Maybe it Means Nothing

***

House doesn't remember her from college. It would have been something of a trick if he did as they'd never actually met. Not really. Not that he can pin down or recall in any memorable way. He knows they were there together, at least for a couple years, but only because she’d mentioned it in passing and he’d tracked down the graduation lists. Sure enough, she hadn’t been lying.

He thinks about it from time to time. He bores easily - always has - so he's gotten rather good at living in his own headspace. Exploring possibilities and worlds and he knows that if he had any talent at all for writing out fiction, he'd be a fucking millionaire with just the short and dirty contents of his spank bank. Porn gets you money, even when you're writing it.

So he thinks about Michigan sometimes. Michigan and Cuddy and Cuddy in Michigan. Tries to imagine her walking by him in a labcoat, looking luminous in her youth, and so very serious. He thinks that she probably looks better now. The young have always held little appeal for him, physically, even when he was young. There was something... better about maturity.

Not that high, firm breasts and asses you could bounce quarters off of were anything to sneeze at. Or that you'd kick out of bed. Still, when he actually allowed himself to really think about what turned him on in person, in a person, it always went back to confidence. Gravity. Something like that.

Wilson would just say - if he ever actually said any of that to Wilson, and after the man had stopped laughing - that brunettes with great legs and breasts were his type in person. Wilson thought he was funny, and although he sometimes managed it.. not so much.

But again, he likes to try and imagine Cuddy when she was young. Tries to draw a picture of her in his head. Edit her into the backgrounds of familiar memories. Testing them out.

Sometimes he pictures her a few tables away from him in that Middle Eastern place down the street from the library. Tries to imagine her eating her rice and lamb and laughing with someone equally young while he tried to be daring and mature and stomach the Turkish coffee the owner plied him with. Other times he pictures her in a fuzzy pink hat and parka, walking by one of the many, many snowball fights out on the quad. Maybe he even hit her with a snowball, making her gasp and glare.

It never quite works though. In the fantasy, she always looks over at him, catches his attention and just smirks. That singular expression of smug amusement and exasperation completely wipes the mental babychub and rosy cheeks away, leaving the slim lines and dignity. She is so vibrantly herself, herself right now in his head, that he never gets far with the Young Greg and Young Cuddy naughty spanking time fantasy. Old Greg and Dominatrix Cuddy well... that's an entirely different kettle of fish.

He does wonder what it would have been like, if they'd met in college. Dazzled her with his wit and trim figure – and his mental Cuddy snorts at that phrase and lets him know she would have at nineteen too – before taking her somewhere and doing what grad students should do with fetching undergrads.

Oh, yes, he wants those memories. But when he's honest with himself - and he usually tries to be - he's glad he met her when he did. Because watching her walk away after a particularly good argument... Well. The reality’s better than that fantasy any day.

-fin-

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