NUMB
Cuddy stood in front of the church and let her eyes follow the smoke that rose into the sky.
The wind had dried up the salty traces of her tears on her skin and she secretly wiped away a last teardrop with the back of her hand.
She and Wilson exchanged looks.
There was someone hurting even more. Who always hurt more than they all did.
Someone whose funeral they both never wanted to attend, whose death they always half expected, half feared.
Slowly Cuddy extracted herself from the black crowd and went to her car, looking back at the smoke crawling up in black curls, fading into the grey and white of the clouds.
When she knocked on his door she could hear his music playing as usual. Like a stubborn teenager raging against the world he barricaded up, turned the music loud and chased away whoever wanted to entry his territory. She knew this and it had no effect on her.
Until she saw his face.
In his eyes she saw the haze of too many pain killers and alcohol and she felt the invisible curtain of isolation that always separated him from the outside world even thicker today.
She felt the need to reach through it, to touch him inside.
"I'm busy", he tried to chase her away with a scratchy cigarette smoke - covered voice.
"No you're not", she simply replied and pushed her way in.
House stumbled as he tried to avoid a collision with her.
She seemed terrified, unsettled. Her black clothes made her look pale, and the blue of her eyes looked even more watery, and colder. She had cried.
House didn't want her to bring all this pain with her inside. He had just succeded to numb it.
"If you want to talk about it, I don't", he stated and she stopped and turned around to look at him.
"Well, neither do I", she simply replied, defeated and tired.
"Then why are you here?"
"Because something happened. And you're hurting, just like the rest of us. You shouldn't be alone. But you ARE all alone in there."
"If you're scared I'll kill myself, too…" he started but she interrupted him.
With a weary look on her face and a soft glint in her eyes. "I'm not scared you'll kill yourself. If at all, I'm scared you'll never start to live."
Her voice sounded hoarse.
"And that's why you're here?"
"No." She breathed in and felt the scratching dryness of the cigarette smoke that was lingering in the air.
He hesitated and looked at her, puzzled as she came closer. The room behind her had started spinning.
He shouldn't have had that last shot of Jack Daniels, he thought, when he couldn't tell whether she was approaching him or backing away from him.
So he stood still and waited. An invisible iron helmet tightened around his temples, made his head feel heavy and his thoughts uncontrollable.
Somewhere in the distance he felt her touch. And he let her. He let her lay her hands flat on his chest, his eyes emptily staring into hers that were looking for him so desperately.
"How many drinks have you had?" she asked him, her voice shaking with controlled rage and fear.
"Apparently one too many to take advantage of this situation", he answered and caught the hint of a smile on her lips.
The baby had turned her into a mother. And she was no longer just a lover but someone who deeply cared for him. He could see that in her eyes where he saw tenderness instead of arousal.
She was falling for him. Falling into him, this black hole of emotions.
"Why don't you just let me in?" she whispered through this hazy curtain between him and the outside world.
The invitation spoken it lingered in the space between them, her face lit up in this light openness of the unanswered question.
It seemed to easy, so tempting. She was making it as easy for him as she in her own complexity could and would ever be willing to.
He shrugged his shoulders, his gaze locked with hers, his mind deaf and blind.
Numbed and stuporous from his pain, from the Vicodins he had taken, he suddenly realized they were dancing.
Standing in the middle of his living room, their bodies barely touching but warming each other, while the sounds of his music reached their ears only in the distance.
He stared down at their bodies that were slowly, barely visibly moving in sync with each other, and clearly in the rhythm of his vinyl songs.
The dizziness made him unsteady and he allowed her to hold him, allowed her to touch his face, her fingers softly burning on his skin.
And then he allowed himself to touch her, to bury his nose in her curls that smelled like magnolias. He felt the softness of her curves leaning against his body.
There was no hunger, no roughness, this time they were careful and the lightness of their touches barely made its way through all the numbness.
It felt like they were stumbling through a cotton covered spiral of sensations.
Until all of a sudden the music stopped.
And she let go. Avoiding his gaze she hastily turned around to leave through the same door she had so forcefully knocked against only minutes before.
He stared at the white wood as the slam of the door reached his ears and cracked his numbness into pieces.
Cuddy felt her mind sobering when she stepped outside into the cold, where heavy rainclouds were forming a thick grey mass above the buildings. She wrapped her coat around her waist and carefully stepped down the stairs into the street.
Motherhood had softened her. When Kutner had died she had not only felt the loss of a colleague, she had felt the loss of a son, of a lover, of a brother, of a friend.
She had drowned in the black smoke, in the mourning crowd. Drunk with emotions she had let her guards down.
But she should know better. It was a dark road she should never take, because it would never make her happy.
Neither was she ever going to bring any light into his world.
He chose the dark because everybody else was running away from it.
She looked up into the sky with tear-laden eyes when the sound of his voice in the distance suddenly made her stop.
It sounded loud and sober. Not at all damped but sharp and dark like millions of black crystals.
"Lisa."
She shivered.
Only once had she heard him say her name before. Which is why she turned around.
He was standing on his doorstep in the twilight of the rainy dusk, looking at her with a sincerity in his eyes that made this invitation seem more like a demand and a solicitation at the same time.
His black silhouette made him look taller than he was and at the same time he had never seemed smaller.
She closed her eyes and suppressed a smile.
She didn't have a choice. She had already set foot on this dark road.
So she followed him back inside.
Into his world.