greg house did not care about what the hell HR thought.

that was perhaps one of the most quintessentially house things about him- if he were to forgo his distaste for the department that forbade him from harassing cuddy or trying to fuck that hot nurse on the second floor, then who the hell would he be? certainly not himself, if you didn’t take that as an overwhelmingly rhetorical query.

so why, you may ask, was he using it as a crutch right now? the stupid department he detested like a cancer, one of the only pillars holding up one of his increasingly unsteady arguments? god, what had become of him?

in a nice and neat nutshell, you had happened to him.

you were one of his fellows. perhaps his favorite fellow among his crew of taub, thirteen, kutner and…foreman- god, he had no idea how he’d finagled his way into cuddy letting him hire four rather than the originally planned out two, even his typical master manipulation strategies didn’t end this well unless god was smiling down on him for the first time in his miserable life, but he was more grateful for it day by day.

see…you were a wrench, of sorts, in his master life plan of ‘solve cases until i drop dead via overdose or old age’. one of many wrenches, but a wrench that needed to be tended to nonetheless. because he was interested in you.

you were smart- you had to be, if you wanted to be on his team- but you were really smart, and…young, and you seemed interested in him. seriously interested.

he wasn't going to say he fell for you. no, he wouldn’t say that, because it wouldn’t be true gregory house didn’t fall for people- not in ways that ended well, or healthy, at least .but you certainly intrigued him, and he certainly found you hot enough to look at in a way that HR would *certainly disapprove of.

all of this was to say, he would not let himself get invested in you. he would not let himself get carried away in the spike that came with figuring out a new person. not this time- not again.

it’s what he always did, and against what most thought of him, he could learn from his mistakes. even if he wasn’t always the most willing to do so, in the best interest of being honest.

but it was difficult, especially when fate herself seemed hellbent on getting you two alone together. if he believed in such frivolous things like fate.

which he did not, if you were keeping track!

things were winding down after a case. the conference room always got quieter, always lulled to a slow chug rather than it’s constant, fast-paced buzzing, after a patient had been successfully cured. or unsuccessfully cured and therefore killed, depending on how fast and accurate his brain was spinning that day.

and as luck- or fate, or whatever being that seemed zeroed in on tracking him down and making his life suck even worse- would have it, you two were the only people left in the glass-surrounded room. that’s just…wonderful, isn’t it!

any other day, he would have been long gone by now. but no, not today. of course not today- the only day of his week so far that left him in actively close proximity to the one person he was trying to avoid more than he was trying to avoid anyone else on planet earth.

“don’t erase my board,” he snapped, hauling himself out of one of the uncomfortable metal chairs that he’d been sitting at, where he’d been thumbing through thirteen’s notes. she abbreviated a lot of things incorrectly. he filed that away in his mind to make fun of her about later as he brought his cane up and over the table to hit away your hand.

“just because you’re half way to the monica to my richard doesn’t mean you get special privileges.”

he emphasized the words as he limped over to you, grabbing the eraser from your hand and starting on the whiteboard himself. he gave you a look when you didn’t back up. “the wall’s glass, you know,” he replied, plastering on one of his ironic smiles before jerking his head towards the open window.

“if someone sees you ogling me like that, HR’s gonna start pissing itself.”