House/24 - Greg House/Brittany House
Fandom: House/24
Pairing: Greg House x Brittany House (OC)
Theme Set: Gamma
Rating: PG-13 for profanity and sexual references
Backstory summary under the cut.
The Greg House/Brittany House pairing comes from theatrical_muse. House (Hugh Laurie) is recruited by a friend to provide some emergency medical backup on a CTU team heading for London, where he laid eyes on Special Agent Brittany Colefield (Eliza Dushku). When they first met, she was going to sacrifice herself to save hundreds of people from a sociopath with a bomb. The shot from an MI6 sniper misses the bad guy and hits her in the arm instead, and all hell breaks loose -- the bad guy escapes and Brittany is lying wounded. But House, together with CTU medical expert Brian Holt, removes the bullet from her arm and an unlikely attraction is born.
They start dating, and ultimately Brittany makes the decision to leave her job at CTU Los Angeles, her friends, her family and everything else to move to Princeton in order to be with the man that she loves. Now married nine months later, their love story is fraught with the usual epic complications that come up when one spouse is a doctor and the other one a gun-toting federal agent...not to mention all the other quirks when there's a twenty-four-year age difference, a nine-inch height difference, and when you live in Princeton but can't stand cold weather. Equal parts comedy and tragedy, the Brittany/House pairing is one of my favorites and I couldn't not do a set on it.
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#01 - Ring: His ring upon her finger is the one true covenant that dictates what she does with her life, and she knows it may not carry the same gravity for him, but she can't help but love him, because she knows even if he fucks it up a thousand times, he loves her.
#02 - Hero: He's fucked up, burned out, addicted, broken, dysfunctional, antisocial, cynical, juvenile, haunted, depressed, and destructive -- but her husband is still Brittany House's hero, because she knows he's got some higher plane of consciousness she'll never be able to touch, and because despite all that he's standing by her side when he doesn't have to.
#03 - Memory: Sometimes Brittany wonders what she'll really take from life when it does finally end, and the only answers she can think of involve Greg -- the memory of his kiss, his arms around her, the words he whispers when they're cuddled into each other in the middle of the night, those kinds of things that seem to mean nothing when compared to the big picture but mean more to her than anything.
#04 - Box: When she goes back to Baltimore, she can't resist going back to the homicide squad, to The Box where Pembleton and Bayliss ran the interrogations in the Adena Watson case; Greg has no idea what the deal is with this claustrophobic little space, and she's not going to tell him that it's where her childhood went to die.
#05 - Run: All he wants is to run again, and she's ready to end it all if it'll give him the chance, never mind that he'd never let her slip through his hands.
#06 - Hurricane: They called her Hurricane Bauer at the Academy -- and Greg House can vouch for the nickname, he's seen her ready to bring hell down upon anyone who so much as thinks something inappropriate about him; he's half sure his wife is a psychic on top of everything else.
#07 - Wings: Greg gives her shit for watching reruns of "Wings" on Nick at Nite, but then they can't help but wonder if they're taking after Tim Daly and Crystal Bernard, before their careers flamed out and they ended up in TV-movie hell.
#08 - Cold: He's cold sometimes, most of the time without ever meaning to be; she is the fire that reared its head, ate Tokyo, and spends forever chipping away at him with insistent flames fed by hope, romnce, idealism and everything he thought was dead.
#09 - Red: There's too much blood in this picture, Greg House thinks when his wife bursts her way into the room, her bulletproof vest and T-shirt covered in dark patches that probably aren't hers, and as if that isn't enough, Jimmy McCarron, the guy with her, peels off his top shirt and it hits the floor with a wet sound -- they want no less than bodies for daring to fuck with the man that she loves.
#10 - Drink: Greg House has to admit his wife is amusing when she's drunk -- she gets rambling, horny, and she tends to insult every group of the classic rock period known to man, including her current tirade on how Bread is a food, unless you're talking the disgusting kinds like rye or those gross specialty ones with the nuts in them, and not the appropriate name for a band.
#11 - Midnight: Watching the clock turn over to midnight always makes Brittany flinch a little, at the same time it gives her hope; her mother was murdered just minutes before midnight, but midnight means a new day, one that hopefully won't be the next longest day of her life...and her husband can see the flicker in her eyes, trying to decide which of these two things she wants to focus on.
#12 - Temptation: She's never been tempted by anyone else, because that isn't who she is, she always loves completely and she's been taking words like that literally since she was in the third grade...they call her lying, call her boring, but whenever she sees anyone else, even men she once loved and still does love, all she can see is how they're not Greg, how they can't touch her like he does, and she wonders if Greg is ever tempted when he's not looking at her.
#13 - View: It all depends on the way you look at things, and the way that his wife always seems to turn failure into new opportunity makes Greg House simultaneously think she's either a genius or insane or both -- exactly the way most people look at him, except she's better-looking and doesn't have a cane to threaten people with.
#14 - Music: He was sitting at the piano again, at some odd hour of the morning, and she could hear the sounds of the notes drifting through into the bedroom, as if turning over and finding warm sheets but no warm body wasn't clue enough; throwing on her robe, Brittany House glided through the kitchen to the living room and just lingered in the doorway, watching her husband's nimble fingers grace piano keys with
#15 - Silk: Gregory House knew one way to make his wife completely nuts, and it involved a pair of black silk boxers (and little else) and a can of whipped cream...of course, that meant having a hundred and twenty pounds of wife tackling him to the nearest flat surface, and when provoked to that level of lust, a CTU agent, no matter how small she was, could get dangerous -- sometimes she took the wind right out of him and sometimes, like right now, he felt that she could devour him just with the way she was looking at him.
#16 - Cover: Partners are supposed to protect partners, as the saying goes, get their backs when they're in trouble, cover them when they need to be covered, defend them until their very last breath; this was how Brittany House always thought of her relationship with her husband, that she needed to be ready to go to the mat for him, protect him from God only knew what that followed them home, and die for him if it came down to it -- which was why she was willing to cause a scene in front of God and the third floor of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital to defend him on this particular day.
#17 - Promise: House had learned, over nine months of living with Brittany, that she took things simply and literally -- that when she said 'forever' she meant it, that when she said 'completely' there was no hint of anyone else in her life, and when she promised him everything, she'd given him everything including her entire life sacrificed just to be with him -- which was why, listening to her hash out the plan to clear his name of everything that had happened today, he was terrified that she was going to go down in flames and it would be his fault.
#18 - Dream: House was just staring at Brittany and her two best friends as if they were all on various forms of illegal drugs while they were discussing plans for Christmas dinner...the lights, the decorating, the tree, the everything...they dream big, and big apparently means hanging upside-down off the roof while putting eight thousand lights all over the house to potentially blind the entire block.
#19 - Candle: When a hopeless romantic married a closet hopeless romantic, there were always roses and candlelight dinners, all those things that had become staples of the supposed romantic relationship...but equally as often and equally as important were the silent embraces, the random phone calls exchanged for no particular reason, and the constant reminders that even with life and death surrounding them every day, they still loved each other no matter what happened -- no matter what meaning near-death experiences, kidnappings, corruption and fuck only knew what else.
#20 - Talent: Now this was both irony and the perfect match -- a woman known for her miraculous talent at getting out of impossible situations had married a man with the absolutely frustrating talent of getting himself into all sorts of trouble.
#21 - Silence: Silence made her absolutely nuts, like it was too quiet or too slow or too just plain something, so after about two point five minutes of just gazing at each other, he says the first thing he can think of -- "You still have gorgeous eyes, by the way" -- and the sound of her laughter as she does that cute 'blush, look away and smile' routine kills the silence quite well.
#22 - Journey: "Journey?!" she says, a wild look in her eyes, laughing a little. "I will admit they made some good songs, I mean, Julian likes listening to them, but what kind of a name is that, I mean what's the journey, where's the destination, where the hell are they going--" and she cuts herself off when her husband takes the pina colada out of her hand and tells her she's not allowed to have any more before she starts making bad puns about Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
#23 - Fire: Greg House sometimes wonders if his wife is a closet pyromaniac, with all the jokes she makes about setting things on fire, but he knows if he ever really wants to see what fire looks like he just has to look in her eyes -- when she's rallying her agents, when she's interrogating the bad guy, or when she's threatening to hand him his own head on a plate, which thankfully doesn't happen too often because then he feels like she just might set him on fire.
#24 - Strength: Anyone who wanted to doubt the strength of their relationship needed only to look at Greg and Brittany House's track record -- she gave up her whole priveleged life for him, he survived kidnapping and extensive torture for her, and if being willing to sacrifice and die for each other isn't strong enough, putting those principles in motion and living up to them should prove that these two are meant to be with each other to the end of the world and probably after.
#25 - Mask: Brittany House has been living a lie for most of her life, trying to be someone she's not, trying to be the perfect child her parents wanted, trying to be the perfect agent her colleagues needed, trying to be everything they wanted and having thrown up her hands at what she wanted...only since she met Greg has she been who she wanted, and that's what his last name reminds her of, when she remembers that she carries it: the idea that she is her own woman.
#26 - Ice: The ice is their mutual enemy -- House is concerned with not tripping on black ice and killing himself, and his wife may have to be bribed in order to set foot outside of their house when it drops below forty, lest she possibly die from exposure to what her transplanted Southern Californian self refers to as a 'fucking icebox' -- so on this particular morning, they agree to not even bother and spend the day cuddled together under two blankets and a comforter, sleeping in, making out and having useless conversations about that guy that won Jeopardy a billion times.
#27 - Fall: It kills him that he can do nothing but watch her fall from grace, tell her agents she won't be coming back, pack up the contents of her office and surrender the command codes, make the heavy-hearted walk out of the office for the last time, because he knows how much she's tried to climb so high and he can't help but think that since she's met him all she's ever done is seem to tread water or see promise like this slip through her fingers.
#28 - Forgotten: When she tells him she has an older brother she didn't even know about, House has no idea what to say to his wife; even the joke about being threatened with even more bodily harm falls flat, because he knows she's uncovering a whole other life that she'd left for dead...and it has a pulse and a name, and a man she once called a friend is now family, and what the hell do you say to that?
#29 - Dance: Greg keeps insisting to her that he can't dance for obvious reasons, but every time he watches Brian twirl her around with the kind of practice that means he's had lessons in at least swing and ballroom dancing for God only knows what reason, he can't help but want to cut in and experience those four minutes of sound, motion and rhythm with her.
#30 - Body: She was willing to break her body to heal his, even if he wouldn't let her; hers had never meant anything to her anyway, and had been broken once -- twice would be acceptable if she could give him what he always had wanted.
#31 - Sacred: There are certain sacred things in Brittany's lexicon that House knows not to fuck with: you don't fuck with her family, you don't fuck with her friends, you don't fuck with Drew Brees and the San Diego Chargers, and you really, really, in the interest of staying alive, do not fuck with Adam Eaton, which was why he knew when Eaton was traded that someone was going to die, at least from how long his wife had been swearing at the top of her lungs.
#32 - Farewells: House is people-watching as he leans against the wall of the ballroom, watching her say her farewells and well-wishes to the people she's worked with all her life -- it seems like there's so goddamn many of them, all people that share things with her, memories, experiences, relationships, lives that she's touched, and it wracks him with guilt to think that she is leaving them all behind just to be with him, yet at the same time he can't help but feel pride at the idea that he's the most important in her life even over all these people who've known her for so long and so well.
#33 - World: The weight of the world bows her shoulders sometimes, after days of training innocent souls to decipher terrorists, of teaching about life and death situations, of being reminded of the moral complications and emotional crevasses that come with having to be a counterterrorism agent, but it only takes one smile from her husband and one off comment about her to remind her that this is what she's fighting for when her back is to the wall.
#34 - Formal: Holding her in his arms as they bask in the postcoital weakness that always overcomes them, House can't help but smirk a little at what he can do to her -- just an hour ago at dinner she was proper and formal, all 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir' in her evening gown with her practiced speech, and now the dress is on the floor with the rest of their clothes and he remembers quite well the moans and whispered words she breathed into his ear as he showed her just how proud he was of her and just what he could make her feel.
#35 - Fever: "You have a fever," he tells her, one hand on her chest to keep her in bed as he gives her a reproachful look to counter the pleading one in her eyes as she tries to escape, "Of...a hundred and two, I am not under any circumstances going to let you out of this bed, the world can save itself for a day while you stay here, rest, and let me take care of you, and no, I'm not listening to any cute whimpering sounds or moral protests -- you're going to sleep."
#36 - Laugh: One of the things Greg House loves most about his wife is her ability to find the humor in the situation; whenever he's had a bad day she can always make him laugh and feel better about not just firebombing the clinic on his way out the door, and this day has been particularly bad so he's hoping she's got a few good jokes about a man and a cane.
#37 - Lies: He had lied to Brittany once and never again; it had almost been the death of them that night, when he revealed the real story about his infarction, and House knew that if he lied again or about anything worse, she'd either leave him or brain him with a heavy object and then leave him, and for obvious reasons neither outcome was appealing -- so he told the truth even in this case where it would hurt her.
#38 - Forever: Brittany realized that she'd never had any real sense of a permanent forever, always thought it was malleable and organic, until she'd taken her vows with Greg on that beach in Belize -- and then she'd understood what the rest of her life had really meant.
#39 - Overwhelmed: When you have life and death in your hands every day, it's easy to feel overwhelmed, when you're the head of a medical department or the training agent in charge, sometimes it feels like they are playing their game on some massive cosmic level where the consequences of fucking up are dire...but then there's that one blissful hour called lunch in which all of that melts away and they're just another ordinary married couple, if you don't count that one has a cane, one has a loaded gun, both know how to use said items, and they're twenty-four years apart in age and prone to public displays of affection just to torment anyone who may be watching.
#40 - Whisper: It's not like they're saying things to each other they don't already know, but their whispered conversations in the dark, in the middle of the night, sometimes in the afterglow of sex, sometimes just holding each other until they fall asleep, seem to mean so much more to them, perhaps because they're at their most intimate and their most vulnerable in a world that normally demands distance and stoicism from them in everything else they go through.
#41 - Wait: Normally, Greg House knows his wife is a woman possessed of incredible patience; she may get a little frustrated, a little annoyed, or a little stressed, but she keeps her cool and she is willing to wait out any manner of things, from delays in traffic to hostage crises to fuck knows what else -- however, on this particular night he's half-naked and waiting for her, and after the day she's had, she could not possibly pounce on him fast enough, which makes him just smirk because he knows his mission is well accomplished.
#42 - Talk: It's dangerous, this game that they're playing, as she listens to his voice whispering in her ear over the phone she's got balanced on one shoulder, following his directions to the letter as he continues to tease and torment her with graphic descriptions of what he's going to do to her when he gets there; she makes a snarky comment, pulse beating faster and temperature rising, about how he's all talk and no action and he tells her there will be plenty of action when she can get herself down to the basement, which almost makes climbing down the elevator shaft to get there faster seem like a good idea.
#43 - Search: Brittany House is always searching for something -- it's what she's been paid and trained and bred to do, look for the answer, find the solution, grasp the higher meaning and then share that with the people around her who need to know -- but at least in one respect, when she laid eyes on Greg nine months ago, her search came to an end because against everyone's beliefs including her own, she ended up spending her life with the snarky, misanthropic son of a bitch who saved her life after she tried sacrificing it on national TV.
#44 - Hope: He can see the hopelessness in her tired eyes, the depression that sinks in around the thin line of her lips and the bow of her head, the fatalism that settles on her skin; he knows she's given up on ever being able to carry his child, and watching her struggle with it stabs him somewhere deep in the gut, but House can't give up -- it just means now that he has to have faith for both of them that someday they'll be able to be parents.
#45 - Eclipse: Brittany House is always noticeable by the midnight blue 2006 Mitsubishi Eclipse that stalks its way onto the scene, and Greg House figures he has it good -- nothing better than a hot sports car with an equally hot woman behind the wheel, not like he'd tell that to Brittany because she'd turn sixteen shades of pink and flustered, and then just turn from hot to cute.
#46 - Gravity: All she wants is to be normal and domestic and naive like everybody else, but watching the woman who will become his wife standing in the middle of an international incident with a loaded gun to her own jaw, Greg House thinks that she is never more beautiful than when she's standing on the edge of forever, facing the gravity of a situation that has the potential to change countless lives, if not the world.
#47 - Highway: They've been driving for hours, in an insane road trip that was totally spur of the moment and makes absolutely no sense, and it's pitch black outside and abandoned on the highway, just the way Greg House likes it -- nothing but the sound of the engine roaring as he flicks his eyes over to see his wife snoring peacefully in the passenger seat, head resting against the window, eyes fluttered shut because she knows he can make it the rest of the way without getting them lost unlike ninety-two percent of the male population.
#48 - Unknown: As Jack Davenport taught her, the one thing that really drives us crazy is fear of the unknown, and Greg House has been living with that since he married his wife, the fear that comes with the knowledge that one in three CTU agents goes home in a body bag.
#49 - Lock: "Did you lock yourself out of the car?" Brittany's laughing pretty hard now, and House just rolls his eyes, thinking that this is absolutely the last time he ever drives her car anywhere, because while his wife a) has a spare key, b) can break into her own car, c) can probably hotwire a car, he's still never going to live this down.
#50 - Breathe: The first thing he hears after the surgery is the sound of her soft breathing, and the fact that she's fallen asleep waiting for him helps House not look down and realize he's now missing his right leg; no matter that it was either this or end up in a body bag, he doesn't want to see it, yet he knows she's the reason why he didn't choose to die this time around.
Pairing: Greg House x Brittany House (OC)
Theme Set: Gamma
Rating: PG-13 for profanity and sexual references
Backstory summary under the cut.
The Greg House/Brittany House pairing comes from theatrical_muse. House (Hugh Laurie) is recruited by a friend to provide some emergency medical backup on a CTU team heading for London, where he laid eyes on Special Agent Brittany Colefield (Eliza Dushku). When they first met, she was going to sacrifice herself to save hundreds of people from a sociopath with a bomb. The shot from an MI6 sniper misses the bad guy and hits her in the arm instead, and all hell breaks loose -- the bad guy escapes and Brittany is lying wounded. But House, together with CTU medical expert Brian Holt, removes the bullet from her arm and an unlikely attraction is born.
They start dating, and ultimately Brittany makes the decision to leave her job at CTU Los Angeles, her friends, her family and everything else to move to Princeton in order to be with the man that she loves. Now married nine months later, their love story is fraught with the usual epic complications that come up when one spouse is a doctor and the other one a gun-toting federal agent...not to mention all the other quirks when there's a twenty-four-year age difference, a nine-inch height difference, and when you live in Princeton but can't stand cold weather. Equal parts comedy and tragedy, the Brittany/House pairing is one of my favorites and I couldn't not do a set on it.
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#01 - Ring: His ring upon her finger is the one true covenant that dictates what she does with her life, and she knows it may not carry the same gravity for him, but she can't help but love him, because she knows even if he fucks it up a thousand times, he loves her.
#02 - Hero: He's fucked up, burned out, addicted, broken, dysfunctional, antisocial, cynical, juvenile, haunted, depressed, and destructive -- but her husband is still Brittany House's hero, because she knows he's got some higher plane of consciousness she'll never be able to touch, and because despite all that he's standing by her side when he doesn't have to.
#03 - Memory: Sometimes Brittany wonders what she'll really take from life when it does finally end, and the only answers she can think of involve Greg -- the memory of his kiss, his arms around her, the words he whispers when they're cuddled into each other in the middle of the night, those kinds of things that seem to mean nothing when compared to the big picture but mean more to her than anything.
#04 - Box: When she goes back to Baltimore, she can't resist going back to the homicide squad, to The Box where Pembleton and Bayliss ran the interrogations in the Adena Watson case; Greg has no idea what the deal is with this claustrophobic little space, and she's not going to tell him that it's where her childhood went to die.
#05 - Run: All he wants is to run again, and she's ready to end it all if it'll give him the chance, never mind that he'd never let her slip through his hands.
#06 - Hurricane: They called her Hurricane Bauer at the Academy -- and Greg House can vouch for the nickname, he's seen her ready to bring hell down upon anyone who so much as thinks something inappropriate about him; he's half sure his wife is a psychic on top of everything else.
#07 - Wings: Greg gives her shit for watching reruns of "Wings" on Nick at Nite, but then they can't help but wonder if they're taking after Tim Daly and Crystal Bernard, before their careers flamed out and they ended up in TV-movie hell.
#08 - Cold: He's cold sometimes, most of the time without ever meaning to be; she is the fire that reared its head, ate Tokyo, and spends forever chipping away at him with insistent flames fed by hope, romnce, idealism and everything he thought was dead.
#09 - Red: There's too much blood in this picture, Greg House thinks when his wife bursts her way into the room, her bulletproof vest and T-shirt covered in dark patches that probably aren't hers, and as if that isn't enough, Jimmy McCarron, the guy with her, peels off his top shirt and it hits the floor with a wet sound -- they want no less than bodies for daring to fuck with the man that she loves.
#10 - Drink: Greg House has to admit his wife is amusing when she's drunk -- she gets rambling, horny, and she tends to insult every group of the classic rock period known to man, including her current tirade on how Bread is a food, unless you're talking the disgusting kinds like rye or those gross specialty ones with the nuts in them, and not the appropriate name for a band.
#11 - Midnight: Watching the clock turn over to midnight always makes Brittany flinch a little, at the same time it gives her hope; her mother was murdered just minutes before midnight, but midnight means a new day, one that hopefully won't be the next longest day of her life...and her husband can see the flicker in her eyes, trying to decide which of these two things she wants to focus on.
#12 - Temptation: She's never been tempted by anyone else, because that isn't who she is, she always loves completely and she's been taking words like that literally since she was in the third grade...they call her lying, call her boring, but whenever she sees anyone else, even men she once loved and still does love, all she can see is how they're not Greg, how they can't touch her like he does, and she wonders if Greg is ever tempted when he's not looking at her.
#13 - View: It all depends on the way you look at things, and the way that his wife always seems to turn failure into new opportunity makes Greg House simultaneously think she's either a genius or insane or both -- exactly the way most people look at him, except she's better-looking and doesn't have a cane to threaten people with.
#14 - Music: He was sitting at the piano again, at some odd hour of the morning, and she could hear the sounds of the notes drifting through into the bedroom, as if turning over and finding warm sheets but no warm body wasn't clue enough; throwing on her robe, Brittany House glided through the kitchen to the living room and just lingered in the doorway, watching her husband's nimble fingers grace piano keys with
#15 - Silk: Gregory House knew one way to make his wife completely nuts, and it involved a pair of black silk boxers (and little else) and a can of whipped cream...of course, that meant having a hundred and twenty pounds of wife tackling him to the nearest flat surface, and when provoked to that level of lust, a CTU agent, no matter how small she was, could get dangerous -- sometimes she took the wind right out of him and sometimes, like right now, he felt that she could devour him just with the way she was looking at him.
#16 - Cover: Partners are supposed to protect partners, as the saying goes, get their backs when they're in trouble, cover them when they need to be covered, defend them until their very last breath; this was how Brittany House always thought of her relationship with her husband, that she needed to be ready to go to the mat for him, protect him from God only knew what that followed them home, and die for him if it came down to it -- which was why she was willing to cause a scene in front of God and the third floor of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital to defend him on this particular day.
#17 - Promise: House had learned, over nine months of living with Brittany, that she took things simply and literally -- that when she said 'forever' she meant it, that when she said 'completely' there was no hint of anyone else in her life, and when she promised him everything, she'd given him everything including her entire life sacrificed just to be with him -- which was why, listening to her hash out the plan to clear his name of everything that had happened today, he was terrified that she was going to go down in flames and it would be his fault.
#18 - Dream: House was just staring at Brittany and her two best friends as if they were all on various forms of illegal drugs while they were discussing plans for Christmas dinner...the lights, the decorating, the tree, the everything...they dream big, and big apparently means hanging upside-down off the roof while putting eight thousand lights all over the house to potentially blind the entire block.
#19 - Candle: When a hopeless romantic married a closet hopeless romantic, there were always roses and candlelight dinners, all those things that had become staples of the supposed romantic relationship...but equally as often and equally as important were the silent embraces, the random phone calls exchanged for no particular reason, and the constant reminders that even with life and death surrounding them every day, they still loved each other no matter what happened -- no matter what meaning near-death experiences, kidnappings, corruption and fuck only knew what else.
#20 - Talent: Now this was both irony and the perfect match -- a woman known for her miraculous talent at getting out of impossible situations had married a man with the absolutely frustrating talent of getting himself into all sorts of trouble.
#21 - Silence: Silence made her absolutely nuts, like it was too quiet or too slow or too just plain something, so after about two point five minutes of just gazing at each other, he says the first thing he can think of -- "You still have gorgeous eyes, by the way" -- and the sound of her laughter as she does that cute 'blush, look away and smile' routine kills the silence quite well.
#22 - Journey: "Journey?!" she says, a wild look in her eyes, laughing a little. "I will admit they made some good songs, I mean, Julian likes listening to them, but what kind of a name is that, I mean what's the journey, where's the destination, where the hell are they going--" and she cuts herself off when her husband takes the pina colada out of her hand and tells her she's not allowed to have any more before she starts making bad puns about Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
#23 - Fire: Greg House sometimes wonders if his wife is a closet pyromaniac, with all the jokes she makes about setting things on fire, but he knows if he ever really wants to see what fire looks like he just has to look in her eyes -- when she's rallying her agents, when she's interrogating the bad guy, or when she's threatening to hand him his own head on a plate, which thankfully doesn't happen too often because then he feels like she just might set him on fire.
#24 - Strength: Anyone who wanted to doubt the strength of their relationship needed only to look at Greg and Brittany House's track record -- she gave up her whole priveleged life for him, he survived kidnapping and extensive torture for her, and if being willing to sacrifice and die for each other isn't strong enough, putting those principles in motion and living up to them should prove that these two are meant to be with each other to the end of the world and probably after.
#25 - Mask: Brittany House has been living a lie for most of her life, trying to be someone she's not, trying to be the perfect child her parents wanted, trying to be the perfect agent her colleagues needed, trying to be everything they wanted and having thrown up her hands at what she wanted...only since she met Greg has she been who she wanted, and that's what his last name reminds her of, when she remembers that she carries it: the idea that she is her own woman.
#26 - Ice: The ice is their mutual enemy -- House is concerned with not tripping on black ice and killing himself, and his wife may have to be bribed in order to set foot outside of their house when it drops below forty, lest she possibly die from exposure to what her transplanted Southern Californian self refers to as a 'fucking icebox' -- so on this particular morning, they agree to not even bother and spend the day cuddled together under two blankets and a comforter, sleeping in, making out and having useless conversations about that guy that won Jeopardy a billion times.
#27 - Fall: It kills him that he can do nothing but watch her fall from grace, tell her agents she won't be coming back, pack up the contents of her office and surrender the command codes, make the heavy-hearted walk out of the office for the last time, because he knows how much she's tried to climb so high and he can't help but think that since she's met him all she's ever done is seem to tread water or see promise like this slip through her fingers.
#28 - Forgotten: When she tells him she has an older brother she didn't even know about, House has no idea what to say to his wife; even the joke about being threatened with even more bodily harm falls flat, because he knows she's uncovering a whole other life that she'd left for dead...and it has a pulse and a name, and a man she once called a friend is now family, and what the hell do you say to that?
#29 - Dance: Greg keeps insisting to her that he can't dance for obvious reasons, but every time he watches Brian twirl her around with the kind of practice that means he's had lessons in at least swing and ballroom dancing for God only knows what reason, he can't help but want to cut in and experience those four minutes of sound, motion and rhythm with her.
#30 - Body: She was willing to break her body to heal his, even if he wouldn't let her; hers had never meant anything to her anyway, and had been broken once -- twice would be acceptable if she could give him what he always had wanted.
#31 - Sacred: There are certain sacred things in Brittany's lexicon that House knows not to fuck with: you don't fuck with her family, you don't fuck with her friends, you don't fuck with Drew Brees and the San Diego Chargers, and you really, really, in the interest of staying alive, do not fuck with Adam Eaton, which was why he knew when Eaton was traded that someone was going to die, at least from how long his wife had been swearing at the top of her lungs.
#32 - Farewells: House is people-watching as he leans against the wall of the ballroom, watching her say her farewells and well-wishes to the people she's worked with all her life -- it seems like there's so goddamn many of them, all people that share things with her, memories, experiences, relationships, lives that she's touched, and it wracks him with guilt to think that she is leaving them all behind just to be with him, yet at the same time he can't help but feel pride at the idea that he's the most important in her life even over all these people who've known her for so long and so well.
#33 - World: The weight of the world bows her shoulders sometimes, after days of training innocent souls to decipher terrorists, of teaching about life and death situations, of being reminded of the moral complications and emotional crevasses that come with having to be a counterterrorism agent, but it only takes one smile from her husband and one off comment about her to remind her that this is what she's fighting for when her back is to the wall.
#34 - Formal: Holding her in his arms as they bask in the postcoital weakness that always overcomes them, House can't help but smirk a little at what he can do to her -- just an hour ago at dinner she was proper and formal, all 'yes, sir' and 'no, sir' in her evening gown with her practiced speech, and now the dress is on the floor with the rest of their clothes and he remembers quite well the moans and whispered words she breathed into his ear as he showed her just how proud he was of her and just what he could make her feel.
#35 - Fever: "You have a fever," he tells her, one hand on her chest to keep her in bed as he gives her a reproachful look to counter the pleading one in her eyes as she tries to escape, "Of...a hundred and two, I am not under any circumstances going to let you out of this bed, the world can save itself for a day while you stay here, rest, and let me take care of you, and no, I'm not listening to any cute whimpering sounds or moral protests -- you're going to sleep."
#36 - Laugh: One of the things Greg House loves most about his wife is her ability to find the humor in the situation; whenever he's had a bad day she can always make him laugh and feel better about not just firebombing the clinic on his way out the door, and this day has been particularly bad so he's hoping she's got a few good jokes about a man and a cane.
#37 - Lies: He had lied to Brittany once and never again; it had almost been the death of them that night, when he revealed the real story about his infarction, and House knew that if he lied again or about anything worse, she'd either leave him or brain him with a heavy object and then leave him, and for obvious reasons neither outcome was appealing -- so he told the truth even in this case where it would hurt her.
#38 - Forever: Brittany realized that she'd never had any real sense of a permanent forever, always thought it was malleable and organic, until she'd taken her vows with Greg on that beach in Belize -- and then she'd understood what the rest of her life had really meant.
#39 - Overwhelmed: When you have life and death in your hands every day, it's easy to feel overwhelmed, when you're the head of a medical department or the training agent in charge, sometimes it feels like they are playing their game on some massive cosmic level where the consequences of fucking up are dire...but then there's that one blissful hour called lunch in which all of that melts away and they're just another ordinary married couple, if you don't count that one has a cane, one has a loaded gun, both know how to use said items, and they're twenty-four years apart in age and prone to public displays of affection just to torment anyone who may be watching.
#40 - Whisper: It's not like they're saying things to each other they don't already know, but their whispered conversations in the dark, in the middle of the night, sometimes in the afterglow of sex, sometimes just holding each other until they fall asleep, seem to mean so much more to them, perhaps because they're at their most intimate and their most vulnerable in a world that normally demands distance and stoicism from them in everything else they go through.
#41 - Wait: Normally, Greg House knows his wife is a woman possessed of incredible patience; she may get a little frustrated, a little annoyed, or a little stressed, but she keeps her cool and she is willing to wait out any manner of things, from delays in traffic to hostage crises to fuck knows what else -- however, on this particular night he's half-naked and waiting for her, and after the day she's had, she could not possibly pounce on him fast enough, which makes him just smirk because he knows his mission is well accomplished.
#42 - Talk: It's dangerous, this game that they're playing, as she listens to his voice whispering in her ear over the phone she's got balanced on one shoulder, following his directions to the letter as he continues to tease and torment her with graphic descriptions of what he's going to do to her when he gets there; she makes a snarky comment, pulse beating faster and temperature rising, about how he's all talk and no action and he tells her there will be plenty of action when she can get herself down to the basement, which almost makes climbing down the elevator shaft to get there faster seem like a good idea.
#43 - Search: Brittany House is always searching for something -- it's what she's been paid and trained and bred to do, look for the answer, find the solution, grasp the higher meaning and then share that with the people around her who need to know -- but at least in one respect, when she laid eyes on Greg nine months ago, her search came to an end because against everyone's beliefs including her own, she ended up spending her life with the snarky, misanthropic son of a bitch who saved her life after she tried sacrificing it on national TV.
#44 - Hope: He can see the hopelessness in her tired eyes, the depression that sinks in around the thin line of her lips and the bow of her head, the fatalism that settles on her skin; he knows she's given up on ever being able to carry his child, and watching her struggle with it stabs him somewhere deep in the gut, but House can't give up -- it just means now that he has to have faith for both of them that someday they'll be able to be parents.
#45 - Eclipse: Brittany House is always noticeable by the midnight blue 2006 Mitsubishi Eclipse that stalks its way onto the scene, and Greg House figures he has it good -- nothing better than a hot sports car with an equally hot woman behind the wheel, not like he'd tell that to Brittany because she'd turn sixteen shades of pink and flustered, and then just turn from hot to cute.
#46 - Gravity: All she wants is to be normal and domestic and naive like everybody else, but watching the woman who will become his wife standing in the middle of an international incident with a loaded gun to her own jaw, Greg House thinks that she is never more beautiful than when she's standing on the edge of forever, facing the gravity of a situation that has the potential to change countless lives, if not the world.
#47 - Highway: They've been driving for hours, in an insane road trip that was totally spur of the moment and makes absolutely no sense, and it's pitch black outside and abandoned on the highway, just the way Greg House likes it -- nothing but the sound of the engine roaring as he flicks his eyes over to see his wife snoring peacefully in the passenger seat, head resting against the window, eyes fluttered shut because she knows he can make it the rest of the way without getting them lost unlike ninety-two percent of the male population.
#48 - Unknown: As Jack Davenport taught her, the one thing that really drives us crazy is fear of the unknown, and Greg House has been living with that since he married his wife, the fear that comes with the knowledge that one in three CTU agents goes home in a body bag.
#49 - Lock: "Did you lock yourself out of the car?" Brittany's laughing pretty hard now, and House just rolls his eyes, thinking that this is absolutely the last time he ever drives her car anywhere, because while his wife a) has a spare key, b) can break into her own car, c) can probably hotwire a car, he's still never going to live this down.
#50 - Breathe: The first thing he hears after the surgery is the sound of her soft breathing, and the fact that she's fallen asleep waiting for him helps House not look down and realize he's now missing his right leg; no matter that it was either this or end up in a body bag, he doesn't want to see it, yet he knows she's the reason why he didn't choose to die this time around.