There was a time when Gregory House was happy to have been in love. When it was still new, when it was still fun. It was his first girlfriend, and he was fourteen. The cynical shell was just starting to form, but she had managed to penetrate it's thin crust. He wasn't quite used to shutting people out, not yet he wasn't.
Where every moment was magical, when all he wanted to do was sit there, and hold her hand, and give her a peck on the cheek, and act as though that was the most daring thing in the world. He wanted to be with her all the time, just to be with her. When every time they kissed, it was fireworks.
He used to think that love was the fireworks, the explosions, the highlights. He knows now that it's not, but when he was a teenager in love, that was all that had mattered to him. The fireworks, the explosions, the knowing that everything was perfect.
His first girlfriend had dumped him, and he'd hated the way he felt. His father called him weak when he moped for a week straight, and told him to grow up and be a man. Usually accompanied by a slap across the face when the tears would well up in his eyes, because nobody understood him, least of all his girlfriend.
But he'd learned how to carefully put up the shell, brick by brick. The next two girlfriends had gone much the same way as the first. They'd managed to penetrate the not-quite thickened shell, because he thought that maybe if he had a girl to love him, he'd be fine. That maybe if he had a girlfriend, then everything would be better. That the fireworks, the highlights, that they would erase everything else.
The second two had also ended much as the first two. And that was when he went to college, and for the first time a man had hit on him. And he'd decided that maybe if he could just find someone to love him, regardless of gender, he'd be fine, but this time he was the one doing the pushing away, because he learned that just because he mocked social norms, not everyone did, and he wasn't going to be with someone who was going to hide who he was.
That one had hurt, but it had felt so much better to be the one doing the pushing away. He'd worked on it, built up the shell around him, brick by brick, with every person to come in and out of his life, he built another brick up in the stone wall that was forming around him. He'd already learned that no one wanted to be with him forever.
So instead, he learned how to con them. To make them think that they wanted nothing more-because if they wanted something more, that meant exposing himself, letting them through the wall. Acted as though he didn't care. It became a game to him, a show. To see how many different people he could juggle, but all of them knowing that he didn't care.
Stacy had changed that, but just like everyone else he'd let through the wall, she'd betrayed him, and he swore off ever letting anyone through again. Every time he had, they left him with one feeling-rejection. And every time, he stood strong, and pretended it didn't matter, because he wasn't weak, he was a man, and he was damn proud of it. It was just a relationship.
Nobody still understood him, but he didn't let it show. Occasionally when it got to be too much, he'd pop a vicodin, and if the tears still started to well, he found himself slapping himself hard across the jaw, reminding himself to snap out of it, that it didn't matter, it was just another girl, just another boy, just another someone who didn't matter, because that someone wasn't him.
He didn't understand love, and he didn't want to. He and love were strangers-the closest thing he had to love was Wilson, and he supposed that Wilson was the closest thing to having a biological sibling. They shared movies, went out for dinner, and looked out for each other, just like any brothers did. And brotherly love was not real love, real love scared him. Then again, one fears what they do not understand.