Often, reality and possibility blend into one another until we can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins. Impossibility is a myth because, after all, if we dare to reach that high, we're likely to fall and shatter and that just wouldn't accomplish anything, so we stay on the ground where birds soar for us, and that's usually enough.

It would have never made sense, then, for the crippled man to contradict everything and redefine life as we know it.

It also wouldn't make much sense if that crippled man feasted on answers and the humility of others, and he had the single most defying puzzle the world has ever known, and yet all he wanted was to not have it... because maybe, in the end, he realized that the high of `being right` wasn't that great at all. Maybe, her whisper was more enticing than the praise of old and young, (maybe her breath across his chest rocked him in the deepest throes of love more than the truth ever could.)

No, that wouldn't make sense at all.

Yet... it would be slightly more sane to say that he was ripped apart from the inside out and when all he had was a hollow coating of that crippled man and the memory of her lust, he thrived on the only other lover he had ever know.

The brilliance that, despite everything else, he wasn't wrong.

... Until one day, there just wasn't an answer; and that's the day he thought he had died.

Little did he know, the nightmare was just beginning.

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Smoke billowed around her in large mushroomgusts and Foreman's hand was on the small of her back, a forceful guide to safety. She had her black blouse pulled up and covering her face from the charcoal ash and yet she still hacked a morbid string of coughs into her palm.

It had all happened so fast because she'd barely had time to see House disappear into the elevator and then it was silent for two beats before an explosion erupted around her and shrieks pierced the low drum of destruction.

Concrete screeching against itself rumbled from the walls and she had just stood there, completely stunned, because she could have sworn that sound just hadn't existed for those two seconds when the ticking of the bomb tauntingly clicked away lives, happiness, and her hospital.

Tick. Tick.

Boom.

"Cuddy!" She jerked back to reality with the sudden realization that she almost fainted from the smoke toxicities in the air, and she realized that Foreman was screaming into her ear and trying to hold her up and half drag her out of the doors because it was that bad.

She thought they were going to die, and she swore that half of her already had.

They passed a corpse that had been thrown back from the impact laying on the blasted glass of a large window, and with a shiver of startling reality, she kicked off her heels and she ran with the neurologist into the parking lot where the blaze of police and ambulances and fire trucks shrilled into the chaos.

Everything moved in slow clarity and she turned, her hair whipping across her face as the first floor collapsed and the front of the second floor followed it.

"Oh my god." She breathed, and her voice sounded torn to her own denying ears. And then everything was there in front of her, and she lost that carefully built facade. "Oh my god!" She cried in anguish and her eyes melted with a salty stream of tears that smudged her mascara from her stinging eyes.

"No, no, no... She chanted a disbelief like a sonnet, as if repeating it would reverse everything, and she collapsed onto the concrete. Foreman was there beside her, shaking his head and his eyes were red with repressed shock, and they didn't even acknowledge each other.

Because, they realized, that lives had been lost. Lives of their friends, co-workers, patients...

All lost in mere seconds. She still didn't quite understand...

And then she realized with a white-hot stark fear, (while the sounds of crime and death blared in the background), that the ticking had started in the elevator.

The elevator that House had gotten on.

Oh god. She was dieing while her heart ticked unblemished and healthy in her chest.

Tick, tick, tick...

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this is the first chapter to my story. it's more like a prologue. actually, it is a prologue. it's how house-being-the-beast starts, (or my idea of how it starts, as it were.)

hm. this story is going to be unrealistic and fantasy-ish in a realistic way. does that make sense? perhaps it makes more sense to say that the contents of this story will be unrealistic, as in impossible in real life, but they will be presented in a realistic style.

better.

the idea goes to Pokeitlikejello. go read her story "Tale As Old As Time". this Beauty and the Beast/House M.D is her idea. go praise her.