him. She thought about how much she loved his face and his wit and his genius. She wanted to scream at him, asking why he had returned the key? Why had he broken the rules? She no longer felt she had the right too.

House took in her features, lingering over the slope of her nose and watching the emotions that flashed across her face as she joined him on the bench. He pulled the earbuds out of his ears and slowly wrapped them around his iPod, before he stuffed the device into his pocket. His right hand fell to his leg and absently rubbed at his thigh. It had been a long time since he had seen any emotion on her face and he had certainly not expected her to seek him out. He did not know why she was here.

Without saying a word, Cuddy grasped House's left hand and pressed something cold and metallic into his palm. She bent his fingers inwards, enclosing them over the hard object and squeezed her hands around his. She lifted his hand to her mouth and lightly grazed his knuckles with her lips as she held his gaze.

She released him and stood up, turning to walk away.

She was stopped by his hand encircling her left wrist; his cold fingers passing over her wrist bones, the pads coming to rest above her pulse.

"No." He whispered.

Cuddy tensed at the lone syllable; her head falling at the realization that he was rejecting her.
What did she expect? She was the one who left him. She was the one who had supposedly moved on. When she saw the key, however, she had not believed that he had really let her go – let them go - because she realised that she had not. She could not face him; she could not believe that she had made herself vulnerable again to the pain and hurt that was them, only to once again find it washing over her. She wanted to get anyway from him and this mess that she had inflicted upon herself. She kept her back to him, willing away the tears, as she tugged her wrist from his grasp.

House tightened his grip when he felt her pulling away; momentarily releasing her in order to slide his hand along her palm and twine his fingers with hers. He clasped his hand shut around hers, using it to leverage himself up and pull his body off of the bench. His free arm slipped around Cuddy's waist and pulled her to him, the motion of her body falling back as he came forward throwing him off balance and causing them to stumble one step forward.

In that moment, as he had watched her walk away, he was certain that there would not be anymore chance - this was his last. This was the only moment he would be afforded to decide what his story was going to be. House hesitated for the briefest moment before he tightened his hold on Cuddy, inhaling the scent of her hair is he leaned forward and murmured into the side her neck, "Don't go."