Title: Gaps (and other ways of falling short)
Pairing: House/Cuddy (angst)
Spoilers: Humpty Dumpty, Skin Deep, Finding Judas, Top Secret.
Summary: Response to the leitmotif prompt in the 18coda challenge on livejournal.
Author's notes: Big thanks to elva-barr for the wonderful beta.
leitmotif (German Leitmotiv : leiten, to lead + Motiv, motif).
a melodic passage or phrase associated with a specific character, situation, or element; a dominant and recurring theme, as in a novel.
No, you can't always get what you want.
The Rolling Stones
Exactly two days after Stacy moves out of his apartment, House decides that he's going home with Cuddy.He shows up at the hospital parking lot around her clock-off time; she ignores him as she unlocks her doors. They both act as if it's not at all significant that he climbs in too.
It's in her living room that she'll manage a guarded Stacy? as her fingernails scrape the back of his neck and his hands slide under her shirt. He won't answer, and will opt instead for smoke and mirrors and for once, she won't press. She's the type to carry her transgressions on her shoulders - and mark them on his thighs - and what he'll be offering will feel too much like absolution for her to turn down.
He tells her she'll never be happy and leaves.
(It doesn't go quite like that – there was more, about giant, gaping chasms – but it's the only part Cuddy remembers when she recalls the conversation).
"By the way, why does everyone around here think we had sex?"
The scars are familiar, but this isn't. This weakness, escaping his frame and filling the room, is new.
She fills the syringe with saline and isn't sure if she's protecting him or giving up on absolution.
Everything's wet, and light diffracts strangely through the water on her eyelashes. She watches House examine the too-hot weight in her arms.
The word failed makes her navel sting.
Everything you wanted, he nearly says, but she stops the statement before it gets a chance to solidify. Those gaping chasms are perhaps becoming a little clearer.
Later, entering his office, she doesn't let her gaze drop to his leg (he'd identify the weakness; manipulate it) but she remembers waking the morning after that night with his blood under her fingernails and a persistent sense of nausea. She remembers the pattern of scars on his thigh and, irrationally, thinks of tiny embryos, dead.
There's a temperament to her character that demands everything be the way it should be, and a complex to his that refuses to give up misery. They're striving for opposite goals, but inevitably arrive at the same place: irrevocable unhappiness. She squares her shoulders. He looks up.
Their best bet is making the most of the overlap.