Title: Elegance
Summary: Even the limp when he takes a step nearer doesn't undermine his natural elegance; it adds to it. One-shot. During "Failure to Communicate."
Ships: None really, just the nostalgia of House/Stacy. A moment, nothing more, and perhaps less.
Rating: T
Words: 470. Short, almost drabble-ish. But not quite.
I know the look on his face, the glitter of his gray-blue eyes, the turning over of every word that I speak. He knows every motive and meaning behind my words, knows every emotion that floods my veins. When he touches my chin, I pull down, feeling his hand follow the familiar old trail down my neck to my shoulder to my arm.
You're a jerk.
I know.
And now he's sure; I see the darkness receding a little from the tide pool of a cloudy day, the slight smile that twitches his lip warming the chips of blue like they haven't been warmed in years. Even the limp when he takes a step nearer doesn't undermine his natural elegance; it adds to it. He's beautiful in all his cruelty and sarcasm and darkness, because there's something else beneath it all; that's what attracted me in the first place, all that time ago and now.
There's differences I notice when his lips touch mine: a little less gentility, a little more torment, but it's still as though it were five years ago. His elegant, long fingers – meant for the ebony and ivory keys – touch places that Mark would never know to touch. I realize that after all this time, we still know one another, despite everything that has been or will be. He knows things, knows almost everything, about me, probably knows things that I don't even know about me.
He's elegant in his pain and suffering, all the things that I feel when we share a kiss that shouldn't happen, but is happening. It's the new feel of stubble against my skin, and the little bit of gentility that prevails in him even though darkness reigns; it's his artistry, the ecstasy that I feel in his touch, the single second after years of loneliness that he isn't alone.
He pulls back, and I know what he's going to say.
If you hadn't just had a fight with Mark…
The lack of loneliness makes him vulnerable, the touch of sad knowing in his voice that no one else would hear saying that this is all because I'm vulnerable, too. It's not. This would have happened anyway.
For once in your life, will you shut up?
And how I want to kill the people on the other end of the phone when it rings, because when work interferes, he gets distracted, and the more information they throw at him, the more the darkness comes back into his eyes, and the farther away from me he has to pull in order to concentrate, his elegance and vulnerability vanishing as though they were never there…
…until he's considerate enough to awkwardly take the phone call downstairs, to let me get some sleep.
Through the darkness, through the pain and suffering, his elegance prevails.