Sweet Charity 5--House/Buffy
“Where were you last year?” Buffy asked, and smiled a smile too sad for a girl her age.
“I ran away, you know. Changed my name and everything.”
House had never really understood why Cameron had made such a point of keeping Kleenex in his office until that moment. He offered her one(in a color he thought of as Cameron-pink) but she refused. “Having a tissue makes me cry worse,” and, for a moment in the set of her jaw, he could almost see the mythical being she purported to be. Greg House didn’t believe in mythical beings.
”But you wimped out didn’t you? Went crawling back to Mama with your tail between your legs.” Usually, he was grateful for the smallest medical pretext to incite his patients; he enjoyed the almost physical surge of power it gave him as much as the thrill of new data, but this time he wished he could tell her of his theories about time.
“It wasn’t like that,” She stood tall for five-foot-nothing, but there was no sign of decompensation.
“What if I told you that I think this Slayer thing is a bunch of crap?”
“How can you still believe that after I put your doctor in the hospital?”
“Pfft. Lucky shot. Wanting to beat up Chase is the most normal thing about you, my dear. So what was it really? Bad crowd? Oh, I know. Something highly original, right?” He put on a little girl’s voice. ‘Like, I slept with him, and then he got all cold and mean’ Boo hoo.”
“Shut up,” Unbidden, the image of Angelus’ crude taunts played in Buffy’s head, and she felt the sting of unshed tears under her eyelids.
“Make me,” House told her. “Put your hands on my crippled body and make me. Superheroes get one free.” His eyes were very blue, and his thoughts were very quiet. Could it be that she met the one person who said what he thought?
“You are *such* a jerk.” She swung at him, more out of emotion than desire to wound him, for even in her weakened state, if she’d wanted to she could have put him through the window of his fancy office. For the first time since she discovered her power in gymnastics, since Merrick showed up and her mother started always watching her out of the corner of her eye, the power rushing through her body felt like a rush. Like righteous anger, or like…
Somehow, a few stolen couplings in a crypt and the gym still left her unable to finish her thought.
It was unclear when they stopped tussling and started making out. It was almost like the same thing. Which would’ve seemed sick to Buffy if she’d been back in L.A. doing the teen-queen thing, or even back in the ‘Dale with Willow doing the hanging-in-on the margins thing. But here she was, spectrally sick, possibly dying(although she wondered how much that still mattered after she’d been “possibly dying” once a week for four years…but wasn’t she entitled to do something crazy now and then?)
And, although he seemed like an old guy in the office, his thoughts were like ones she might have, if she hadn’t been a solid C+ in science and born too late to appreciate Pink Floyd. And, somewhere in there, he had a sense of humor about himself. “ Would it help, Miss Summers?” he asked, in a mock-courtly way, his hand on her breast, “if I start out cold and mean?”