as if i'm not already blazed enough

You're dating me, House says, whispers, realizes with a breath-hitching antialacrity. You sought and decided, that one, there, me - or else it just happened to you, and maybe that's worse. You see Amber Volakis bottle-blonding her way through the pediatric oncology ward in kitten heels and pearls and you somehow manage to get all the same subversively violent thrill from her, her conniverring, as you do from me.

Because Amber is confident. Because Amber is controlling. Because Amber is, just a little bit, vicious.

Because Amber is classic, and she's made herself that way, perched upon not a monument of indie rock and narcotics but a pill-bottle pedestal of cream-colored compliments much too fragile ever to be slippery. The way you would hold a tiny kintsugi teapot, its molded joins and fluting spout gawky in your hand like the sugar spoon in a child-size picnic-basket teaset; that's the way Amber palms her respect.

House, tucking all his chemical advantages away in his cheek for later, is a professional addict. He's not personally nervous. Neither is he confident. He just, unfortunately, is. A black hole, of course. A bottomless pit. A wound that won't close because its once-open edges have been sewn down.

He is, perhaps, narcissistic - not clinically, necessarily, but gravitatious. Exposing the world and his immediate environs to the pernicious leach of what ails him is neither difficult nor particularly easy. Discards basic human decencies, they say. But imagine Gregory House being honest and decent. It would crawl all through you like a pile-driver.

Because House is not classic, and he never pretends: he is irritatingly, ultra-modernly, polarizing. For Amber to be unfazed by him (or somehow worse, indifferent, but gods may say that this cruel curse could never go that far) is for her to command an exorbitant, extraordinary power. And it's that power that stands her up equal to him, just as tall or taller, framed as not a contemporary or a successor but a divine reprise.

Greater than. Not just parts but sum. A salacious indignity to even draw the comparison. A gross display of monotheistic - nay, monadistic - idolatry, senseless masturbatory worship.

Have I such holy flesh? Of course, all bow when they see me. Of course, all turn their heads.

So, then, it's sensical. The theory holds without holding space for coincidence.

Even still, House must reason his way out of it. He's never been bothered to see Foreman emulating him, mirroring him, adopting all his best and worst traits, because he knows that Foreman's not having fun with it (and maybe Foreman's not having fun with it most principally because he's not in control). He knows that it will happen; he doesn't have to fight the power.

Oh my god, says House, I love the power. I am the power. I am all that will ever be.

And thus House, ever ensuring his own personal perpetuity by exclusively casting himself into the right, thinks this very reasonably, as an unsurrendered comfort, in order to avoid being wrong.

Amber Volakis doesn't deign to invite Gregory House into her own private torture cloister. Instead, she saves her entire public budget just for him, and coming full force into the light of a cold day's sunbeam only serves to make irreverent ice on the driver's side of House's car.

Maybe it hurts, just a little bit, that she's not arresting but rather enchanting. To watch her lips and only her lips move is to watch words be anointed in their sacred passage. To know that, if she is performing him, she's doing it so much better, and not while running laps, but simply by standing still.

Hurts a little bit. Makes him dizzy. Makes him snap, or say he's busy.

Consumed by her. Possessed by her. Wearing an a-line dress, for her. Watching the pearls primly line her neck and thinking that they of all things, all props, all motives are so lucky, to sit righteous as an altar-server at the slit from whence her pristine breathy judgements issue.

The hurt of being around her is a pleasant sort of pain. House marvels at it because he cannot possibly think what else to do.

Other such slits make thin, relentless red scab lines. The lines of Amber, besides her headbands and heelstraps and hems under coat, are a thick, gratuitous crimson smear, like digging your finger around in a hipbone stigmata hoping someday you'll reach the head or the heart.

Knowing your whole fist could enter this way. Knowing what it takes to cave in a chest. Doing it without so much as soft-lashed blinking.

So slow. So tender. What they mean when they say excruciating. The prey, lying rotten in an active mouth.

Is it a stretch to say that he wished Amber really could rise up and devour him the way his own feeble ouroboros never could or would?

She is dangerous. This we know. This is what the power told us so.

(The power would tell us that her colors are false and affected, that the devil is a dress-up doll, but she's as decadent as none other than herself.)

Still, she's brilliant. Still, she's white-hot, exploding lightbulbs and wineglasses and heatlamps and plexiglas and continually, unrepentantly flooding his brittle vision.

Only Amber could so dumbfound him, the free-flowing house of a thousand witless lies. Only Amber could make love of a hate like that.