A/N: Yes, yet another fic written for the 10/27/07 Saturday Night Writing Challenge at the House Fox Forum. This time the prompt is the last line 'And they were never seen again.'

Disclaimer: If House was mine, 13 and CTB would be gone and Old Fraud would be hired!

All the Unshed Tears

She sat, curled into a defensive little ball in her overstuffed armchair, and thought about the past ten years. She thought about where she'd been, where she was and how she'd gotten there. She rarely thought of such things anymore. She'd long ago decided that way of thinking was a waste of time. It only served to remind her of lost opportunities, missed chances and wrong turns. Nowadays she thought about things. Symptoms and diseases, tests and treatments, lies she'd heard and lies she'd told.

But today she indulged herself and thought about things too long ignored. Her past. What passed for her life. And what would be her likely future. Introspection was no longer in her skill set. There was a time when an evening spent mulling over her feelings was a commonplace occurrence. But no longer.

Her fingers itched to reach out and click on the television, her stereo, any sort of distraction and just let her mind wander. But that was her method for solving puzzles, and she wasn't a puzzle to be solved. Instead she stretched languidly and stood from her chair, making her way to the kitchen where she knew a bottle of wine waited in the refrigerator.

Pulling down a large glass from the cabinet, she went through a now all too familiar routine. The bottle was uncorked, its contents gurgled into the glass and her hand was on the refrigerator door almost without her awareness. As a thin strip of light fell across her toes she paused. If she was going to do this, she'd need the bottle.

She placed the bottle on the floor beside her chair and made herself comfortable. She wondered briefly if the situation had been reversed, would he have ….but she squelched that idea before it could come to fruition. Pandora's Box was supposed to stay closed for a reason; and she didn't believe in hope anymore.

She remembered the day she left. The last time. It had taken all of the previous two years, but she'd learned to repress the feelings that inevitably fluttered in her stomach in his presence. It hadn't been easy, and there were times even then when she knew she didn't completely pull it off. She told him she expected him to be fine. And she had no reason to suppose he wasn't. She should have wondered if she'd be fine.

She hadn't been away long when she began to long for the familiar. Change was bad. It wasn't a lesson she'd wanted to learn, but it seemed she'd learned it none the less. When the job was offered to her she accepted with an enthusiasm that almost surprised her.

Weeks passed quietly before he became aware of her. She'd watched him, of course. And even after he knew she'd returned, she kept watching. She watched him break in a new team. She watched him start some semblance of a relationship with his boss. And then she'd watched it fall apart.

She'd been with him once. About six months after his relationship ended. It was drunken and angry and sad simultaneously and nothing like she'd ever imagined.

She'd handed in her resignation the next day.

She couldn't stand to watch him like that. Not anymore.

She'd found a job nearby. The pay wasn't as good and the work certainly wasn't as challenging. But she wasn't in her twenties anymore, and the thought of having to start her whole life over again was so monumental that it filled her with an inertia she simply couldn't overcome. So she didn't. Really, she never even tried.

And the days turned to weeks, the weeks to months and so on until one day she looked in the mirror and a woman approaching middle-aged looked back at her. Ten years in which she'd come to enjoy her work again, if in a slightly different way. She headed her own team now, and she found she needed the puzzles.

Then just days ago, everything and nothing had changed. He was gone. She almost hadn't answered the ringing phone, she wasn't on call, but the idea that a new case might have come in and she wouldn't have to sit and stare at the TV another night was too alluring to ignore.

She'd closed her eyes and a warm if somewhat tired voice told her that cancer had finally beaten him. A bitterly ironic twist, she thought, since it was a faked cancer scheme that had led her to leave the last time.

She'd dressed carefully that morning, and applied more make-up than normal, attempting to erase any evidence of her recent bout with insomnia. She'd gone and paid her respects, chatted inconsequently with her former colleagues, exchanged pleasantries. She had looked around the funeral parlor, colleagues and former patients and too many lawyers to count milling around and thought how much he would have hated this. All this 'social nicety' on his behalf. She hadn't stayed much longer.

And now, sitting in the same overstuffed armchair she'd sat in the first time she realized she loved him, she realized she still loved him. She lifted the bottle from the floor to replenish her glass and found it empty. She cocked her head to one side in an eerily familiar gesture and caught her own reflection in the darkened TV. She blinked, and suddenly her chest felt tight as the weight of realization pressed down upon her.

In all her years of trying to get over him, she had become him.

She closed her eyes and smirked a wry grin, wondering what he would have said about that.

Puzzles that consumed her thoughts and being for days, provided her with an almost euphoric rush when solved and then left her flat until the next one came along.

Nights spent consuming too much alcohol and watching too much crap on TV.

A cold sarcasm, modeled after the master, which kept anyone who expressed interest at least an arm's length away.

Ten years in the same apartment, at the same job.

No family she kept in contact with.

No friends.

No lover.

No feelings.

Damn.

For that one night, she wished she was still the same woman she'd been when they'd first met. She wished she could go back and stop herself from being this way.

She couldn't. That same inertia weighed her down, as it must have weighed him down for so long. She knew tomorrow she would do what she always did. She would make a joke and go on. She would be just fine.

But for that one night, she let down her guard and cried all the unshed tears.

And they were never seen again.