Title: The Way of Things

Category: Drabble
Rating: T
Spoilers: Promo for 5x23

-

She just attended a funeral and knows that some day, she might be attending his. The melancholy sits tight in her and her heart constricts and aches inside the cavity of her chest.

His blue eyes are tired, weary. Somehow, he seems to be a physical self reflection of how she feels emotionally. The midnight hours chip away on both of their faces and crack in their bones. She has spent a night in his bed, staring at the ceiling as the lamps on the road casted dancing shadows everywhere, like an Alaskan aurora.

Her emotions are dangerously close to the spillway as he stands in too close a proximity, threatening to overflow and create puddles at her feet. The only move she knows to make is to delude the situation, to make it watered and less powerful to swallow.

"You want to kiss me, don't you."

It comes out more fact than a teasing remark. Her mind and voice have failed to counteract the syrupy thickness of want folding around the contours of their bodies.

"I always want to kiss you," he answers without a trace of malice or jest in his voice.

She stiffens slightly to the remark and feels the heat rise on her skin. It's the first reaction and she knows what the next of the steps will be: Softening, molding, becoming pliable underneath the fingers of a man who knows little of shaping beautiful things.

"This man is forbidden," her brain screams to her as she fixes her gaze on the glaze of moisture coating his lips, like he is paving the way for her to him.

She's known the plaster has been chipping away for a while now, removing herself from the fact that she has needed to replace it for some time. The foundations shake and she quakes, giving in to something stronger than even she can withstand.

She thinks, in another life, she might have been able to. A life without Gregory House hobbling behind her, tucked inside a shadow.

Nothing seems to matter as his lips connect to hers. She tastes the fruit of self betrayal, the promise to herself to never fall in love with a broken creature. They are both mixed fractions, pieces. It is a nice thought to think that if someone were capable of linking and weaving the particles, that they would resemble something of a whole.

House is not meant to be complete though. And as he pulls her back inside of his door, she thinks she isn't either.