pretend
He sleeps restlessly. She's known it all these years, but never before has she really stayed awake after one of his midnight visits to watch his slumber. Usually she is content to curl up at his side and forget it as they both slip away to dreamland.
She reaches out and touches the mangled muscle of his thigh, and winces. Guilt and Gregory House are tied unavoidably in her mind. He's remarkably adept at hiding it, even when they're both slightly intoxicated and in the throes of making love. He has his trademark moves: a slight shift to the right, so that the horrendous scar falls under shadow, not moonlight; long, elegant, musician's fingers always ready to turn away the searching hand that approaches the damaged thigh; a flash of irritated pain across the hard blue eyes that tells her it hurts, tells her to pull back.
Sometimes, when her hand reaches the wound before he can turn her away, he lets her trace it with trembling fingers for a moment, never longer, before letting his weakness and pain slip and the vulnerability in his closing eyes is too much, and he whispers, "Lisa."
When he uses her first name, when he lets slip that endearment, that sign of a deep weakness that he can't let go, she knows to turn away, to let him tangle rough yet elegant fingers in her dark, curly hair, to make him forget, for a few moments longer, that the even pain exists.
He's damaged, after all: a vase with too many hairline fractures, a piano with too many of its strings loose or twisted or snapped. She knows when to stop and when to go; they are familiar to one another, regardless of the things they pretend at work.
She studies him by the half-light that filters in from the streetlamp and the moonlight. He's lying on his side, turned toward her, calmer than a moment before; the dream has passed, leaving him in deep sleep, in an easy slumber that relaxes his brow – unwrinkled, as it never is in wakefulness – and leaves him looking at ease, almost vulnerable. The lines in his face have cut deeper and deeper over the past five years. She misses his smile, a feature of his that she doesn't see anymore unless he's around Wilson, the way his eyes defrost and warm and look more like the ocean than ice.
Her eyes fall from his face to the angry scar on his thigh, and she traces the wound, the enormous factory of pain, and wishes that somehow, he could have been spared the heartache.
"Even the lives you save you dismiss," she whispers, tracing the curve of his jaw with gentle fingers, feeling the rough of the stubble beneath her fingers, repeating the words that he'd told her, the words that his imagination had told him. "Even your own," she adds, softly.
The luminescent blue flickers open and turns to her, half-asleep. "You sound like Wilson," he growls, eyes closing again, wearily, but a half-smile twitches his lip before he slips back into the easeful expression of sleep. "Go to sleep."
She pretends he loves her, and moves closer to him; grudgingly, he opens his arms and slips them around her, half-glad for the warmth of another body against his, a body that carefully curves itself around his leg, avoiding causing him pain even in sleep. He pretends this is only a mercy fuck, and that the only reason he comes back is for sex, and that he doesn't really care about her, because if he admits he cares, he'll hurt more than he already does.
Everybody lies.