Their ride home had been as quiet as their arrival at the airport, with him rolling his eyes at the passengers clapping their hands, while Hannah just grabbed her stuff and waited for him to join her.
The cab-driver stared at him when his stranger grabbed their luggage, effortlessly hanging it over her shoulders while he limped to the entrance of their home, before he realized that she had the keys.
The cabbie obviously thought something along the lines of him being a selfish ass letting the woman haul everything to the door.
If he knew…
If he knew Hannah could drag around their luggage AND his cab without breaking into sweat, man, would his eyes get big!
She just opened the door, getting inside and dropping all of their stuff next to the piano before stepping out of her high heels.
House's gaze followed her into the kitchen before returning to the heap next to his entrance door.
This was so normal.
This was so… her.
He followed her into the kitchen where she rumaged in the freezer.
"Are you hungry?" she asked, turning around to him.
Watching the pizza in her hands he needed too much time to answer.
"I… I also could order something…", she continued, her eyes never really meeting his.
House caught her hand with the frozen food before she could stuff it into the freezer again.
"Pizza is okay, as long as you don't burn it. And I mean the oven, not… well, you."
She frowned at him briefly, before turning around wordlessly to said thing to heat it up.
House sighed.
"Hannah… I'm sorry…"
"Why? You are right… I could burn this thing."
Facing him again he could see no humor in her face when she said that and he didn't know what to answer.
Suddenly she sighed heavily.
"If I'd know this would be this awkward, I would never have…"
She stopped herself before she could finish the sentence.
House leaned on his cane, his eyes fixed on her, seeing her squirm under his glance for the first time, again opening her mouth to speak.
"Don't!" he interrupted her.
"But I…"
"Don't you dare to even think about what you are going to think about", the diagnostician growled. When she just looked at him, he continued.
"We can't change what happened. But we can work on it."
At that she focused on him, making a step towards him.
He took a step back.
"See? You're afraid of me", Hannah concluded, hands on her hips.
"How can we work with that? You wanting to run every time I come near you?"
She could see his mind work, his face showing his effort to come up with an explanation for his behaviour, the fingers of his right hand closing firmly around his cane.
Then suddenly he looked up, closing the distance between them, the cane falling to the floor when his arms closed around her waist.
"Of course I am afraid. I've never seen something like that before. But I'm glad it was you with me in this room, and not Cameron, or Chase. All of us would be dead. And I told you it would be awkward at first."
A small smile crept on her face, a hint to her sarcasm reappearing when she placed her palms on his chest.
"Got more than you wanted?"
He cocked his head, studying her face for a while before answering.
"Got everything I need."
She just rested her head next to her hands, listening to his heartbeat.
"Think things can go back to the way they were?" she then asked.
House rested his chin on top of her head, hands softly stroking up and down her back.
She didn't feel any different.
"I hope so."
Pulling her face up he placed a soft kiss on her lips.
She didn't taste any different.
"Give me a little time, okay?" he said, kissing her a second time when her arms closed around his waist.
"I'll give you all the time you need." She hestitated a bit.
"I just hope you won't take too long. You haven't touched me for almost two weeks now…"
He frowned, then decided to laugh a little.
"You just want me for my body."
Hannah remained earnest.
"No. I want all of you. I just hope I haven't screwed up too much."
House narrowed his eyes, keeping his arms around her when she wanted to step out of his embrace.
"I believe saving my life and the lives of everybody in this hospital can't be described as screwing up. I'll manage, you'll see."
When this big guy in the white uniform could manage an alien wife, then he could, too.
One second later he rethought this thought.
Ever since the wedding he was having this thoughts. Listening to the Navy-guy telling his friends that for once he managed to put everything in the right order: secret love affair, elope before becoming her boss and then knocking her up… The other guy laughing at that, caressing his new wife's slightly swollen belly and laughing about himself never doing anything in the right order.
Jesus, sometimes he really was pathetic…
The woman in his arms looked at him with a confused expression on her face.
"Greg?"
"Yeah?"
"Could you let go off me, now? I'm starving."
"You were the one complaining about not being touched by me."
He nevertheless let her step out of his hug, from where she got back to the oven and the pizza.
"Hannah…"
She turned around, still looking a bit confused, yet also amused by his last remark when he shocked her.
"I love you."
Giving her no time to answer he limped out of the kitchen, falling down on his couch in the living room, rethinking what the Navy-guy had said to him one of the nights after all had happened.
It had been in the middle of the night, some days after the incident.
Of course they couldn't head for the US after something like that just so.
NCIS had a lot of questions, even though Agent DiNozzo hadn't been the least bit surprised how everything had ended.
JAG had a lot of questions, but since their big chief was married to… one of them… he also didn't really wonder how all of them came out there alife.
Okay, almost all of them. Cramer still was critical. Again one of his kiddies had been hurt.
Yet that was not really his problem.
He was having trouble to sleep, so he sat in the living room of this stunning house Harmon Rabb and his wife lived in. If he could carry this thing he would have stolen it and placed it on top of his appartment-building to live there. The TV showed a mindless show, something about Z-class celebrities trying to survive in a jungle.
Please, as if the whole world wouldn't be glad if they just forgot them there.
He wasn't really paying attention while sitting in the dark room, leaning forward on his cane, looking at the TV, but not watching what was on air.
All he could see was Hannah jumping over the bed their patient lay in, OVER the bed, from the spot she had been standing. Attacking a guy at the other end of the room who was aiming a gun at him. He still could hear the bones of this guy crack when she already had turned to the next one, ripping his rifle out of his hand and beating the thing over his head with a force that sent him into the next wall.
Third guy was aiming at her, and he really thought "That's it."
Poor guy hadn't even the time to pull the trigger when the whole room disappeared in a blinding ray of light.
Blinking his eyes repeatedly he finally saw the blurry vision of a guy falling to the floor with a hole in his body where his stomach had been and Hannah, with one hand lifted up in front of her.
"What did you do?" he heard himself ask, but she disappeared through the door.
Some minutes later everything was over.
"You'll accustom", a deep voice said and he looked up from the TV, seeing Rabb stand in the hallway to the living room.
"'s easy for you to say. You knew your wife was an alien…"
"Yeah. I knew when she drilled her arm into an iraqi, firing one of these energy balls at another one while her arm was still in the guy", the lawyer answered, his eyes focused on him.
House frowned at Harm while he sat down next to him, leaning back on the couch.
"Ouch."
"Not what I thought. I just wanted to run away screaming. Even more when she blew the house up. You don't see your partner go blonde and fire electricity at a hazienda every day. What scared me most was that she turned around before this thing even hit the house, looking at me kinda bored while she climbed into the helicopter."
House stored away this information, intending to ask Hannah…
"Still you knew before you did her", he then said. The ex-pilot sighed.
"If I had known she had killed only 10 minutes before she came to me, I wouldn't have… done… her. I'm sure, agent Gibbs is still looking for this terrorist…"
House looked at the JAG a little confused.
"So… your wife doesn't have a problem with killing, I assume…"
The man didn't even hestitate with an answer.
"Unfortunately, no. What you have to learn is that this is their temper. They extinguish everything that's unnerving them. She scared the shit out of me more than once, but I learned that she never would hurt anyone unintentionally. When she's pissed off, then you have a problem. Still, with the ones they like it only ends with screaming and some laserlike glares."
The lawyer looked at his TV for a while, obviously thinking about the times his wife had scared him, then turned to watch the diagnostician again.
"You'll get accustomed to it. If you love her…"
"I do! But she could have told me… that…", House snapped louder than necessary while dragging his Vicodin-tube out of his pocket. Dryswallowing two of the pills he started thumping his cane to the floor. The lawyer looked at him patiently.
"When should she have done that? Oh, and by the way, darling, I'm an alien?" Rabb asked loudly, leaning his ellbows on his knees. House sighed, crunching a crumb of his pill between his teeth while thinking. The voice of his couch-companion got soft again, quietly continuing his speech.
"You have to learn one thing about Sayajins: they may be stronger and have a preference to solve things with violence, but other than that they are humanoids, even primates like we are, with feelings, problems and I believe Hannah's up in the bedroom asking herself what she did and if she scared you away."
House watched the lawyer for a while.
"How do you manage?" he suddenly asked.
"How did you…?"
Rabb looked at him, revealing a pair of grey-blue eyes… he had noticed that most of the partners of Hannah's sibblings had a blueish eyecolor… that reminded him of his conversation with her father when she had been in coma…
Rabb interrupted his thought.
"Fall in love with her?"
House nodded.
"I'd have stayed away from her when I'd found out something like that…"
"She saved my life twice before I even knew. I got on her nerves by wanting to save her from everything, everywhere… And I wanted to run, stay away. I just couldn't. We were back to normal before we even knew."
"Just like that?"
The lawyer tilted his head to one side.
"Ah… okay, no. I had an affair with a subordinate, was mad at everyone and everything when the subordinate dumped me, and Cara was the only one with the balls to face me. Telling me to get a whore if I was missing the sex that much instead of going on her nerves."
"Sounds like someone I know… Yet I wouldn't have fallen for her after telling me to get a hooker. Uh… now I know why the thing with me and Wilson never worked…", the doctor snarrled sarcastically, his remark being ignored by the sailor.
"I think I had fallen for her long before that. I'm just a bit slow recognizing something like that", Harm admitted. House did him the favor and grinned.
"And then I find myself all jealous of DiNozzo because he knows her since she can blink an eye and she's helping him. I looked forward to the NATO dance, taking her out for the first time, even if it was job issues. I never thought I would get shot that day, and I hoped she would stay with me…"
"She rather went to find the shooter?" House asked. This guy's life was more screwed up than anyone else's he'd ever met.
"No. She stayed with me until they moved me into surgery. Then she sat out in the hall until her temper and the Admiral took over. Chegwidden waited for me while she went hunting."
"Your boss just let her go?"
"My boss knew better than to be in the way of a Saiyajin with a mission, even though he didn't know she was doing this for the man she loved rather than her partner."
At that Rabb started to smile and House threw him a confused look.
"I'd still like to see Gibbs' face when she marched into his office, her dress still stained with my blood, demanding to know where the bastard was who did that to me."
"And you rewarded her with a little hanky panky?"
Harm frowned, then seemed to remind himself who was talking to him there.
"She told me she didn't want to wait anymore. I couldn't say anything against 'Life's too short to wait until everything fits for us'. I didn't want to say something against that."
House leaned back on the couch. He didn't believe that it was that easy do digest everything he had seen, even though he was pretty sure that Hannah's sister was way more brutal while being an alien.
"Would you have married her if you hadn't become her boss?" he asked casually, his mind drifting back to the wedding.
"I… don't know… all I know is that right now I couldn't be any happier. I always thought I would end up alone with a black adress book after…", he swallowed hard once, leading the diagnostician to the assumption there had been another woman who had caused more hurt than the sailor would want to admit.
"She didn't meddle in my life and still became my friend. She didn't urge me into anything and still became a part of my life. She's eating ridiculous amounts of ketchup, keeps stealing the cheese out of my greek salad, is afraid of spiders and lets me mock her because of it, and she's wearing my t-shirts in bed…"
"Not to forget the bun in her oven… you're totally whipped, man", House smiled sadly, the other man smiling back at him.
"Yeah, I know. You'll get back to that eventually, you'll see. Hannah's not Cara. She has broken with the military. She's done that because she had to. Because she saw no other way to save all of you."
"I know that. My brain on the other hand thinks it has to bother me with it."
"You'll manage, you'll see."
"Pizza's ready. And I didn't manage to burn it!" Hannah announced, walking from the kitchen into the living room with the food, two bottles of beer and his cane hooked on her arm. He blinked a little confused about the fact he'd been sitting here that long, musing.
"What? No mocking me?" She sat down next to him, handing him one of the bottles while he started to frown at her.
"Nah… you might burn me instead", he then said, regretting it when he saw her face fall.
"Jeez, Hannah! That was a joke. Get used to me mocking you being an alien!" House exclaimed, shaking his head at her.
She grabbed a slice of their food, obviously thinking about what he had said.
"I think I should, shouldn't I?"
"Yep. 'Cause I'll mock you for the rest of our lives, you know", he declared, grabbing himself a slice and taking a bite.
"You what?" First he wasn't talking to her for two weeks and then he was getting everything right in half an hour? Just like that?
"I came to the conclusion that I want to keep you. Includes the mocking", House said with his mouth full, watching her get more and more confused.
"Keep me…?"
He studied her intently, how her black eyes looked at him questioningly, totally lost.
"Yah. Marry me."