One of those lazy summer afternoons, rain painting his windows in sheets of silver, and he was never really sure later just how he'd ended up in bed with Lisa Cuddy. But when he thought back to ask himself again, the question was not Why? but What the hell took me so long?
It seemed to House that she'd always been there, just out of reach or of sight or of touch; his guilty conscience, ever-present reminder of better days. His mortal enemy, the clever by-the-book nemesis to his fly-by-night practice of medicine. While others retreated from him, cowed by his directionless fury and the blazing spark of intelligence, she, unintimidated, drew a line in the sand and then dared him to cross. And he had, in his way: an elbow here, a careless toe there; but even when the world was falling to pieces around and within him, he hadn't ever allowed himself to realize just how often she'd had his back.
If his blinded affair with Stacy had been a whirlwind then this, too, was a tempest; but the two were extremes of a sort that defied all comparison. Who you are matters, he'd told her, and in the end that was the truth he learned from Cuddy: who you are really does.
They'd both worked too hard, given up too much and were too old and jaded to put stock in the mass-marketed idea of romance... but sometimes, when he felt as if his leg were his whole world, a screaming winding biting agony of pain, when he loathed every boundary and spent every muscle's last oxygen just to shatter them on principle, the one who held him back was her. When he pushed the world too far, she pushed back. When he wanted someone to give, she knew he needed someone to stand their ground.
And in the end, the words didn't matter, the thoughts didn't matter, what the world may spit up around them mattered only as far as they let it. He tested her, made her think; she made him face head-on his assumptions. And so what, if they never touched: except for a brief fleeting brush in her office, his long fingers smoothing an errant strand of dark hair back behind her ear? She was a force of nature made flesh, driven and unyielding and nearly radiating with power, the kind that stopped the heart and warmed the blood. Their whispered, haunted moments, were a thing outside time. So what, if neither of them were perfect?
House learned then that it didn't matter all that much.
Someone out there, after all, was going to give her what she wanted. What she needed.
Why shouldn't it be him?