Lisa Cuddy and Greg House are just like any other employer and employee right? Wrong! This isn’t your normal workplace relationship. Season one follows Cuddy as she battles for power with her star employee in the position she created for him. House evades clinic work and does his best to avoid any contact with patients. But despite this, Cuddy always manages to keep him in line, to a point.

When House suspects an infection is spreading throughout the hospital and is affecting newborn babies, Cuddy at first doesn’t believe it. But Cuddy’s faith in House’s ability is very strong and as we will see often, Cuddy relents to House’s pleading and eventually gives him the go-ahead for changing the treatments for the sick babies without their parents’ consent.

House’s chronic pain forces him to use the narcotic Vicodin and when Cuddy sees House popping twice as much Vicodin as when she hired him, she challenges him to quit his addiction. House goes through withdrawal and his patient suffers because of it. In the end, House admits to Wilson he is addicted, but he never knows it was Wilson’s idea for the challenge in the first place, not Cuddy’s.

Halfway through the season, we are introduced to Edward Vogler. A multi-millionaire, who has donated 100 million dollars to the hospital. With his donation, Vogler becomes the Chairman of the Board and he soon has it in for House. Cuddy was unable to convince Vogler that she had any power over House. She tried to save his job, making Vogler think she liked House. Things get out of hand and the board is forced to vote to either fire or keep House. All of the board members - including Cuddy - approve termination. Wilson is opposed, and House is saved because it wasn't unanimous. So, the board takes another vote and votes Wilson off the board. House tries to confront Cuddy, but she quickly ends the conversation by declaring that he may be a great doctor but he is not worth $100 million. But during a second voting on House, Cuddy stands up to the board, after House saved another baby. She was reminded again why House was an asset to the hospital and thereby saved House’s job, while at the same time giving back the 100 million dollars Vogler donated. Cuddy says that she voted to get rid of the lesser of two evils.

The end of season one brings the return of Stacy, House’s ex-girlfriend, with whom he lived together for five years. Her husband is ill and she is desperate. We learn that Cuddy was one of the doctors involved when House had an infarction in his leg five years prior. When he went into cardiac arrest after his first operation, Cuddy shocked him back to life. Because Stacy’s husband will need monitoring and intensive therapy after having been diagnosed by House with AIP, Cuddy offers Stacy a job at the hospital.
It was clear from episode one of the show that Cuddy would always choose House, and that she cared for him a great deal. Their constant snarky and sexy banter was a great part of establishing the show.

Season two provided more development with House and Cuddy's relationship. It revealed that the two actually knew a lot about each other, and had a long history. The first part of the season started off with Cuddy finding herself in a difficult position when a worker falls off her roof. She feels very guilty and overrules House’s treatment. House then makes sure he checks out her house and especially the bedroom for toxins and anything else that could have caused the patient’s condition. When the patient is finally diagnosed, House tells Cuddy how he feels:

House: Now would the world be a better place if people never felt guilty? […] I know this wasn’t just because it was your roof. Cuddy…you see the world as it is and you see the world as it could be. What you don’t see is what everybody else sees. The giant, gaping chasm in between.
Cuddy: House, I’m not naïve. I realize-
House: If you did, you never would have hired me. You’re not happy unless things are just right. Which means two things. You’re a good boss. And you’ll never be happy.

The relationship between House and Stacy reaches a climax and Stacy leaves the hospital. The emotional pain turns into a worse physical pain for House and he goes to Cuddy for a shot of morphine in his spine. Cuddy gives him a shot, but when House approaches Cuddy for another shot of morphine. She thinks it's curious that the pain returned after House solved the case. He says he only wants a shot, not a psych session. Cuddy calmly tells him that when she administered the shot, it was only a placebo full of saline. House realizes his pain is indeed in his mind.

When Foreman is infected with a disease that killed a cop, House pleads with Cuddy to have him do the autopsy, instead of the CDC. But Cuddy refuses. House then tries to manipulate Cuddy by introducing Foreman’s dad to her, but she doesn’t budge. We see Cuddy as she cries after Mr. Foreman and House left, but her strength holds and she is convinced she is doing the right thing.

Wilson gloats to House about Cuddy asking him out to dinner. House’s jealousy rises to the surface, but he is convinced Cuddy is up to something. House brings Wilson items from Cuddy's trash -- a receipt from a pharmacy and an empty box of Red Clover. Both doctors know that Red Clover is used for cancer. House observes that Cuddy asked an oncologist to dinner instead of any other doctor in the department. House thinks that this isn't a date but a consult. After the date, House wants to know how Wilson's dinner with Cuddy went. Wilson says that it was a real date and that cancer never came up. House asks why he is in the lab doing a PCR test from a spoon. He deduces that it must be Cuddy's spoon from dinner. Wilson admits that he's checking her saliva for cancer markers. House tells Wilson to find him when the results come in. Wilson announces to House that Cuddy is negative for all cancer markers. House goes to Cuddy's office and tells her that she doesn't have cancer. She's more than a little surprised by the test results, mainly because she didn't know that tests weren't being run. Cuddy's estrogen is too high because she is on fertility meds. Her dinner with Wilson was an audition. Cuddy confesses that she's looking for a sperm donor, not a partner.

After her confession about wanting a baby, Cuddy confides in House again when she gives him files on potential donors to read. She also asks him to administer twice-daily injections of menotropins, which are part of the IVF protocol. House is more than happy to and spends a long time making sure the area of the injection is sterile, transfixed by Cuddy’s bodacious derriere. House feels she shouldn’t pick a random guy, just because he has good genes. So, he invites one of the guys from the files for an interview, unbeknownst to Cuddy. When she enters the room while House is talking to the man, she soon realizes what House is doing and tells him to leave. While giving Cuddy another injection, House shares how he feels about her picking a donor:

House: I don’t care if you marry this guy, date this guy, go through his garbage, but you should know genes matter. Who you are matters. Find somebody you trust.
Cuddy: Someone like you?
House: Someone you like.

Later on, Cuddy visits House in his office. She wants to ask him something, but looses her resolve and just thanks him for the injections. When House asks her if she came all the way up for just that, Cuddy simply answers ‘no.’
When House is shot by the husband of a former patient of his. Before he passes out, House asks Cameron to tell Cuddy that he wants ketamine. A clinic in Germany has been treating chronic pain by inducing a coma, which basically allows the brain to reboot itself. There's a 50% chance that House's pain will never return. The banter remained but it took on a more serious and caring tone. Throughout the season it became more clear that House and Cuddy had something going on. Behind the arguments about patient treatments and Cuddy forcing House to do clinic, it was obvious they cared about each other.

Season 3 starts with Cuddy still attempting to become a mother. At first, House thinks she’s been successful and constantly jokes about it – especially about the changes that her body is supposed to be going through, firmer breasts, bigger ass – unaware that, in fact, she hasn’t been successful at all. And it’s his knowing about it that actually leads to probably one of their most heartbreaking moments – after Cuddy makes the wrong call on a case that involved a little girl, House, who is in a lot of pain that day and mad at her for not giving him more of his medication, yells at her that it’s good she never got to be a mother because she would suck at it. As Cuddy cries and shares this with Wilson, she says that people might think House has no people skills, but that’s not true, because he knows exactly how to hurt them. While it’s sad to see him hurt her, it’s also very revealing of how much his words can get to her, how much they matter. You only really get that hurt by people you care about a lot, and you can only know what hurts someone the most if you know them too well.

But as we already know from previous seasons, Cuddy’s ability to forgive him never ceases. No matter what he does, or how badly he behaves, she knows who he really is underneath the “jerk” attitude he puts up for everyone. And because she knows all this, she’s willing to even jeopardize her own career by perjuring herself for him when detective Tritter (a patient House refused to apologize to) incessantly tried to put him in jail for several reasons – including his drug use, which again, as in every season, she tried to stop, unsuccessfully. But she wasn’t aware that her attempts to help him quit Vicodin had failed. She truly believed he was recovering until she caught him using Vicodin while trying to skip work, much to her disappointment. She had, however, something to use against him this time – the fact that he’d be in jail if it wasn’t for her, something they’d use for their own manipulation games later.

The middle of season 3 is probably the huddiest phase we had ever witnessed in three years of the show. As it progresses, their feelings for each other become more and more clear. It starts with a very jealous House that will come up with whatever medical excuse he can think of to go after her, wherever she is, just to stop her from seeing someone else. Despite her annoyance for being constantly interrupted, Cuddy can’t help but come full of life around him, confident, compelling, her true self - a side of her that only House gets and no one else. Something that her date quickly picks up on:

“You should hear yourself when you’re talking to him. Nothing in the world is going on.”

A little bit after this event, we see House take on one of his craziest stunts – faking cancer, something that obviously made Cuddy really worried for him. But unlike everyone else, who went totally nuts when the (fake) news came out, she wasn’t all over him full of questions and desperate measures to save him, because she knew he’d come to her if he needed her. Which he did, even though the disease was a lie. That’s when they share one of those moments where we can see how much they enjoy each other and what they do – Cuddy laughing at House taking the chance to grab her ass as they hug, and House amusingly smirking after she gives him a “not a chance” comeback to his following her to her room.

Later in the season, House is puzzled. There’s this patient he’s sure he has already met before, but can’t really place him. Turns out, in the end, that he did know the guy but for a special reason – he’d seen Cuddy make out with him at a party. Obviously jealous, he questions her about the guy, pretending not to care. But he can’t fool her, she knows it when he’s jealous and teasingly tells him to get over her. And that’s when we have one of the best dialogues between them ever, confirming to us what we had suspected all along – they had been involved in the past!

Cuddy’s desire to have a child hasn’t gone away, and House knows it, as she gets too attached to the case of a 40-year-old pregnant woman who will die unless they kill her baby, something Cuddy will not accept. This leads her to take some desperate, crazy measures, which goes to show how much alike they are when it comes to going as far as it takes to do the right thing for their patients, and why she lets him do the crazy things he does, something no other boss in the world would do – because given the same circumstances she’d be just as crazy as him. And even though House has been pretty harsh on her about trying to get pregnant, he’s still the one Cuddy would trust to save her baby.
And the jealousy goes on, this time on House’s part, again (at least the third time we’ve seen it this season). Always observant of everything about her, he notices one day that she’s wearing extra makeup and assumes that means she was out late the previous night. Which was true, Cuddy really had been out late, with Wilson, they went to a play, which a normal thing friends do, but House has an different theory about taking women to the theater – the only reason to do that, in his opinion, is if the guy wants to have sex with her.

Needless to say, he goes nuts when he finds out Wilson took her to that play and immediately confronts him about it. Wilson, who knows too well how House feels about Cuddy, would never miss the chance to tease him about this, made House believe he might have slept with her indeed, which leaves House speechless, even though Wilson would obviously never do that. Wilson tells House he has a problem (for believing he’d do such a thing and going so crazy over it) – yeah we all know what that problem is...

While watching a patient’s family, where the father dated a girl much younger than himself, leave the hospital, Cuddy and House have a casual conversation about relationships. Cuddy says she doesn’t get May-December relationships: “Why can’t it be October/October?” – hence our shipper name, if you’re new to this thread and didn’t know where “Octobers” came from. ♥
And that’s the moment he chooses to make his move. He finally asks her out, for the first time actually. To a play. But despite his sexual theory about that, the moment is sweet, the invitation is almost shy, definitely surprising to her. Much to his –and our – disappointment, she says no to it, again because of Wilson. House is mad at Wilson, he thinks he is leading her on and just can’t accept that she’d rather go out with Wilson than him. But there’s a reason to it. She chose Wilson because he’s the safe choice – which pleased House, especially because that meant he wasn’t safe. Cool. The season closes as House loses his team and works alone to solve the case of a woman who died while trying to get to him, her only hope to be cured. While trying to figure it out in the middle of the night, Cuddy comes to see him. She knows he cares about the case. She knows he cares about them all, even he’ll never admit that to her or even to himself. And that’s the last Huddy moment of the season, a very meaningful one to most shippers, as we see, probably for the first time in three seasons, House actually complimenting her in a non-snarky way:

"The way the security light hits your legs…looks good."
"Thank you."

At the beginning of season 4 we find House alone. His old team either quit or got fired and he wants to prove to Cuddy that he can do this by himself. But he needs people to bounce ideas of off. At first, Cuddy resists, saying she is done enabling him. But she relents when House shows up at the patient’s surgery. Even though House saves the patient’s life, Cuddy still forces him to hire a team. So, he does. House hires 40 fellowship applicants and starts an elimination process, not unlike Survivor.

When House takes on the case of a fighter pilot who wishes to remain anonymous, Cuddy admonishes him about running everything past her, showing him again who’s boss. But when the patient agrees to a breast enhancement surgery to cover up another surgery, House keeps Cuddy out of the loop. But Cuddy won’t allow the surgery, so House tells her that his explanation for the boob job won’t make sense to the Board or a judge, but it will make sense to her, so she will give him permission, meaning she would also be responsible. Cuddy decides to put her faith in him again and lets him continue.

House’s elimination rounds continue as a patient is brought in to the clinic with severe burns. As House is with him, the patient sticks a knife in a light socket and is electrocuted. After his electrocution, the patient tells House he got in a car crash and he died for 97 seconds. The reason he put the knife in the light socket is because he wanted to relive that moment again. House’s need-to-know attitude and self-destructive streak get the better of him and he electrocutes himself. House survives, but because he was not there for his teams, the patient dies. This infuriates Cuddy and she holds House responsible, showing no sympathy for his actions.

Foreman is back at PPTH and Cuddy puts Foreman on House’s team again, to be her eyes and ears, much to House’s dismay. The patient House is treating suffers from Giovannini Mirror Syndrome, where one innocently picks up the attributes and senses inner thoughts of others to cope with memory loss. Wilson informs House that Giovannini patients mimic whomever they think is in charge. At Foreman’s request House and Cuddy present themselves to the patient to see who is more dominant. The patient observes and mimics House and Cuddy and at first it’s unclear who is the alpha, but in the end House is the more dominant, because the patient exclaims “You have great yabos!” resulting in a happy dance from House.

A bored House announces a contest for the fellows. House declares that the contest objective is to retrieve a pair of Cuddy's underwear and bring it to the group. When one of the fellows brings House a pair of panties, House wants to make sure they are Cuddy’s. In the hallway, House drops his Vicodin bottle so that Cuddy will bend down. He is amazed when he sees no panty line. ‘Oh. My. God!!’ he says. Cuddy can’t help but blush.

When there are only a few fellows left to pick from, House has to make a final decision on who to keep and who to fire. But he is torn about it and asks Cuddy for her opinion. At first she is taken aback a bit, shocked that he wants her advice, but when he explains that she knows this stuff, she tells him her choices.

At Princeton Plainsboro Hospital, Cuddy is busy with a hospital inspector discussing the day's accreditation review. Cuddy briefs the staff about the onsite inspection. She asks the former fellows to be on “House watch” afraid he might mess things up. House brings in a patient from his favourite daytime soap opera against the patients will. Cuddy summons House, asking him to cure the patient without committing any more felonies. He agrees but he wants the flat screen TV from the doctor's lounge in return. They bicker, but Cuddy doesn’t budge. Cuddy walks in the morgue to meet the inspector there and finds House. He pressures her for the flat screen TV to avoid any trouble. He tells her to use a safe word when she wants out, the word being ‘sweet sauce’. As the inspector enters the morgue, House starts talking to him, but before long, Cuddy blurts out the safe word. Once again, House got his way and the TV is installed in his office. But the patient is getting worse and Cuddy’s job is on the line. When Cuddy tells House this, he seems stunned. So, he tells her to wait a few minutes and then call security, so he will be the one locked up, not her. When House finally diagnoses the patient, he calls Cuddy in the middle of the night. He tells her she should have been fired and they banter again, resulting in House asking her what’s she’s wearing, before they both wish each other a good night. A perfect example of their relationship.

The season ends with a bus crash, that leaves House with a severe concussion, a cracked skull and a gap in his memory. Under medical hypnoses, House tries to access his memory. He should rest, but is sure he saw a symptom in somebody and he needs to find that person that save its life. During on of his ‘memories’, Cuddy shows up, indicating that this might not be a memory, but a fantasy, to which House replies, “If this were a fantasy, you’d be wearing this.” And Cuddy is in a naughty schoolgirl outfit, starting to strip for him. But the fantasy is cut short, because apparently, House’s subconscious would rather be diagnosing than watching her. House collapses when he comes out of it and Cuddy sends him home with a nurse and a hospital security guard to look after him, because he needs to rest. But House escapes and goes to see the patient, after which Cuddy goes home with House and sleep on his couch to make sure ‘he doesn’t make a limp for the border.’ House convinces Cuddy he is okay and he gets back on a bus to see if his memory will finally tell him who he’s looking for. But to speed up his brain, he takes Alzheimer drugs, which eventually stop his heart. Cuddy gives him mouth-to-mouth and brings him back to life. She puts his head in her lap as House tells Wilson it was Amber with him on the bus.

House offers deep brain stimulation, in case there is still something they missed. At first Wilson declines, but he wants House to do it anyway. So, House risks his life to save Amber’s. During the procedure, he suffers a seizure, which widened his skull fracture and caused a brain bleed and slips into a coma. Cuddy is by his bedside all this time and she is there when he comes out of the coma, relief covering her face. But even after he is awake, she stays by his bedside, sleeping in a chair and holding his hand.

Season 4 shows us a very well established relationship between House and Cuddy. They bicker, they banter, he does something unethical and she scolds him for it, but when it comes down to it, they care about it each other.

Season 6 starts with House admitting that he wants to be happy. And seriously trying to change, trying to overcome his drug addiction, by finding things that could distract him from his pain (cooking, diagnosing) and most importantly, being…nicer. Of course he failed to do the latter many times, but he really tried, especially with Cuddy. It’s clear how he’s completely aware of his feelings for her now, and how he wants to act on those feelings, and let her know it, now in not so subtle ways as before.

Their first scene on season 6 already shows some change, when she knocks on his door to talk to him, clearly feeling somehow responsible for his breakdown. In other times, he could have blamed it on her, he could’ve used it to make her feel guilty, and he could’ve even mocked her for being narcissistic to think she was the reason for him not going back to work. But he didn’t do any of that. Instead he reassured her that she wasn’t the reason he was leaving.

He couldn’t be gone forever, of course, because he realized doing his job actually did him good. But to be back, he needed to get his license again, by completing some required round hours, which he obviously doesn’t want to do. Which is really fun, because that’s how we get to see that the old House is still there, while he’s trying to change how he deals with himself and the people around him, his personality is still the same. He doesn’t do things the way he’s supposed to, he disrupts the students’ rounds, he shows up one day and decides to quit the next, he does what he’s always done, skip work. Until she realizes going by the book with him is pointless since he wasn’t gonna learn anything, so she just certifies that his hours have been completed even if they really haven’t. House had really been enjoying having their usual banter back – the sexual tension, as he calls it, even though she says there isn’t any, only to be surprised by him getting up real close to her, just inches apart – “You do make me feel funny.” The look on her face after he leaves makes it quite evident that he does the same to her.

It was always the wish of all Huddy shippers to find out more about how these two had met. We know it had been in Michigan, but we never knew exactly how. No more wondering anymore after season 6! When House finds out that Cuddy is going to a medical conference, he arranges to go with her, and when Wilson tells him there’s an 80’s party she’ll be going to, he just has to be there. It’s the perfect opportunity to try and get close to her outside work. Which leads us to one of the most anticipated and celebrated Huddy moment – seeing them slow dance to a song that could fit them better, Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time:

If you’re lost, you can look, and you will find me
Time after time
If you fall, I will catch you, I’ll be waiting
Time after time

House chooses this moment to reminisce the first time they danced together – med school, when they met. “No”, she says, to which he continues “I saw you, endocrinology, tracked you down”, and she stops him. It’s not that she doesn’t remember, it’s just that that wasn’t the first time they’d met. They met before that, at a bookstore. She handed her syllabus to the guy behind the counter, a guy who barely looks at her and can already tell she’s overly ambitious, has a chip on her shoulder, and knows how to party – reading her better than anyone else from the beginning. And so they go on, remembering how one thing led to another…and then didn’t. “I was gonna call you (…) figure out where things would go from there.” Cuddy is surprisingly taken aback by this confession, that he wanted to make it work with her even then, and leaves him on the dance floor not knowing what he did wrong.

It turns out that he really didn’t do anything wrong. Cuddy just can’t believe that he can be the kind of guy who’ll always be there for her. She’s a mother now, she wants stability – or so she thinks – and she thinks she’s already found that in someone else. Something that House doesn’t really take well, but tries to be ok with for the most part. He doesn’t hate Lucas, and he doesn’t resent Cuddy for moving on. But he also doesn’t give up on her; he continues to demonstrate how he feels about her and how he still wants to be with her no matter what. This is all very hard on Cuddy too. It’s hard for her to trust that he truly changed, that this isn’t just another game to him. Because at first that’s what he tries to turn it into, he does try to get in the way in the hopes that Cuddy and Lucas would break up. But when she’s smarter than him and plays with him too, he realizes that attitude isn’t working and won’t take them anywhere, because, in Cuddy’s words “It’s not fun anymore”. It hurts her not being able to believe his change, and we can see how much she wants to believe when Lucas says maybe House isn’t that bad, leaving her alone with her baby afterwards – “That would be nice wouldn’t it?” she asks Rachel.

Even though they’re still apart, Cuddy’s trust in House’s opinion when it comes to work and important decisions is still there. On a very difficult day, when she is almost losing her job, he is the one to encourage her, and to remind her why she does her job and why she won’t give up. Contrary to all of his jokes about her competence, he does admire and respect her, and is proud of her when she succeeds in the end, as can be told by how adoringly he looks and smiles at her announcing the good news to the staff. What goes on from this episode on is a series of much lighter and cuter interactions, where House shows that he can be nice to her without having a secret agenda, just doing things that he knows she will like – giving her a coffee machine, for example (cause he’s not for conventional gifts, as we know).

The hopes that this would be the season something would finally happen rose in the final episodes. To our surprise, Cuddy tries to ask House out, which he thinks she’s doing under Wilson’s influence. She looks a little bit sad that he’d think it, and says that no, that’s just her inviting him, which he still declines – “I just want us to be friends,” she says. “Funny, that’s the last thing I want us to be.” – he replies , and if she ever had any doubts of how he felt about her and whether he really meant it, there weren’t any after this moment. Despite this blunt declaration, which for House standards it’s the same as clearly stating “I want to be with you/I love you” Cuddy is still in a relationship with Lucas, and a pretty serious one, as it seems. And she’s planning on moving in together with him, which is crushing House, no matter how ok he wants to pretend he is with it. In one of his therapy sessions, his therapist, Dr. Nolan, after going around circles thinking he had a problem with Wilson’s new relationship, finally figures out that it’s all about Cuddy, that what’s been eating him is that he’s losing someone he LOVES. At the mention of the L word, House obviously doesn’t wanna hear it anymore, and accuses Nolan of being a faith healer, taking advantage of people who want to believe they can get better, because after a year of doing everything right, he’s still miserable while everyone else around him is happy.

Once House accepts that there’ll be no way but to accept Cuddy and Lucas are indeed moving in together, he decides that the mature thing to do would be giving them a housewarming gift. A book, written by her great grandfather, that he’s had for a long time and was to give it to her on a special occasion. Cuddy doesn’t really know how to respond to that, and leaves House confused, wondering if there’s any trouble going on. There isn’t…except that they’re not just moving in together, they’re actually getting engaged. While he’s been trying to pretend he is ok with the relationship, and being supportive of it somehow, the engagement he just can’t take. Which leads to a big and much needed fight. The patient is facing a situation very similar to what House’s been through in the past – to amputate a leg or not. Cuddy is in favour of amputating, while House doesn’t want to. Just like he didn’t want to amputate his own. He held on to that as if his life depended on having that leg, even if it would kill him with pain forever. And he’s doing the same to the patient, encouraging her not to amputate, this time as if this is the only thing that can be the way he wants, like at least this will be his decision, unlike everything else that’s been going on in his life. Cuddy won’t let him do this, though. As hurtful as it is, she tells him exactly what he’d needed to hear – he saved his leg, but what else does he have in his life now that everyone’s moving on?

And what follows is not only a heartbreaking confession from House, but also what finally shows Cuddy how much he has indeed changed. In front of Cuddy, he tells Hannah what happened to him, how he insisted on saving his leg and now he wishes he hadn’t – “I’m in pain, every day. It changed me. Made me a harder person…a worse person. And now…now I’m alone. You don’t wanna be like me. You have a husband who loves you, you have friends, you can start a family. You have a life. And this...is just a leg.” There aren’t even words to describe how much this moment means, not only to Huddy, but to the character of House, to the course of the show. He’s finally come to a point where he’s taking responsibility for what his life has become. If he’s in pain, it’s nobody’s fault, it’s his own, and he chose it. And not only does he see that now, he sees what it’s done to him in every way, how much he has lost. Cuddy only watches it, with a single tear streaming down her face, without a word. She sees it now; she sees what she needed to see for so long, the most vulnerable side of him, the man who isn’t afraid to expose his deepest scars, who doesn’t hide behind snarky comments anymore. She sees his true self, the man she truly loves and wants to be with.

House doesn’t know this yet, though. After losing Hannah on the way to the hospital, once again failing after doing everything right, he doesn’t see the point in not drugging himself. He’s lost everything anyway. Except that NO he has NOT lost everything! Just as he’s about to take the Vicodin and throwing all his efforts to come clean, someone shows up. “You’re gonna leap across the room and grab them out of my hand?” Cuddy says no, she won’t. She’s not there to make this decision for him – “It’s your choice if you wanna go back on drugs”. He explains he can’t see much reason not to, and wonders why else would she be there, if not to yell at him. And the reason is that she’s tired of running from him and how she feels. She finally ended it with Lucas, because she’s tired of trying to move on when all she can think about is him.

“I just need to know, if you and I can work.”
“You think I can fix myself?”
“I don’t know.”
“Cause I’m the most screwed up person in the world.”
“I know. I love you. I wish I didn’t. But I can’t help it.”

And that’s what he needs to hear, what he can’t even believe he’s hearing, and he just has to show her he feels the same way, he has to get up (for which he asks for her help, even if silently, another new thing) and be with her and kiss her with all the love he has in him – it’s the sweetest, most gentle kiss they ever shared, like he just wants to softly caress her lips with his, taking it as slow as possible, for as long as this moment can last.

“How do I know I’m not hallucinating?” he asks, voicing the fear of all of us fans.
“Did you take the Vicodin?”
“No.”
“Then I think we’re ok.”
“Yeah.”

And they’re glowing. They’re smiling, they’re happy, they’re relieved, they’re together. They’re where they’ve always wanted to be, in each other’s arms, clasped hands, and the promise of finally, for once, taking a chance at happiness. And this time for real.