A/N – Despite the title, this is anything but a happy fluffy Valentine's Day story. It's kinda like the antidote to all those type of things, if that doesn't sound too horrifically vain, lol. This is for everyone who isn't looking forward to Valentine's Day, who like me (sigh) are single, and who just want to wallow in self-pity for a little while :) Enjoy!
Title – Valentine
Rating – PG-13
Word Count – 2,082
Genre - Angst
Pairing – House/Cuddy
Warning – Complete (but purposeful) lack of any speech marks at all.
Concrit – Absolutely.
Notes – Huge thanks are due to ashleywest over at LiveJournal – without you and your persistent nagging…ok, reminders, this would never have been posted :) Also thanks to gidget89 and her oneshot Pink, which helped me through my writer's block on this fic. Thanks to you both!
Summary – Her voice is sharp, pulled tight and taut like a tightrope wire. Any second now it will wobble and break and both of you will fall.
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She's leaving. The words come out softly, quietly, three small syllables spoken as if to trick you into believing they aren't really important. She raises her eyes from her coffee cup for a second, just long enough to catch a glimpse of your faces, to see Wilson with his mouth wide open in silent disbelief, and you with your eyes ice cold and glaring angrily at her. She stands up; pushing back her chair to leave even as you point out that this is her office. Not for much longer, she says, her eyes dark and glittering and the tight line of her lips wavering as she fights to hold back tears. Not for much longer.
She walks off with her legs shaking and her shoes squeaking unevenly against the floor. You watch her go, your face devoid of expression. Wilson mutters an excuse and chases after with platitudes that ring hollowly in the empty air, and you sit alone in the too-bright office, knowing that this is just as much your fault as it is hers.
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You're twenty-three and she's nineteen, and the thick cold haze of wind and that hangs in the air like a damp blanket has done nothing to dissuade either of you from venturing out onto the frozen grounds and onto the running track. To begin with you lope along easily ahead of her, the ground swallowed up by your enormous strides, but then the insistent thud of running shoes comes closer and closer behind you, and suddenly you blink and she's there beside you, matching you stride for stride. Her cheeks are flushed pink and a determined smile creeps slowly across her face as you purposely up the tempo and turn this into a race. You might have long legs, but she has the stamina you lack, and comes close to overtaking you several times as you start to run out of energy. Suddenly, the rain starts hammering down, a heavy, unrelenting torrent that shows absolutely no signs of stopping. By now you're both soaked, but she just laughs, slowing to a halt and wrinkling her nose as she looks up at you with a grin. To your surprise, you find yourself inviting her over to your place to dry off. She sits with her legs neatly crossed in the middle of the floor of your shabby apartment, and tells you that her name is Lisa.
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You corner her as she comes out of the bathroom. Her eyes are ringed with red and her shell-pink lipstick is smudged and faded – she always bites her lip when she's nervous. But none of this stops you. You walk over; step right up close until she has no choice but to look at you, and start talking, a low dangerous whisper that quickly escalates into a yell. Words tumble venomously from your lips like spiders. She tries to brush them off, but they crawl languidly over her skin, searching for the best place to settle before biting down hard with their pointed teeth. In an instant her precariously maintained composure dissolves. She drags you into a nearby office, away from the twenty or so people who had stopped to stare at you both, and opens her mouth to let forth her own vicious torrent of words. But hers aren't planned to hurt like yours were, haven't even been thought over for more than a second before she lets them slip meaninglessly out of her mouth – and the façade of anger she's trying so hard to maintain is ruined by the telltale sparkle of salt-glass tears that glitter in the corners of her eyes. She tails off, looking down at the dull grey carpet covering the floor and at the three or four inches separating her glossy black heels from your scuffed sneakers. I'm sorry, she murmurs, and you know it's not just for the yelling – you both have everything and nothing to apologize for. More than everything, really, and less than nothing. But you don't say anything, waiting for the now-familiar sigh as she turns and walks away.
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You know for a fact that her first day as Dean of Medicine was bittersweet. Her mother suffered a massive heart attack just two days before, and her condition had been critical. But it's been a week now, and the last you heard (from Wilson of course, who had taken it upon himself to find out everything there was to know as part of his I'm-a-good-friend act), she was weak but relatively stable, and still under monitoring at Princeton General. Why she hadn't asked for her mother to be brought to what was now her own hospital is something you aren't quite able to fathom, and the fact that you can't figure it out irritates you more than it should. Impulsively, you decide to drop by her place on your way home – a sort of belated celebration of her success. You have ulterior motives of course, as you always do – you plan on bringing wine or champagne, on coaxing the answer to that infuriating question out of her with the help of more-than-enough alcohol. It suddenly strikes you that you haven't even seen the expensive new house that, according to Wilson, she's brought, and the ensuing curiosity brought on by this fact makes you want to go all the more. (You'll have to actually find her address first, but it shouldn't be too hard to hack into the hospital records – one of your more recent achievements was the discovery of her computer password.) And so your decision is made.
The door swings open, illuminating the doorstep and a small square of grass around it with a dull splash of spilled-milk light. My skills as a super-sleuth are great, you begin, as if in answer to the question you're sure she should by now have voiced, but something in her posture makes you stop. It's only now, in your five second step-back appraisal, that you notice the bent head and the slight tremor that runs fleetingly across her shoulders and back again. This you were definitely not expecting. Before you have the chance to ask why she's crying, she begins to speak herself, not raising her eyes from the pristine beige-coloured carpet covering the floor of her hallway. The hospital phoned, she tells you bleakly. Cardio-pulmonary infarction with severe ventricular tachycardia. They tried, but… She breaks off, curling her pink-painted toes into the carpet until they disappear into the thick cream fibres. You look at her slowly, mind shifting slowly into gear to formulate some sort of acceptable response. Her feet trace indistinguishable patterns on the ground and you follow them with your eyes, haphazard twists and swirls and spirals that fade before you have time to see where they are leading. You open your mouth to speak, still not entirely sure of what you are going to say. The improvised words rise up haltingly in your mind, hovering vaguely on the tip of your tongue, but you don't have time to let them out. Instead, you look up to see her face crumpling in misery and before you have time to react her small body is pressed against yours as she sobs into your shirt.
It takes one painful minute for you to force your muscles out of the involuntary rigor mortis they had frozen themselves into the second her skin brushed against yours. It had been a knee-jerk reaction, an instant physical alert that warned of the outright breaking of almost all of the countless tacit rules your relationship was built on. Slowly, awkwardly, you snap out of it, looping one arm and then the other carefully across her shoulders with as much care as if she were made of glass or porcelain – some delicate expensive statue that would surely break if you applied too much force. You glance down, noticing she's still in her work clothes, the pink skirt and formal white blouse now scarred with creases, and her hair is pulled back, wild curls smothered into submission with a hairpin behind each ear. You slide the clips out absently, fanning her hair neatly across her back and taking a strand between two fingers to toy with as you wait for her breathing to calm.
Time passes – several eternities hidden under the dancing masquerade of a minute. She steps back a little, sniffing and brushing away tears with the back of her hand. Do you want to come in? She asks, and almost instantly you want to say yes, despite the fact that the night has a dangerous, impulsive air and that neither of you would really mind breaking a few more of your mostly disregarded rules. You hesitate, just for a second, and then; Ok, you say. Ok, fine. The rules lie in ruby-red sulphuric shards on the doorstep as she smiles, ever so slightly, and leads you inside.
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You didn't think she's be going so soon. It's only been a few days since she told you and Wilson, but as you pull up in the car park you see her loading boxes into the trunk of her car. I got early notice, she says quietly, flashing a tight smile in your direction before turning away.
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Her voice is sharp and measured, pulled thin and taut like a tightrope wire. Any second now it will wobble and waver and both of you will fall. You need to go, she says slowly, devastatingly. I need you to go.
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She's watching you now, carefully and with more than a hint of fear in her eyes as you walk up and stop right in front of her, invading her personal space by several inches. You smell perfume and apprehension and the scent of coconut shampoo. Leaning forward so you're only millimetres from her face, your lips grazing the edge of her cheekbone, you whisper in her ear. I don't want you to go, you say simply.
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Her skin is ice-cold. She flinches away from your touch, but you don't let go, holding her small hands pressed tight between your own. Her bones feel impossibly fragile, as if you could crush them with just your finger and thumb. Fine, hollow bird bones, filled with air and ready to take to the wind.
Please, you tell her. Listen to me.
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She stands perfectly still, her eyes closed. You hear her take a deep breath and then another, but neither of you say a word. It's as if you're some sort of twisted garden decoration – a pair of elaborate marble statues, entwined in flaws and imperfections and posed as an aesthetic centrepiece for a backdrop of still cars and cold concrete marked with lines. Time loses its hold, stretches like an elastic band until her eyes flicker open in front of you and it snaps sharply back into place. So, you find yourself saying, finding some acerbity just for show. What's the verdict?
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She smiles sadly, shaking her head. You watch her curls bounce on her shoulders at the movement, and fix your eyes on a single dark strand, avoiding eye contact and holding your breath for the answer you know you won't hear.
I can't deal with this any more Greg, she says quietly. With all the lying and secrets and excuses. It isn't fair – for you as well as me. For both of us.
And with that she slips her hands out of yours and walks away, and once again you are alone.
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Her eyes meet yours, seeming almost unnaturally blue in the cold morning light, and she smiles. But it's not the bright, uninhibited smile you haven't seen in far too long. This is just a feeble, third-rate substitute – a tiny, bittersweet twist of the lips that bears no resemblance to its original brilliant grin. I can't stay House, she says, her voice surprisingly gentle. You of all people should know that.
You open your mouth, searching vainly for the magic words, some secret combination of letters that can somehow persuade her to stay, but she silences you quickly, with a kiss so fleeting you might have imagined it. In that brief half-second you feel her cheeks damp with cold tears against your own, breathe in the familiar smell of coconuts in her hair. And then she's gone, another piece of your life crumpled and folded away like a rejected valentines card at the bottom of the trash can.