A/N: So, okay, this isn't my primary fic-dom but DID YOU SEE THE FINALE? DID YOU? I wrote this and I'm leaving all my cliches IN because I'm just going to let myself drown in happiness. Also, WTF but I could not think of a good title for this. I ended up in crack territory: "Hey, My Shower's F*cked, Let's Use Yours," "I've Fallen (IN LOVE WITH YOU) and I Can't Get Up," and "I've Never Been More Enamored With Hugh Laurie In All My Life: If You Agree, Don't Bother Reading This Fic, Let's Just Go Stalk Him."

*Spoilers* for S.6 finale. If you haven't watched it, don't read this, because it'll just be that much better when you're hiding your face with your hands and making high-pitched 'ohhhh' noises if I haven't ruined it for you.

Onward.

"You think I can fix myself."

She hears it as a question, he knows, because she attempts an answer, a good one: I don't know. But it isn't a question and he doesn't need her to answer because she's standing there wanting to know if they can work, which means she has faith, somewhere.

She's seen the pills in his hand so she knows he's not cured, knows the addict is still alive and well. But she hadn't turned around and walked out when she'd seen them; she hadn't pretended the only reason she was there was to re-bandage his shoulder and not to say the thing about them maybe working. She knows he has the pills, knows he's kept the pills, had seen him on the floor ready to take the pills and she still said it.

Her faith in him appears to be real and way, way bigger than his own.

Now Cuddy's formidable, he's breathless, and the pills in his hand are embarrassing him. He wishes he weren't holding them anymore but he can't see a way to get rid of them gracefully. He can't put them back into the bottle - it would look like he were saving them, and the trash can is too far away to reach with just a stretch; he'd have to get up on his leg and it's killing him and he doesn't want some grimace or awkward stumble to steal her focus from the words she's saying. She has to keep going, keep talking.

He's still processing the thing she said before he said that thing to her: I just need to know if you and I can work. And before that: ...all I can think about is you. For a second it had felt like mockery, like she was revealing his thoughts instead of her own, delivered with the tenderness that he's given up on having directed toward him. Rachel's adoration, Lucas' love, and nothing for House. Nobody for House. Like she'd said.

She feels badly about it. She knows she'd taken advantage of her nearness to his heart to mainline those words into him. The look on his face as he'd listened to her had been horrible and gory, pieces falling apart because he trusted her, because she didn't lie to him except maybe for a prank, and because he was desperately invested in the idea that she might love him still. Concrete dust had bleached the decades of fatigue on his face into a plaster mask, and she'd seen that the eyes shining through were too young and too vulnerable and maybe she shouldn't have let herself say everything because she had a feeling she'd witnessed what his father had seen when he'd lost it: when it hadn't been as much about belts and bathtubs as it had been about rescinding that most basic childhood need. House was still just a kid: still his father's boy in so many ways.

House doesn't know what to feel at this moment. One of the speeches she'd made to him today had to be a lie; they couldn't both be true. Either there's nobody for him, or someone has just come.

He wants to say something bitingly sarcastic about how nice it was that she waited for him to hit bottom before letting him know she cared.

He wants to send her out of his home, to punish her for her refusal to accept all his confused, fumbling efforts to woo her away from a perfectly good life partner.

He wants to take the Vicodin, to defy her and see if she'd still be there then.

He wants to start talking, to say things he knows she'll respond to because he knows how to manipulate her, because he knows what she wants, because besides medicine, she's probably his best and most-studied subject.

He could hit her so hard with guilt over what she'd said that she'd be on the floor crying into his shoulder. He could give her his sobriety like a gift, telling her it was for her or because of her, and no matter how well-intentioned she was to not feed into his addiction she'd want to believe him so badly. These acts would be effortless for him.

But then something in his head steps back and this foreign thing comes to him: the knowledge that all of these are non-options. He sees himself like an animal at the zoo, huddled pathetically in a concrete corner, unable to recognize that the door to the cage is wide open and that he doesn't have to bite at everything that moves. All this on the coattails of the faith she's dragged here, the faith he's kicked almost to death over a period of years. Years. He hangs his head slightly, and then through the extraordinary, brutal shame welling up in his chest he realizes that he has changed. It's the shame that means he's changed.

"Because I'm the most screwed up person in the world," he says, the first syllable clipped by his surprise that he's saying it, and the feeling of that honesty leaving his body is unreal. Like he can breathe. Like he can look at her and ask her to wipe his slate just one more time. He's never dealt in mercy and to want it now seems hypocritical, something from the karmic circus that could only come back to hurt him.

When she says, I know, he doesn't feel terrible: he feels free. She knows, and she follows it with I love you and a lot of other words that somehow relate but aren't as significant as those three. He doesn't know what his face looks like anymore. He imagines it looks wrecked, deconstructed, stupid and tired, but he doesn't care: she's still there and it's all still benevolent and good and if he doesn't move maybe the universe will stay happy with him for another minute.

It's the expression on her face that has his brain completely occupied, remembering and trying to remember again. Suddenly he realizes that she's said everything she's come to say and he hasn't said enough. She's waiting for him to say more, to do more, and the thing that pushes him forward is his conviction that now is his moment, his reward for the pain, all of it, but more than that - more than that reward could ever mean - it's a chance to prove himself. To show her that he's not just what he'd let himself become, but that he's still what she had known him to be. He can be everything she can remember loving him for, or at least he can try. He can start as soon as he can get up off the floor.

He feels almost defeated as soon as he tries, and he can't catch the irrational thought in time to avoid thinking that seeing this - this struggle he's used to but she isn't - might make her reconsider him for the things his leg would preclude in the future. But she just puts out her hand and pulls him up. He wobbles without his cane but limps to her, and this seems to please her and he thinks it's possible she doesn't care about preclusions and prohibitions, and that maybe the extent to which his leg concerns her is the extent to which his leg concerns him.

He gets close enough to brace himself on the wall as he looks down at her and he realizes she'd stayed against it for that reason, because she'd wanted him to get up and come to her and kiss her and for that he'd need the help. It puts a stab of something beautiful and triumphant down the center of his body: she wants him.

His head bends of its own accord and he has to hold himself back to make sure he's not rushing, though his sense of time is distorting and he wouldn't know what rushing feels like right now. He knows solidly that she doesn't look away and that her invitation never wavers, and even as he dips close to her face he doesn't hear the thing he's almost expecting, which is Cuddy changing her mind.

Instead they touch, warmer than he remembers it feeling to kiss someone, and he can't bring himself to cover her mouth with his because he loves her breath on his face, he loves it, and if he can keep its touch on his skin he'll do anything. He kisses the corner of her mouth instead, then her lips, each in turn, and her mouth stays gentle and slightly open like she's waiting for him to gather courage.

He feels a violent happiness, and maybe it only feels violent in its unfamiliarity but he has to pull away from her so that he doesn't crush her in a fierce hug.

"How do I know I'm not hallucinating?" he asks her, and she seems to understand that he's only trying to show her how happy he is that she's real.

"Did you take the Vicodin?" she asks back, playing along. His joy is biting its way through his body. It hurts like turning on a light in a dark room, but he feels stronger, further every minute from despair. He holds out his hand, those two bone-white pills so clean they look fake against his dusty palm.

"No," he says. His face doesn't show it but his voice is harder to control, overrun with trembling, expansive hope. Cuddy says something else but he's stopped listening. He's looking down, he's watching her, he's imagining the days and weeks and months in front of them and the twin novelties of relief and satisfaction. He thinks that a few minutes ago he was alone while she was standing in front of him, and that from now on he won't be alone even if she's absent.

Cuddy stops talking, and though he doesn't know what she's said, he feels like she deserves acknowledgement. The sum of what he wants to convey is his utter and inexplicable confidence: in her, in himself, in her faith in them both.

"Yeah," he says, deliberately low-key to stem the flow of exuberance that might overwhelm the moment. It occurs to him then that the Vicodin pills don't need to go into their bottle or into the trash, they just need to not be in his hand anymore. So he drops them. Her smile is encouraging and warm.

He bows his head again. She's so much shorter without her heels and he bends deeper than he imagines bending (on the occasions he's imagined it) to reach her mouth again. When he gets there he blanks; he forgets why he shouldn't fill her with his eager desire and impassioned gratitude, and so he does. She arches against him, her left hand never leaving his chest, and he pushes back against her. She responds perfectly, in kind, and he knows he's too tired and torn-up right now to fulfill the promises he's making with his kisses but if she just gives him eight hours' sleep he'll absolutely annihilate her in the bed where he used to sleep alone.

His hand feels empty without the pills and he wants to fill it with something better; he finds her hand and holds on.