crossover: amarilla y manos y besos
Title: Amarilla y Manos y Besos
Author: modernsaints
Pairings: Cameron/Renata Remedios, Cameron/Foreman
Rating: PG-13 for language and brief sexual content.
Summary: It's not like Cameron means to fall in love with everyone she knows. It just kind of... happens.
Warnings: If you don't like ladies makin' out with other ladies, you may not like this fic! Also, there's references to some S3 relationship drama, a one-line reference to Airborne, and another line that references Euphoria. Also, there is lots and lots of pretension here!
Notes: For crossover prompt 3, "House meets 100 Years of Solitude." (Which is a lovely, lovely novel by Gabriel García Márquez, for the record.) Rudimentary Spanish may help out here, but is not necessary. And whoever wrote this prompt - God love you. Seriously. :)
Concepción is the first one to find her, standing outside in the parking lot, forlorn, eyes wide, a shawl clutched about her neck with one hand. In the other is a scrap of unlined, heavy paper. Concepción faces her: two Hispanic women, one a softening, heavyset nurse, middle-aged; one slender with no shoes and bare arms. She follows Concepción in, although she has to be led by the hand; another nurse, Maya, helps her along to the clinic, and rolls her eyes when the woman does not say thank you. She sits and waits, and her teeth chatter, and two hours later Concepción happens to be walking by when she notices her and stops still. She kneels by the woman. She says, "¿Por que no tiene zapatas?" The woman stares at her, blank, silent.
Concepción reaches for the paper in her hand and the woman offers it, silently. "Remedios." She slips back and forth between languages, carelessly: "That's what we're all here for, chiquita, yo lo sé, come on now," lifting her up with both hands, "¿como te llamas?" Still silence. "Entonces, te llamas Remedios ahora," a soft smile, "come on, Remedios, we'll get you, ah, someone," calling out to the desk, "where can we get a translator, or somethin', we have, ah, a deaf-mute over here?"
With her back turned, she does not see Remedios swaying, but the nurse at the desk does: she is on her feet, mouth wide, hand pointed, but by the time Concepción turns around, Remedios has already collapsed on the floor.
------
House is frustrated: "How the hell do I treat a woman with no medical history who doesn't talk?"
"Even if she could talk she'd be lying," Cuddy says, and House slams his cane against the desk because she's right, and he doesn't want to admit it.
-----
She still refuses to speak, but can hear; when they are attempting a history, they have a nurse ask her, "¿Dónde es el dolor?" and she rests one hand on her forehead, lightly, as if it is too unbearable to even touch. She has the paper still in her hand - Concepción left it on the gurney, and she snatched at it as they transferred her to the bed. Every time someone new comes near, she shows it, touches her own chest.
"We know," Foreman says. "Remedios. Remedies. Soon. We have to figure out - " and then he cuts himself off, sighing, hands in his pockets, "I feel like I'm talking to an autistic kid, or something. There's probably someone in there, but..."
"But you don't want to try hard enough to get through," Cameron says, voice laced with a certain cold acid.
"But even if I could, it wouldn't make any damn difference," and the conversation is over then, and Cameron moves to take her blood pressure. She is so slender and so beautiful, and so young, and for a second, Cameron can hardly believe she has the heart of an eighty-year-old woman.
-----
The whiteboard is oddly clean: "heart failure" and "mutism".
"Tox screen was clean, so heart failure makes me think something genetic, or a structural defect." Chase shrugs and kicks his chair onto its back legs, balancing steadily, Foreman watching him with a mixure of amusement and hopeful schadenfreude. "Get an angiogram, fix whatever it is, she'll be out of here by lunch."
"One, that's my line. Two - " House pauses and swipes for the leg of the chair with his cane. Chase yelps, slamming it back onto the front legs. Foreman doesn't even attempt to cover his grin. "Just started antibiotics, just in case. Still doesn't account for the mutism."
"What makes you think the mutism's related?"
House rolls his eyes dramatically. "If it weren't recent, she'd know sign language. At the very least she'd have figured out how to, I don't know, carry around a whiteboard or something. Things are awfully damn handy." As if to demonstrate, he turns and draws a face with blank eyes and a drooling mouth, and labels it "Chase".
Foreman continues, ignoring them: "Mutism implies either something neurological, or an injury of some kind. MRI was clean, and she doesn't have bruises or cuts on her throat, so our best bet right now is an internal injury that got infected."
"Shut up, I'm busy mocking." House adds a tiny bow to Chase's hair. "And where the hell is Cameron?"
-----
She's in Remedios's room. The windows are open and the spring breeze blows in, gentle, bringing the scent of lilacs. She sits with one hand on Remedios's, a notebook on her lap, a pen on the table. "Please," she says. "Please write us something."
Remedios has large luminous eyes and tough feet, the soles thick and dirty, as if she has walked a long, long way. Her black dress lies over the back of a chair. From this angle, it resembles a nun's habit, with the sleeves sheared off - but Cameron shakes her head and the image disappears. She looks at Remedios. Long eyelashes, thick, filled with the residude of thousands of tears.
Cameron sets the notebook onto the bed. "Please," she repeats. A hopeful, last-ditch effort - she studied French but knows the basics - "¿Por favor?" Remedios looks at the paper, and the pen, and strokes it with two fingertips. When she lifts the pen, Cameron's eyes widen - she was not expecting results - but she sinks back in her chair when she sees the carefully scrawled word. Remedios, again, and then in even messier letters - Remedios is clutching the pen awkwardly, her eyes anguished, her back hunched - Mauricio, and then she is tearing at the paper, frantically, sending an entire notebook's worth flying in shreds of white, like tiny butterflies, everywhere.
"Does it hurt?" Cameron is on her feet in a second, frantic. "Are you all right? What is it?" Voice higher, frustrated, "Tell me what it is!"
Remedios puts one hand over her heart, and sinks back onto the bed.
-----
But of course none of the tests reveal internal injuries; the mutism remains a mystery. The angiogram is even less useful; cardiomyopathy, but no explanation still, and they are unsure if there is even recent pain - Cameron has no proof, save that momentary gesture. She asks Remedios, "But didn't you tell me - "
Remedios puts her hand on the table and looks out at the rosebushes. Her nails are long and jagged, as if they have not been clipped, and Cameron has the urge to cut them with scissors. Beneath her gown, her posture is stiff, nearly posed - the pain of a lumbar puncture still dug deep inside her spine. Cameron turns to Foreman and Chase and spreads her hands, helpless, and says, "So what now?"
At the window, Remedios tips her head back, as if to laugh, and stares at the ceiling. Her hands clutch the windowsill. Her hospital gown could be a dress, tattered around her knees, showing the dirt still embedded in her skin. She puts her hand over her mouth and stares, wide-eyed, and when she pulls her fingertips away, they shimmer red in the light.
-----
"We fucked this one, up, huh." House spins his cane between his hands. "Spitting blood, heart abnormalities, and mutism. None of these are like the other."
"Maybe that's it," Foreman says. "Maybe mutism isn't a symptom. Say she was born mute, in poverty, and nobody ever bothered to teach her how to communicate. If she was treated as an idiot, maybe she just learned to act like one."
"Learned helplessness. Not bad." House looks at the board, underlines mutism. "Except for the fact that she can write names."
"She can write two words, House. That's not solid proof of anything. Take it off the board."
Cameron stares at her fingernails. Next to her, Chase looks at his watch and shifts anxiously; neither of them is bored, just thinking so hard that they shift past overdrive and back into neutral. Her mind whirrs clickclickclick and nothing falls together, nothing makes sense. Finally, she agrees, "Take it off," and sighs.
Chase's head pops up. "Leptospirosis. You saw how filthy she was, her water couldn't have been much cleaner."
"In the middle of May?" Cameron says. "Kind of rare."
"Yeah, we're really used to the normal disorders around here." Chase flips his pen between his fingers, and Foreman looks at him, and Cameron looks at Foreman and the narrow groove between his eyes - a sure sign that he wants to punch someone - and she has the momentary urge to smile and pat his hand.
"Better than nothing. Get some more blood, check for that, look for brucellosis and diptheria as long as you're on there."
While they are drawing her blood, Remedios trembles, hands knotted in the sheets. Her fingernails tear jagged holes and Cameron touches her wrist, briefly, and Remedios looks up at her with the firm-set mouth of a petulant child. "Ssh," Cameron says, and kneels next to her. She wants to ask: have you ever even seen clean needles? Ever in your life? But she shuts that out of her head. She doesn't know who this fragile girl is, but she knows better than to make those judgements. Still, Remedios looks at her with those silent, judging eyes. And Cameron pulls back, keeps their hands from touching, their skin. She thinks, what will seep through your skin to mine?
But she knows the answer, from a year of hospital visits and twisting her ring around and around, and worrying herself into fevers and nausea. She knows nothing good. She stumbles a little as she steps back, holding the vials of blood; Chase moves to catch her and she stiffens up. "I'm okay," she tells him, hands shaking. "I'm okay."
-----
A handful of nurses call her "Remedios, la bonita," in soft whispers, and go about clutching their crucifixes. When Chase stops one in the hall and asks her what she's whispering, she tells him she is reciting her Hail Mary, and goes on with her movements, slow and assured.
He stares after her. The seminary likes to emerge in soft murmurs this way, reminding him you cannot leave. He shakes his head and keeps walking and tries not to think about the statues of Mary, blue-robed like a hospital gown. When he goes in to check on Remedios, her hands are folded, the fingers so slender that she appears to have no hands at all.
-----
The blood is coming from her stomach, as if she has eaten her own self and is now spitting it out, sick on her own flesh.
Or maybe, Foreman thinks, watching her look to the ceiling with her palms up and her eyes closed, maybe she's just really sick of everything living. It is not an unfair thought. She puts one hand to her heart, as if aware of her audience. He is furious and tired and wants to shake her until she speaks (oh but that is unfair, isn't it? He clenches his fists in his pockets.)
When he leans to check the IV, he sees more scraps of paper lying next to her right hand. Each one says Mauricio. Some have crudely drawn birds, or hearts; every single one has a butterfly perched somewhere on the letters.
He doesn't know what to say or do. He collects them in his palm, thinks to throw them away, and then looks at her peaceful, easy half-sleep and cannot bear to. He puts the paper back. Her hand closes about one scrap, and her mouth opens, breath catching, almost a gasp - not quite. He looks down at her, shakes his head, and turns away.
-----
Finally House decides to send them off on the bus route that leads nearest the hospital, in hopes of finding a part of town she could live in. Asking around, showing a photo. Looking for other girls with no voice and bloody mouths. None of them think it is environmental, but none of them particularly wants to be in the same room as Remedios, unnerved, despite all the logic they push through their skulls. On the bus ride Cameron sits alone and trembles, hands in her lap, looking out the window as suburban houses roll by, merging together. Chase and Foreman sit across from her.
At one point, Chase gets up and sits next to her and says, voice low, "I missed you Tuesday night."
"Mm."
"I still like you." Silence and then: "I still want to be with you."
"Go back," she whispers, and anger rushes in white heat through her stomach. She does not know if Foreman can hear them and for a moment, she is furious, filled with a high and righteous violence at him: doesn't he have any shame? How can he know that others will hear, and still say these things, leaning towards her, face hopeful and solicitous? She clenches her fists and waits for him to leave. "I said, go back."
"I can't."
Suddenly she is exhausted, unable to maintain the adrenaline rush of emotion. She slumps back into her seat. She thinks I know exactly what you mean.
-----
They come upon one neighborhood, with barefoot children and shabby fences, but nobody knows the name or face. "How lonely," Cameron says on the way back. She has made sure Foreman sits as a barrier between her and Chase.
Still, he leans forward so he can see her and says, "Yeah. Lonely."
She leans back and does not look at him. Foreman stares straight ahead, one eyebrow quirked a little. In the tiny seat of the bus she is cramped next to him so that their legs touch from knee to hip. Even through his clothes, he is warm and smells faintly of aftershave and it is difficult not to sink against him, head on the place where his shoulder meets his chest, and she startles herself with the sudden realization that she hasn't been held in months. And she's angry, and she should be able to go on like that, why is she moving ever so slowly, so carefully, to her right? Half-centimeters closer to his broad shoulders.
She tenses up and draws herself in, pulling her hips and stomach away, crossing her arms.
And as if he notices (though she knows he doesn't) Foreman shifts towards her, hand on her shoulder for a second before the bus jostles them apart, and Chase yelps as he falls off the seat. She turns and laughs. "God," she says, "You're like... a five-year-old." He looks up at her with puppy-dog eyes, and that grin, hair flopping in his face, and she can't resist smiling back.
"You're just as bad as he is," Foreman says, and she sighs and tucks back into herself and watches the scenery roll by.
-----
Cameron is the first to see it, sitting by her bed during a night shift.
Remedios rolls over in her sleep and screws her eyes up, curling into the fetal position, hands digging and digging into the pillow until she nearly rends it in half, and Cameron is at her side in a heartbeat: kneeling next to her, hair falling out of her ponytail, "here, I'm here, it's okay, it's okay," and Remedios opens her eyes slowly but surely and something dawns in her. She stretches out her hands.
The entire world stops breathing for a split second.
Her hands are cool and thin against Cameron's face, curving to cup her cheeks and jaw, the heels of her hands meeting. Cameron reaches up to take her wrists but Remedios is already pulling her close, ecstatic, her breathing fast and shallow, and Cameron knows she should be pulling back, knows whatever it is, it could be contagious, it could live in the tiniest sore at the bottom of a tooth -
- Remedios is kissing her -
There is no such thing as disease. There is no heartbeat but their own, combined, and Remedios is kissing her with her mouth open and soft, and Cameron kisses back, against all judgement. Her hands slip down from wrists to forearms to shoulders. Her bones like massive tulip blooms, cradled in her palms, brilliant and shining, her mouth biting gently at Cameron's lower lip, pulling back, meeting her again.
Time goes by (perhaps).
Remedios draws back and touches her fingertips to her mouth, and then reaches into a fold of the blanket and pulls out paper. She unfolds them from their tiny bird-shapes. One says Remedios and she gestures back and forth, pointing to her own heart, pointing to Cameron's. She unfolds another: yet another Mauricio: again, her heart, then Cameron's. She folds the papers together, puts them to her own lips, puts them to Cameron's, and she does not know what to do, she is staggering back under the heartbreaking truth of what this is, she takes the paper between her lips and bites at Remedios's fingertips and swallows the paper whole.
-----
She steps into the hall and presses her fingers to her mouth as well. But before she knows it, her hand crumples and her knuckles press into her teeth, and her face collapses in on itself, and she is crying, there in the hallway, trembling like big bright hibiscus flowers.
-----
When she comes back, Remedios is sitting up. She has taken the notebook Cameron left by the bed (oh how foolish her hope was) and she is writing, hand moving in long, looping strings, and Cameron cannot resist stepping closer in her astonishment. (That is all. Honestly. Not the magnetism of her quick breath and her wild, tangled hair; not her lips still red and swollen.)
Remedios hands her the notebook and Cameron accepts it, and moves to go, but - Remedios is so forlorn. Her eyes downcast, and her hands tugging at her gown (revealing a soft indent of skin, where her breasts meet) and Cameron knows. She moves forward and plants a kiss on Remedios's cheek, and hurries out so she does not have to see Remedios, looking at her, blowing a kiss back.
-----
Concepción changes her bedpan, her sheets. She works with María Aurelia, who has snapped a crucifix in half from rubbing it too violently; María Aurelia watches Remedios sleep and says, "Sabes que ella no es de - "
"Yo sé nada," Concepción says, cutting her off with a slash of the hand. "Yo sé lo que ellos quieren que yo sepa." There is a hint of mocking to her voice; María Aurelia likes to pry about and open files and peek through windows. But she doesn't take the hint, and continues to go on about Remedios, la bonita, el milagro and Concepción wants to say, sería un milagro si mirabas afuera de tu cabeza maldita.
But she knows as well as the rest of them: el milagro is in the bed before them, smiling and blushing when they remove the bedpan, smiling and smiling more. She reaches for paper and writes, Mauricio, as usual, and they nod at her like elderly nuns, but this time she writes something new: mi amor, mi amor.
-----
Foreman comes in that morning while Chase is getting them coffee, and Cameron pulls him over by his sleeve. "Here," she says, fumbling with the paper, half-dead from sleep loss, from confusion. Foreman cocks one eyebrow and sits down at the table.
It's Spanish, and she doesn't know anything, but she crosses her fingers that he does. She sets the notebook before him. "Read," she says, and then picks out the word labios, which is probably not obscene, but kind of sounds like it to her, right now.
There is a long silence. Foreman shifts a little, and tugs at his collar, and then looks at her with both eyebrows raised and says, "I really don't understand. She doesn't write more than two words - and definitely not in handwriting this nice - " his voice grows cooler, more appraising. "But you couldn't have written this."
"Why not?" She leans forward, feels her glasses slipping down her nose.
Foreman clears his throat. "It's pretty explicit."
For a moment, everything is released of its context, its tension, and she bursts into an easy, happy laughter. "You're saying just because I'm a woman, I can't write sexual things? Welcome to the twenty-first century, Foreman. Women have sex, and sometimes they even like it." She leans forward as she talks, restraining a giggle, and Foreman allows her a brief, tense smile. (It's morning, he hasn't had coffee - it's the best she can expect, honestly.)
Still, he shakes it off, looking at her with those same deadpan eyes. "However, women don't generally write those things in a foreign language, and then hand them to a coworker." He glances over her for a second and she feels something in her slip off-center, and he amends, "Well, in your case, to a coworker you haven't tried to sleep with."
She's silent, but perhaps the hurt shows on her face; his face softens. "Hey, I'm the one who's apparently less attractive than a guy twenty years older. If anyone's got a right to be hurt..."
" - It was never about attraction - "
"I'm not asking," he says, gentle, "for you to justify it. I'm honestly kind of grateful you never dragged me into all that."
There is a long silence, and she looks at her own hands, and her wrists, and thinks if Remedios had kissed him, he would have kissed back. If he had kissed me, I think - I think I would've kissed back too. But I think he'd have pulled away from me. And it isn't about sex (it never was) and it surely isn't love. (Except to the girl in the hospital bed.) It's just some kind of connection and it hurts like hell to have it snapped. She says, finally, "Translate it for me?"
He looks at the paper and says, "Tell me where it came from, first."
"From her."
"Nice joke."
She shakes her head, insistent, "I swear, I swear on my life."
There is another silence, brief, only a few seconds, before Foreman jumps to his feet. "Do we have - have we asked her questions? Have we gotten a real medical history? We can communicate with her now, this is huge! Why didn't you tell me this?"
"What did you think it was, if not me?"
His face closes, ever so briefly, and he steps back, setting the paper on the table. "I told you, I thought it was some practical joke. Thought House put you up to something, or you were just - nevermind, it's not important - " Before she can touch his shoulder and ask, he is off down the hallway, nearly bowling Chase over, and all Chase says is, "Something new? My beeper didn't go off."
"Yeah," Cameron says, "I guess."
-----
She can't be in Remedios's room for tests anymore. Remedios gets frantic and joyful and insists on clutching Cameron's hand through everything, and curls up against her chest, and pulls her down by her jaw to kiss her earlobes. The first time she does it, Chase wolf-whistles, and Cameron hisses, "I am humoring her in her delusions - "
"Doesn't mean it's not hot," House says, and she glares at him too and says, "Is this what it takes to get you in a patient's room? Because if so, I'd prefer you stay back in the office." House just leers some more, and makes obscene gestures with his cane, and Chase mutters something about "you wish it were that big", and pretty soon all hell breaks loose, and Cameron is nearly grateful for the strength of Remedios's arms around her shoulders.
Then she sees the veil that seems to have fallen over Foreman's eyes, and the sharp desperation in Chase's, and she wants to scream. You only love me when I'm someone I'm not. Remedios's mouth moves against her shoulder, as if she is speaking without sound. The people who matter - the people who judge harshly, who see the truth - look at her and look away.
She doesn't blame them (she looks away from the mirror just as often.)
-----
And yet, despite all the questions they route through a translator (Foreman's Spanish is passable, but not fluent) they can never get her to write anything else. Just love letters, continually poured out in the same clean script. They scour them for clues but everything is the same words repeated in different strings: te amo, te quiero, tus manos a mi espalda, tu cuerpo encima de mía.
Cameron takes the first notebook home and runs it through an online translator. The syntax is funny but she gets the gist of it: lots of pretty words, letters to a man haloed in butterflies, a man with the smell of grease on his skin, shimmering iridescence leaving its mark on Remedios, smeared on her stomach, handprints on her thighs. It's not even that obscene but she blushes to read it, to know that this is what Remedios thinks when she looks at her with that wide, bright smile. She's unsure what Remedios sees. Is she really seeing Mauricio, back in her own bed, in her apartment? Or is it a hospital and a woman and her mind creating a thin veil that blurs it just enough to be something else?
She thinks about Remedios thinking about it, and Remedios thinking about her reading it, and herself thinking about Foreman reading it. She feels her face heat up then, too, and her stomach twists. Because again: Foreman looked and was not ashamed, but what must he have thought of her? And how he responded, bland, assured of its unreality, as if to decry even the possibility of any affection between them.
She wants to say, I'm not so bad. I can't help the way my heart shakes whenever I'm around anyone. I do my best to cover it up, I swear, I swear I do.
-----
There's a reason she told Chase she was least likely to fall in love with him. No one seems to have figured it out yet. Perhaps that's for the best.
-----
Endless dissections and recreations and deconstructions: if she's hallucinating, it must be neurological. If she's vomiting blood (albeit in minute quantities) there's no reason for it to be neurological. If she can write, the inability to write may have been a symptom. "And dysgraphia is... wait for it... neurological symptom," Foreman says.
"I suppose dysgraphia also magically fixes itself?" Chase taps his fingers against the desk.
"I suppose it's easier to diagnose if we throw out every option because it's improbable. After all, we just don't feel like doing all that work, looking through improbabilities."
"I suppose you don't really mean 'we', do you?"
Cameron looks to House, prepares to smile a motherly, mocking smile - aren't they just so cute? But House is absorbed in the conversation, and she feels sidelined, knocked out. She looks down for a second before saying, a minute hesitation in her voice, "I think we've already got such a constellation, it can't hurt to put up dysgraphia."
Foreman does not smile, but he says "thank you" in this very entitled voice, and touches her hand beneath the table.
-----
Remedios has been losing weight steadily, violently; she picks at her food, and frowns. When Foreman holds a fork to her mouth, she chews listlessly, as though it takes all the energy in her bones. Eventually they resort to bringing in Cameron to try and coax her, but Remedios is quicker - she shoves the food off the tray, using it as a desk to write her notes on. Cameron sighs helplessly and tries not to be delighted when Remedios kisses her wrists. The note says, "lo siento, lo siento que no puedo hablar contigo, mi amor, mañana, mañana, yo he pasado tanto mi tiempo sin hablar, sin vivir," and Foreman's eyes get big when he reads it.
House adds "anorexia" onto the board, and they pace for awhile, each of them in their own way - House going back and forth with the insults, Foreman staring at his own interlaced fingers, Chase gnawing at anything within arm's reach. At one point, she leans over to slap his hand to keep him from biting his nails bloody. He gives her this quick thankful smile and she thinks I can't sleep with you and still be your babysitter.
Isn't that how it always goes: she can sleep with someone, or she can care for them. And each time she's sure she can get both at once. (Until she can't.) In some sick way she almost wants to crawl back to Remedios's arms, sleep together in the light crinkled hospital sheets. But it's also not what she wants. And she knows that, in some way, Remedios knows it too (a minute hesitation before she slipped into kisses and peals of laughter. Cameron's sure. She has to be.)
They are on a sixth round of debate, Chase now arguing for a psychosomatic cause. It's unlikely, but Cameron can't resist saying, "You'll diagnose conversion disorder for a planeful of people, but not one girl?"
"Cardiomyopathy doesn't just show up on a whim. Think of an explanation that doesn't suck."
"She's depressed, she's poor, she can't communicate. She could make herself a hell of a lot sicker than you think." She tries to hold herself very still and not think about how incredibly lonely a girl would have to be, to make her own heart literally break.
House stands across from her, palms on the table, cane slung over a chair. Staredown. "You would think that," he says, voice casual, "pretty rich white girl. Nobody really gets sick, they're just sad. If you just give someone a big hug, they'll get better!" And she knows he's getting frustrated when even his insults fail to make any sense, when he's run-down to the point where anything beyond the case is extraneous, too much thought, but he tries anyway because he's House and he does not get tired. He doesn't. His leg does, but he never ceases.
Something shifts together in her head. Pretty white girl and virtually every other stereotype House has managed to come up with. She jumps to her feet, crosses to the whiteboard, takes the marker before any of them realize what she is doing. She writes, loopy cursive next to House's scrawl: "anorexia nervosa"
Foreman reacts first. "That's bullshit."
"It makes perfect sense. Psychological disorders lead to psychological symptoms. The mutism, the dysgraphia, hallucinations, weight loss - a bunch of defense mechanisms for some other trauma. She makes herself throw up, she accidentally swallows a - a popsicle stick, or something, it tears a hole in her stomach, and causes the bleed. All that's left is the cardiomyopathy, and that could just be congenital disease - "
House turns on his heel (fairly quickly for a man with a bum leg.) "You're sad, therefore everyone else is sad. You won't eat a cheeseburger, therefore the patient is the one with the issue. Obviously."
"Oh, I've never seen you project onto a patient before - "
They are cut off by the quick, rapid-fire sounds of four beepers going off in a chain. They fumble and Chase is the first to mutter, "Well, fuck."
-----
"Well," House says brightly, "That shoots down your theory."
"She's dying!"
"Yeah, but she's not dying from your theory, so I don't know why you're still talking. So! What do the new bleeds tell us?"
And she stops short, and her heart catches in her throat and she realizes: they don't tell us a damn thing. She's bleeding into herself, and we'll never be able to tell her why. Because she's not stupid, she knows House has failed before and will fail again, and oh she can't bear to be around when it happens. Because sometimes it's Esther, and House turns it into a fixation, but sometimes he will just berate them, and berate them, until she collapses from grief.
She touches her throat, and tries to focus. Since when does she think like that? Even when - even when Joe died - she cried and shook and didn't eat, but some tiny part of her had always been steady and resolved to go on. To stay strong. Some tiny piece of diamond, shimmering and impossibly tough, buried in her chest where a heart should be. So why is she like this?
Remedios's mouth on hers. She touches her lips, this time, for a split second. Something besides disease, passing between them: something like love: the possibility of open arms and soft hands, of looking at the same people as always, with a new feeling of affection. Could that be it? The reason she's been leaning close, then pushing away (she thinks about sitting next to Foreman on the bus. That wasn't her. She feels assured of it. That was something Remedios planted in her, and she must simply cut it out, and she will be stable again.
She will be normal again.)
-----
She finds Chase sitting in the chapel, legs splayed, elbows on his knees. His hands are folded at his forehead. She sits behind him, barely breathing, and wants to touch his shoulder, but knows how he will take the gesture. She touches her own shoulders instead. Her arms cross and her hands tremble, closed over the rounded bones, and she breathes, and the scent of incense is in her throat.
She can hear him whispering:
"Just let her be okay, just let her go, I don't want to see her anymore" something shudders just beneath his skin, as if his muscles move like sharks under the waves, tensing. She wants to step forward and place her arms around him like a necklace. He goes on: "just take her away, just make it stop make it stop," and a crucifix falls from his clenched hands, hits the floor, makes a soft tinkling noise. As if it's no more than a toy.
-----
House tells her during a differential, "You're getting soft," and she has to restrain the urge to burst out weeping.
-----
They are in the lab when Chase sighs and looks up from a microscope and says, "You know, I think he's right."
"House is always right." Foreman doesn't miss a beat, turned away, looking at the computer. "ANCAs negative."
"About Cameron, I mean."
"I told you, I'm not interested in your sex life."
Chase looks at him, and the light reflecting off the back of his head, and how severely delineated the line is: bright and dark, skin and light. "There is none. And - and don't say, 'I don't care about that either', because this is unrelated, okay?" Foreman sighs and slumps his shoulders a little, and Chase takes it as encouragement to go on. "I was in the chapel this morning, right, and I... she came in. And she just sat down, right behind me, and didn't say anything to me, and after awhile she started..." There's a split second where he hesitates, thinks, it's too personal and then he thinks no, there's no such line anymore. "She was crying, Foreman."
Foreman looks over his shoulder. "Why were you in the chapel?"
Pause. "I was avoiding House."
Foreman just keeps looking, eyes level, not speaking, and finally Chase turns back to the microscope. He can practically hear the sarcasm: I work with a bunch of emotional fuck-ups. (But that's not Foreman; that's someone else entirely, a louder voice he's never gotten rid of. And Chase closes his eyes and shuts it off, kills the sounds.)
-----
Cameron dreams that Remedios is singing into her ear, "mi mariposa, esta noche eres mía, mi luna," and when she awakes she finds that the words reverberate in her head with a startling force. She opens a dictionary she bought (just in case, of course. Of course) and looks the words up, and finds herself blushing red at the words you're mine.
But it is nearly two in the morning, and she falls asleep with the dictionary tumbling to the side of the bed. Upon waking she accidentally kicks it under the bed entirely, and believes the entire thing to have been a hazy, ridiculous dream, and does not think of it again until late that afternoon, when a butterfly lands on the railing of the bed and Remedios begins to vomit blood again.
-----
Dr. Buendía from Pediatrics has taken to sitting by her bedside when they're not running tests, holding her hand, reading her excerpts from Octavio Paz. At first, House tries to kick him out, but ends up leaving him alone, making some sneering remark about pediatricians with hearts three sizes too big.
"The opposite of yours, huh, Grinch," Foreman says. A hint of a smirk slides across his face, just enough to raise his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth.
House pulls an ugly face, tongue stuck out. "That's Mr. Grinch to you."
"It's weird, though," Chase says, as if in the middle of some conversation none of them were invited to. Cameron looks up. "Buendía's a man, but Remedios treats him like he's no one. Cameron's a woman, and..." He trails off as if to preserve some delicacy, but instead leaves the space wide open for House's obscene gestures. Cameron resists the urge to cover her face. Foreman laughs, then cuts himself off abruptly. "Seriously, though. She writes love letters to a man. Isn't this all - isn't it a little weird?"
And to her surprise, Cameron finds some spark of rage in her belly, hot and fierce: her palms hitting the table: "They're hallucinations! They're not rational, all right?" Thinking defensive thinking I want her to get better, shut up with the tangents, can't we get back to healing? Like we're supposed to?
Chase raises his eyebrows, hands in the air, but he returns to the differential with a more appeasing tone to his voice. She settles back down. Thinking I want to protect you, Remedios, I want to be there for you.
-----
House has stolen a banana from Wilson, and is enjoying the victory in her room: she's asleep, and with Vegetative State Guy gone, he could always use a new lunch buddy. (The victory is slightly tarnished by the fact that the banana is a touch overripe. Mental note: tell Wilson he needs to hit the grocery store.)
Remedios rolls over in her sleep and makes a soft sound. Her eyelashes flutter, resting against her cheeks briefly, opening, a cocoon splitting in the warm damp air.
She sees the banana and smiles a tiny bit, and stretches out her hand, clutching it like a child for a toy. To anyone else, it would be endearing; House scowls at her and takes a bite with a snap of his teeth. "Mine." She clenches her hand open and shut again, insistent.
She is losing weight... He looks at the tray, untouched, by her bed. No wonder. Even a healthy girl could drop twenty pounds, between poverty and hospital food. He breaks off a tiny piece of banana and sets it in her palm (though he looks about furtively first to make sure Cameron, for example, is not lurking outside, prepared to accuse him of caring.)
Remedios shoves it into her mouth. Her eyes pop open, wide, and he can see her tongue poking about in her mouth. She's... disgusted? No. Surprised. It didn't taste right.
click
He picks a chunk of potato off her tray. He has to practically peel her lips open, but he gets it in her mouth; she chews stubbornly, looking miserable at the taste. But not shocked. Just the banana.
What was she expecting? His mind starts and goes and does not stop, ever.
-----
Mi casa, mi corazón. Buendía's song echoes in her head as she watches House barrel out the door and down the hallway. Mi casa she thinks. Mi país, mi amor. Mi alimento y mi alma.
When she squints into the light, halos form around everyone's faces. Mauricio in her dreams saying te regresaré, Mauricio disappearing in a whirl of butterflies, the woman stepping forward from them. The woman with tiny delicate hands and Remedios can see them, in dreams, making fluttering motions over the broad plain of her body. Hands and belly and thighs. She dreams Mauricio, ¿me has regresado? and Mauricio promising to take her to the movies, and fried plantains, and whispers mi gitano, and her mother Fernanda with candles in her eyes spitting bits of hot wax, more than hot enough to burn.
The plantains sweet and hot on their tongues. She refused to eat the bananas because of what the plantations were doing to their town. Mauricio brought her gifts, and she eventually let him make her a dress of banana leaves, but made him cut it away with fingernails and teeth. They ate slices of plantain after, sucking the starch off their fingers, off each other's lips.
-----
"All along we've gone under the assumption that she was just some Hispanic girl from the wrong side of town."
For some inane reason, Chase feels the need to put in, "A perfectly valid assumption"; House just gives him that look and Chase sighs and shuts up.
"Valid, but a lie. She's South American. That opens up a whole new set of possibilities, including..." He begins to mime a drumroll, then sighs when the three just stare at him blankly. "God damnit, do I have to spell it out? Cardiological and digestive malfunction, plus dementia. A first-year student could figure this crap out - "
Chase sits bolt upright, snapping his fingers. (Foreman cringes a bit off to the side.) "Chagas disease. Of course - "
"It still doesn't explain the mutism." Cameron has been perfectly still but she speaks now, thinking, Those hallucinations. You can't force that kind of passion. "It isn't the best explanation, it's just an explanation."
"You don't believe me?" House is gesturing with the cane now, leaning heavily on the table, eyes narrowed. "Do the goddamn tests! The mutism - all our theories about it were based on incorrect assumptions. She doesn't have to communicate, she barely speaks the language. She doesn't know a person for a thousand miles!"
How sad someone would have to be, to literally break their own heart. Cameron's chest feels as if it is about to cave inward, crumpled. Chagas can't be cured, only managed. She won't make it. The purity and force of Remedios's hands on Cameron's, her palms cupped around her cheeks, pulling Cameron in don't think about kissing her. Nobody that dramatic about an impossible love could ever survive.
(Believe me she thinks I know impossible love. Because everything is impossible. Because she cannot surmount her own desperate, clutching hands.) She stands and turns to go to the lab, and knows that House already has a whole course of drugs planned. Nothing she says or does will alter the future. She is still just as she has always been. House begins to talk about prescriptions for Remedios (once she leaves) and Cameron knows: she will not leave. She will heal from the Chagas, but her desperation, her heart split in shreds: that will send her to the graveyard.
-----
"In a way," she whispers, sitting in the chapel, "I'd almost rather have it that way."
The space does not even echo her own thoughts back. Silence absorbs everything and she thinks, no wonder Chase left. She does not think about tearstains on her own cheeks. She certainly does not think about the last time someone held her as she cried. (Foreman's hand, as he slipped into a coma: the closest she's gotten since Joe.)
When the world works like that, how can love possibly be pure? Sonnets don't speak truth. She knows that, now. (And yet Remedios says, maybe some do.)
------
In fact, when Remedios is walking through the sliding doors into the golden May sunlight, Cameron could nearly believe it is a dream.
You're dead and I'm dreaming watching you go into heaven. The hospital is just the world, sick sad tired, and you are dressed in your plain blue dress, and you are stepping barefoot into heaven.
But she's not barefoot (María Aurelia bought her shoes; in a fit of one-upping, the others proceeded to buy her a new dress, a set of hair ribbons, and a crucifix). She's walking slow, steady, her heart beating strongly now; she has a little difficulty swallowing, but ate a whole apple. The bleeds have stopped and been cauterized. And in the most heartbreaking turn of events, she looked Cameron clear in the eye and wrote, in a steady, elegant hand, "¿Dónde está?"
"Who?" And then, glancing at Foreman, him mouthing the Spanish translation, "¿Quién?"
Mauricio. Cameron's heart stuttered and fell, very delicately, like a crystal cobweb. She whispered, head tipped down, hair in her eyes, "So the haloperidal's working too, then. That's... everything, really."
"I guess it is."
Watching now, from the balcony, she thinks Where do you go now? This girl, silent beautiful, wandering into the lilacs and the peonies with her hands spread wide. The doors slide open, shimmering like opal in the light, casting prisms over the tile floors. The sunlight spills like honey. Before they discharged her, Cameron sat on the bed next to her and brushed her hair, plaited it into one long, graceful braid. The light catches a few loose strands and makes her sparkle.
The last thing she wrote, as Cameron tied the braid off: "Renata."
"Mm?"
A few more delicate movements. "Renata Remedios." Cameron nodded solemnly and left without saying goodbye. What a precious thing, to hold someone's name - to be the only one for a thousand miles who knows the true name. She did not tell Foreman. She did not tell Chase (thinking about the bright colors of the stained glass in the chapel, thinking about the color of his hair lit blue.) Certainly not House.
And yet holding it is not worth a thing at all, if Remedios continues to walk about the world with it. If she will ever prepare again to offer it to someone else.
-----
"It's - "
"Don't say sick." The twilight falls around them in waves of perfect, warm air, growing darker and cooler constantly. They are side-by-side and do not look at each other. The concrete of the curb looks rough, and she shoves her hands farther into her pockets. "Because it's not," she continues.
"I wasn't going to say that."
There's a long pause. She asks, "Where's your car?"
"In the shop. The suspension - " He catches some look in her eye, and he cuts himself off. "Never mind. What're you doing here?"
"Talking. To you. About it."
They are just a few inches apart. He's still wearing a heavy winter coat, and she feels the wind slice through gaps in her shirt, and she thinks, he's so... rational. Remedios is alive. He's happy. It's that cut-and-dry. (She knows it's not, but some vicious part of her cannot stop. She's alive, he figured out the puzzle. Isn't he just like -)
"What I was going to say is," he says, "it's concerning." A flash of a smile, teeth bright in his mouth. "Friends get concerned about each other." She has to laugh. It is sort of funny, in a way; still, she does not speak, and waits for him to go on. "Chase told me you were upset before... but this goes beyond upset. Even for you, and even for how much you normally connect with patients."
She stares out into the empty sky. Too bright for stars, too clear for even a wisp of cloud. "She seemed like she loved him so much. Like it was going to kill her. And then it didn't."
"And... you wish it had?"
"See. You'd call that sick, if I hadn't stopped you."
She looks at him with her lips parted, ever so slightly, as if holding her breath. Maybe she is and doesn't know it. The concrete is like sand beneath her feet, shifting, making her dizzy. He shifts an inch (or does she?) But she thinks nobody ever really shifts. We all just stand here and think we're holding hands when really the bridge is collapsing beneath us
He says, "I'd call it misguided. You want love to be something out of a story, or a movie - " hesitate hesitate - "Cameron, it's not like that. Love is the hard work, the day-in day-out crap." He's turned toward her now.
"Are you going to tell me a story about your parents again?"
There's a moment, and then he bursts into surprised laughter, the kind that spirals out of control until he is bent double, palms on his knees, nearly choking. She presses her hands to her mouth to keep in a giggle. "Jesus," he finally says, wiping at his eyes with the back of a hand. "You are something else."
"Yeah, well." She bites her lip. - but don't give in. And what do you know about love, anyway? And is it so wrong to want to believe -
He continues on, serene, "Whenever you get some crazy idea in your head about what love is, you end up taking it out on one of your coworkers. Quite frankly, if you decide love isn't real, I don't want to be the one you use to get over that."
It's spring, but her breath freezes in her throat.
"How dare you - "
He steps forward and both his hands are on her shoulders, firm, keeping her pressed to the ground. Keeping the concrete in place. "Hey," he says, "hey. I like you too much, okay? I don't want you to get caught up in this bullshit you tell yourself. It's not healthy, and it certainly won't make you happy."
-----
Remedios with her mouth soft and wet, insistent, slipping a cool palm under Cameron's blouse. Remedios pushing Cameron's hair aside to dip and kiss her neck. Remedios breathing slow, then fast, then gasping to breathe at all.
-----
She jerks herself back, knocking his hands off her shoulders. "It's not bullshit."
-----
If Remedios kissed him, he would've kissed back. Lie. He would have stepped back and held her hands and said lo siento, niña. He would have pulled the sheets over her body and then, once she was calm, he would've done a full neurological workup and left her lying there hollow, a husk of herself.
If he'd kissed me, I... I think I'd have kissed back. Lie. She knows she would have kissed back. (Because after seeing his father, so devoted, she thinks wouldn't it be nice? I want to grow old with fidelity. I want to spend years with that kind of intensity.)
If I'd kissed him
-----
"It is bullshit! Love doesn't have to be forever and perfect to be love, and expecting anything else will just get you hurt." He cocks his head a little. "But then again, going by your past choices, that seems to be what you like."
She's on the tips of her toes now, facing him, shoulders squared. Her voice has gone from high-pitched (angry) back down to low and deadly, deadly serious. "Don't you ever dare talk about me like that. My personal life is really none of your business, Eric."
There is a long silence. The bus pulls up, and he steps back and says, "If I piss you off enough, maybe I can save myself from your affections." And he laughs as he says it, wry and almost bittersweet, and he steps onto the bus and she watches him go away, helpless, hands open at her sides.
-----
She wakes to find a flock of butterflies on her windowsill, not moving, barely twitching with the faintest breath of wind. When she turns over, the moment hangs in a perfect balance for a split second; then the butterflies, all at once, rise up in a whirlwind and expand into her room like a cloud before disappearing back out the window.
He looked so sad. Like he knew I cared and he couldn't stop it.
She makes breakfast and tries to eat a banana and finds it sticky and heavy in her mouth. She spits it out and leaves the rest on the windowsill as a treat for the pigeons.
If I'd kissed him
Driving to work, she finds herself thinking about his car, and wondering how long it will be in the shop. Wondering what kind of car it is, and how it smells inside, and what kind of music he plays in it. How far back the seat goes - if she could prop her feet on the dashboard and fall asleep with her sunglasses on.
If I'd kissed him, I think he'd have kissed back, even though neither of us want him to.
-----
Driving down narrow one-lane roads in his car, with her legs dangling out the window, her head propped against his shoulder. She's reading a novel. Every now and then she licks her finger to turn the page. He cannot put his arm around her at this angle, but the space between his chest and shoulder is more than embrace enough. She gets to sad parts, sometimes, and turns her head up to kiss his jaw, and he makes a quick, startled sound.
"You know," she says.
"I know."
The beach is still about ten minutes away, and she shifts in her seat, excited to get out of the car, stretch, strip off the baggy T-shirt she stole out of his closet. (Even though it smells like him. She's so used to that scent, and she wants ocean breezes in her hair.) "Settle down," he says, and she pulls her feet back into the car so she can sit on her knees and turn to him and kiss his throat and face and mouth, arms tight around his neck. "I still have to drive," he says, but it's feeble at best.
Yellow butterflies make their way in and out of the open windows. She whispers in his ear, breath hot, voice low, "I'm glad - "
"I know."
"Let me tell you anyway," she says.
Author: modernsaints
Pairings: Cameron/Renata Remedios, Cameron/Foreman
Rating: PG-13 for language and brief sexual content.
Summary: It's not like Cameron means to fall in love with everyone she knows. It just kind of... happens.
Warnings: If you don't like ladies makin' out with other ladies, you may not like this fic! Also, there's references to some S3 relationship drama, a one-line reference to Airborne, and another line that references Euphoria. Also, there is lots and lots of pretension here!
Notes: For crossover prompt 3, "House meets 100 Years of Solitude." (Which is a lovely, lovely novel by Gabriel García Márquez, for the record.) Rudimentary Spanish may help out here, but is not necessary. And whoever wrote this prompt - God love you. Seriously. :)
Concepción is the first one to find her, standing outside in the parking lot, forlorn, eyes wide, a shawl clutched about her neck with one hand. In the other is a scrap of unlined, heavy paper. Concepción faces her: two Hispanic women, one a softening, heavyset nurse, middle-aged; one slender with no shoes and bare arms. She follows Concepción in, although she has to be led by the hand; another nurse, Maya, helps her along to the clinic, and rolls her eyes when the woman does not say thank you. She sits and waits, and her teeth chatter, and two hours later Concepción happens to be walking by when she notices her and stops still. She kneels by the woman. She says, "¿Por que no tiene zapatas?" The woman stares at her, blank, silent.
Concepción reaches for the paper in her hand and the woman offers it, silently. "Remedios." She slips back and forth between languages, carelessly: "That's what we're all here for, chiquita, yo lo sé, come on now," lifting her up with both hands, "¿como te llamas?" Still silence. "Entonces, te llamas Remedios ahora," a soft smile, "come on, Remedios, we'll get you, ah, someone," calling out to the desk, "where can we get a translator, or somethin', we have, ah, a deaf-mute over here?"
With her back turned, she does not see Remedios swaying, but the nurse at the desk does: she is on her feet, mouth wide, hand pointed, but by the time Concepción turns around, Remedios has already collapsed on the floor.
------
House is frustrated: "How the hell do I treat a woman with no medical history who doesn't talk?"
"Even if she could talk she'd be lying," Cuddy says, and House slams his cane against the desk because she's right, and he doesn't want to admit it.
-----
She still refuses to speak, but can hear; when they are attempting a history, they have a nurse ask her, "¿Dónde es el dolor?" and she rests one hand on her forehead, lightly, as if it is too unbearable to even touch. She has the paper still in her hand - Concepción left it on the gurney, and she snatched at it as they transferred her to the bed. Every time someone new comes near, she shows it, touches her own chest.
"We know," Foreman says. "Remedios. Remedies. Soon. We have to figure out - " and then he cuts himself off, sighing, hands in his pockets, "I feel like I'm talking to an autistic kid, or something. There's probably someone in there, but..."
"But you don't want to try hard enough to get through," Cameron says, voice laced with a certain cold acid.
"But even if I could, it wouldn't make any damn difference," and the conversation is over then, and Cameron moves to take her blood pressure. She is so slender and so beautiful, and so young, and for a second, Cameron can hardly believe she has the heart of an eighty-year-old woman.
-----
The whiteboard is oddly clean: "heart failure" and "mutism".
"Tox screen was clean, so heart failure makes me think something genetic, or a structural defect." Chase shrugs and kicks his chair onto its back legs, balancing steadily, Foreman watching him with a mixure of amusement and hopeful schadenfreude. "Get an angiogram, fix whatever it is, she'll be out of here by lunch."
"One, that's my line. Two - " House pauses and swipes for the leg of the chair with his cane. Chase yelps, slamming it back onto the front legs. Foreman doesn't even attempt to cover his grin. "Just started antibiotics, just in case. Still doesn't account for the mutism."
"What makes you think the mutism's related?"
House rolls his eyes dramatically. "If it weren't recent, she'd know sign language. At the very least she'd have figured out how to, I don't know, carry around a whiteboard or something. Things are awfully damn handy." As if to demonstrate, he turns and draws a face with blank eyes and a drooling mouth, and labels it "Chase".
Foreman continues, ignoring them: "Mutism implies either something neurological, or an injury of some kind. MRI was clean, and she doesn't have bruises or cuts on her throat, so our best bet right now is an internal injury that got infected."
"Shut up, I'm busy mocking." House adds a tiny bow to Chase's hair. "And where the hell is Cameron?"
-----
She's in Remedios's room. The windows are open and the spring breeze blows in, gentle, bringing the scent of lilacs. She sits with one hand on Remedios's, a notebook on her lap, a pen on the table. "Please," she says. "Please write us something."
Remedios has large luminous eyes and tough feet, the soles thick and dirty, as if she has walked a long, long way. Her black dress lies over the back of a chair. From this angle, it resembles a nun's habit, with the sleeves sheared off - but Cameron shakes her head and the image disappears. She looks at Remedios. Long eyelashes, thick, filled with the residude of thousands of tears.
Cameron sets the notebook onto the bed. "Please," she repeats. A hopeful, last-ditch effort - she studied French but knows the basics - "¿Por favor?" Remedios looks at the paper, and the pen, and strokes it with two fingertips. When she lifts the pen, Cameron's eyes widen - she was not expecting results - but she sinks back in her chair when she sees the carefully scrawled word. Remedios, again, and then in even messier letters - Remedios is clutching the pen awkwardly, her eyes anguished, her back hunched - Mauricio, and then she is tearing at the paper, frantically, sending an entire notebook's worth flying in shreds of white, like tiny butterflies, everywhere.
"Does it hurt?" Cameron is on her feet in a second, frantic. "Are you all right? What is it?" Voice higher, frustrated, "Tell me what it is!"
Remedios puts one hand over her heart, and sinks back onto the bed.
-----
But of course none of the tests reveal internal injuries; the mutism remains a mystery. The angiogram is even less useful; cardiomyopathy, but no explanation still, and they are unsure if there is even recent pain - Cameron has no proof, save that momentary gesture. She asks Remedios, "But didn't you tell me - "
Remedios puts her hand on the table and looks out at the rosebushes. Her nails are long and jagged, as if they have not been clipped, and Cameron has the urge to cut them with scissors. Beneath her gown, her posture is stiff, nearly posed - the pain of a lumbar puncture still dug deep inside her spine. Cameron turns to Foreman and Chase and spreads her hands, helpless, and says, "So what now?"
At the window, Remedios tips her head back, as if to laugh, and stares at the ceiling. Her hands clutch the windowsill. Her hospital gown could be a dress, tattered around her knees, showing the dirt still embedded in her skin. She puts her hand over her mouth and stares, wide-eyed, and when she pulls her fingertips away, they shimmer red in the light.
-----
"We fucked this one, up, huh." House spins his cane between his hands. "Spitting blood, heart abnormalities, and mutism. None of these are like the other."
"Maybe that's it," Foreman says. "Maybe mutism isn't a symptom. Say she was born mute, in poverty, and nobody ever bothered to teach her how to communicate. If she was treated as an idiot, maybe she just learned to act like one."
"Learned helplessness. Not bad." House looks at the board, underlines mutism. "Except for the fact that she can write names."
"She can write two words, House. That's not solid proof of anything. Take it off the board."
Cameron stares at her fingernails. Next to her, Chase looks at his watch and shifts anxiously; neither of them is bored, just thinking so hard that they shift past overdrive and back into neutral. Her mind whirrs clickclickclick and nothing falls together, nothing makes sense. Finally, she agrees, "Take it off," and sighs.
Chase's head pops up. "Leptospirosis. You saw how filthy she was, her water couldn't have been much cleaner."
"In the middle of May?" Cameron says. "Kind of rare."
"Yeah, we're really used to the normal disorders around here." Chase flips his pen between his fingers, and Foreman looks at him, and Cameron looks at Foreman and the narrow groove between his eyes - a sure sign that he wants to punch someone - and she has the momentary urge to smile and pat his hand.
"Better than nothing. Get some more blood, check for that, look for brucellosis and diptheria as long as you're on there."
While they are drawing her blood, Remedios trembles, hands knotted in the sheets. Her fingernails tear jagged holes and Cameron touches her wrist, briefly, and Remedios looks up at her with the firm-set mouth of a petulant child. "Ssh," Cameron says, and kneels next to her. She wants to ask: have you ever even seen clean needles? Ever in your life? But she shuts that out of her head. She doesn't know who this fragile girl is, but she knows better than to make those judgements. Still, Remedios looks at her with those silent, judging eyes. And Cameron pulls back, keeps their hands from touching, their skin. She thinks, what will seep through your skin to mine?
But she knows the answer, from a year of hospital visits and twisting her ring around and around, and worrying herself into fevers and nausea. She knows nothing good. She stumbles a little as she steps back, holding the vials of blood; Chase moves to catch her and she stiffens up. "I'm okay," she tells him, hands shaking. "I'm okay."
-----
A handful of nurses call her "Remedios, la bonita," in soft whispers, and go about clutching their crucifixes. When Chase stops one in the hall and asks her what she's whispering, she tells him she is reciting her Hail Mary, and goes on with her movements, slow and assured.
He stares after her. The seminary likes to emerge in soft murmurs this way, reminding him you cannot leave. He shakes his head and keeps walking and tries not to think about the statues of Mary, blue-robed like a hospital gown. When he goes in to check on Remedios, her hands are folded, the fingers so slender that she appears to have no hands at all.
-----
The blood is coming from her stomach, as if she has eaten her own self and is now spitting it out, sick on her own flesh.
Or maybe, Foreman thinks, watching her look to the ceiling with her palms up and her eyes closed, maybe she's just really sick of everything living. It is not an unfair thought. She puts one hand to her heart, as if aware of her audience. He is furious and tired and wants to shake her until she speaks (oh but that is unfair, isn't it? He clenches his fists in his pockets.)
When he leans to check the IV, he sees more scraps of paper lying next to her right hand. Each one says Mauricio. Some have crudely drawn birds, or hearts; every single one has a butterfly perched somewhere on the letters.
He doesn't know what to say or do. He collects them in his palm, thinks to throw them away, and then looks at her peaceful, easy half-sleep and cannot bear to. He puts the paper back. Her hand closes about one scrap, and her mouth opens, breath catching, almost a gasp - not quite. He looks down at her, shakes his head, and turns away.
-----
Finally House decides to send them off on the bus route that leads nearest the hospital, in hopes of finding a part of town she could live in. Asking around, showing a photo. Looking for other girls with no voice and bloody mouths. None of them think it is environmental, but none of them particularly wants to be in the same room as Remedios, unnerved, despite all the logic they push through their skulls. On the bus ride Cameron sits alone and trembles, hands in her lap, looking out the window as suburban houses roll by, merging together. Chase and Foreman sit across from her.
At one point, Chase gets up and sits next to her and says, voice low, "I missed you Tuesday night."
"Mm."
"I still like you." Silence and then: "I still want to be with you."
"Go back," she whispers, and anger rushes in white heat through her stomach. She does not know if Foreman can hear them and for a moment, she is furious, filled with a high and righteous violence at him: doesn't he have any shame? How can he know that others will hear, and still say these things, leaning towards her, face hopeful and solicitous? She clenches her fists and waits for him to leave. "I said, go back."
"I can't."
Suddenly she is exhausted, unable to maintain the adrenaline rush of emotion. She slumps back into her seat. She thinks I know exactly what you mean.
-----
They come upon one neighborhood, with barefoot children and shabby fences, but nobody knows the name or face. "How lonely," Cameron says on the way back. She has made sure Foreman sits as a barrier between her and Chase.
Still, he leans forward so he can see her and says, "Yeah. Lonely."
She leans back and does not look at him. Foreman stares straight ahead, one eyebrow quirked a little. In the tiny seat of the bus she is cramped next to him so that their legs touch from knee to hip. Even through his clothes, he is warm and smells faintly of aftershave and it is difficult not to sink against him, head on the place where his shoulder meets his chest, and she startles herself with the sudden realization that she hasn't been held in months. And she's angry, and she should be able to go on like that, why is she moving ever so slowly, so carefully, to her right? Half-centimeters closer to his broad shoulders.
She tenses up and draws herself in, pulling her hips and stomach away, crossing her arms.
And as if he notices (though she knows he doesn't) Foreman shifts towards her, hand on her shoulder for a second before the bus jostles them apart, and Chase yelps as he falls off the seat. She turns and laughs. "God," she says, "You're like... a five-year-old." He looks up at her with puppy-dog eyes, and that grin, hair flopping in his face, and she can't resist smiling back.
"You're just as bad as he is," Foreman says, and she sighs and tucks back into herself and watches the scenery roll by.
-----
Cameron is the first to see it, sitting by her bed during a night shift.
Remedios rolls over in her sleep and screws her eyes up, curling into the fetal position, hands digging and digging into the pillow until she nearly rends it in half, and Cameron is at her side in a heartbeat: kneeling next to her, hair falling out of her ponytail, "here, I'm here, it's okay, it's okay," and Remedios opens her eyes slowly but surely and something dawns in her. She stretches out her hands.
The entire world stops breathing for a split second.
Her hands are cool and thin against Cameron's face, curving to cup her cheeks and jaw, the heels of her hands meeting. Cameron reaches up to take her wrists but Remedios is already pulling her close, ecstatic, her breathing fast and shallow, and Cameron knows she should be pulling back, knows whatever it is, it could be contagious, it could live in the tiniest sore at the bottom of a tooth -
- Remedios is kissing her -
There is no such thing as disease. There is no heartbeat but their own, combined, and Remedios is kissing her with her mouth open and soft, and Cameron kisses back, against all judgement. Her hands slip down from wrists to forearms to shoulders. Her bones like massive tulip blooms, cradled in her palms, brilliant and shining, her mouth biting gently at Cameron's lower lip, pulling back, meeting her again.
Time goes by (perhaps).
Remedios draws back and touches her fingertips to her mouth, and then reaches into a fold of the blanket and pulls out paper. She unfolds them from their tiny bird-shapes. One says Remedios and she gestures back and forth, pointing to her own heart, pointing to Cameron's. She unfolds another: yet another Mauricio: again, her heart, then Cameron's. She folds the papers together, puts them to her own lips, puts them to Cameron's, and she does not know what to do, she is staggering back under the heartbreaking truth of what this is, she takes the paper between her lips and bites at Remedios's fingertips and swallows the paper whole.
-----
She steps into the hall and presses her fingers to her mouth as well. But before she knows it, her hand crumples and her knuckles press into her teeth, and her face collapses in on itself, and she is crying, there in the hallway, trembling like big bright hibiscus flowers.
-----
When she comes back, Remedios is sitting up. She has taken the notebook Cameron left by the bed (oh how foolish her hope was) and she is writing, hand moving in long, looping strings, and Cameron cannot resist stepping closer in her astonishment. (That is all. Honestly. Not the magnetism of her quick breath and her wild, tangled hair; not her lips still red and swollen.)
Remedios hands her the notebook and Cameron accepts it, and moves to go, but - Remedios is so forlorn. Her eyes downcast, and her hands tugging at her gown (revealing a soft indent of skin, where her breasts meet) and Cameron knows. She moves forward and plants a kiss on Remedios's cheek, and hurries out so she does not have to see Remedios, looking at her, blowing a kiss back.
-----
Concepción changes her bedpan, her sheets. She works with María Aurelia, who has snapped a crucifix in half from rubbing it too violently; María Aurelia watches Remedios sleep and says, "Sabes que ella no es de - "
"Yo sé nada," Concepción says, cutting her off with a slash of the hand. "Yo sé lo que ellos quieren que yo sepa." There is a hint of mocking to her voice; María Aurelia likes to pry about and open files and peek through windows. But she doesn't take the hint, and continues to go on about Remedios, la bonita, el milagro and Concepción wants to say, sería un milagro si mirabas afuera de tu cabeza maldita.
But she knows as well as the rest of them: el milagro is in the bed before them, smiling and blushing when they remove the bedpan, smiling and smiling more. She reaches for paper and writes, Mauricio, as usual, and they nod at her like elderly nuns, but this time she writes something new: mi amor, mi amor.
-----
Foreman comes in that morning while Chase is getting them coffee, and Cameron pulls him over by his sleeve. "Here," she says, fumbling with the paper, half-dead from sleep loss, from confusion. Foreman cocks one eyebrow and sits down at the table.
It's Spanish, and she doesn't know anything, but she crosses her fingers that he does. She sets the notebook before him. "Read," she says, and then picks out the word labios, which is probably not obscene, but kind of sounds like it to her, right now.
There is a long silence. Foreman shifts a little, and tugs at his collar, and then looks at her with both eyebrows raised and says, "I really don't understand. She doesn't write more than two words - and definitely not in handwriting this nice - " his voice grows cooler, more appraising. "But you couldn't have written this."
"Why not?" She leans forward, feels her glasses slipping down her nose.
Foreman clears his throat. "It's pretty explicit."
For a moment, everything is released of its context, its tension, and she bursts into an easy, happy laughter. "You're saying just because I'm a woman, I can't write sexual things? Welcome to the twenty-first century, Foreman. Women have sex, and sometimes they even like it." She leans forward as she talks, restraining a giggle, and Foreman allows her a brief, tense smile. (It's morning, he hasn't had coffee - it's the best she can expect, honestly.)
Still, he shakes it off, looking at her with those same deadpan eyes. "However, women don't generally write those things in a foreign language, and then hand them to a coworker." He glances over her for a second and she feels something in her slip off-center, and he amends, "Well, in your case, to a coworker you haven't tried to sleep with."
She's silent, but perhaps the hurt shows on her face; his face softens. "Hey, I'm the one who's apparently less attractive than a guy twenty years older. If anyone's got a right to be hurt..."
" - It was never about attraction - "
"I'm not asking," he says, gentle, "for you to justify it. I'm honestly kind of grateful you never dragged me into all that."
There is a long silence, and she looks at her own hands, and her wrists, and thinks if Remedios had kissed him, he would have kissed back. If he had kissed me, I think - I think I would've kissed back too. But I think he'd have pulled away from me. And it isn't about sex (it never was) and it surely isn't love. (Except to the girl in the hospital bed.) It's just some kind of connection and it hurts like hell to have it snapped. She says, finally, "Translate it for me?"
He looks at the paper and says, "Tell me where it came from, first."
"From her."
"Nice joke."
She shakes her head, insistent, "I swear, I swear on my life."
There is another silence, brief, only a few seconds, before Foreman jumps to his feet. "Do we have - have we asked her questions? Have we gotten a real medical history? We can communicate with her now, this is huge! Why didn't you tell me this?"
"What did you think it was, if not me?"
His face closes, ever so briefly, and he steps back, setting the paper on the table. "I told you, I thought it was some practical joke. Thought House put you up to something, or you were just - nevermind, it's not important - " Before she can touch his shoulder and ask, he is off down the hallway, nearly bowling Chase over, and all Chase says is, "Something new? My beeper didn't go off."
"Yeah," Cameron says, "I guess."
-----
She can't be in Remedios's room for tests anymore. Remedios gets frantic and joyful and insists on clutching Cameron's hand through everything, and curls up against her chest, and pulls her down by her jaw to kiss her earlobes. The first time she does it, Chase wolf-whistles, and Cameron hisses, "I am humoring her in her delusions - "
"Doesn't mean it's not hot," House says, and she glares at him too and says, "Is this what it takes to get you in a patient's room? Because if so, I'd prefer you stay back in the office." House just leers some more, and makes obscene gestures with his cane, and Chase mutters something about "you wish it were that big", and pretty soon all hell breaks loose, and Cameron is nearly grateful for the strength of Remedios's arms around her shoulders.
Then she sees the veil that seems to have fallen over Foreman's eyes, and the sharp desperation in Chase's, and she wants to scream. You only love me when I'm someone I'm not. Remedios's mouth moves against her shoulder, as if she is speaking without sound. The people who matter - the people who judge harshly, who see the truth - look at her and look away.
She doesn't blame them (she looks away from the mirror just as often.)
-----
And yet, despite all the questions they route through a translator (Foreman's Spanish is passable, but not fluent) they can never get her to write anything else. Just love letters, continually poured out in the same clean script. They scour them for clues but everything is the same words repeated in different strings: te amo, te quiero, tus manos a mi espalda, tu cuerpo encima de mía.
Cameron takes the first notebook home and runs it through an online translator. The syntax is funny but she gets the gist of it: lots of pretty words, letters to a man haloed in butterflies, a man with the smell of grease on his skin, shimmering iridescence leaving its mark on Remedios, smeared on her stomach, handprints on her thighs. It's not even that obscene but she blushes to read it, to know that this is what Remedios thinks when she looks at her with that wide, bright smile. She's unsure what Remedios sees. Is she really seeing Mauricio, back in her own bed, in her apartment? Or is it a hospital and a woman and her mind creating a thin veil that blurs it just enough to be something else?
She thinks about Remedios thinking about it, and Remedios thinking about her reading it, and herself thinking about Foreman reading it. She feels her face heat up then, too, and her stomach twists. Because again: Foreman looked and was not ashamed, but what must he have thought of her? And how he responded, bland, assured of its unreality, as if to decry even the possibility of any affection between them.
She wants to say, I'm not so bad. I can't help the way my heart shakes whenever I'm around anyone. I do my best to cover it up, I swear, I swear I do.
-----
There's a reason she told Chase she was least likely to fall in love with him. No one seems to have figured it out yet. Perhaps that's for the best.
-----
Endless dissections and recreations and deconstructions: if she's hallucinating, it must be neurological. If she's vomiting blood (albeit in minute quantities) there's no reason for it to be neurological. If she can write, the inability to write may have been a symptom. "And dysgraphia is... wait for it... neurological symptom," Foreman says.
"I suppose dysgraphia also magically fixes itself?" Chase taps his fingers against the desk.
"I suppose it's easier to diagnose if we throw out every option because it's improbable. After all, we just don't feel like doing all that work, looking through improbabilities."
"I suppose you don't really mean 'we', do you?"
Cameron looks to House, prepares to smile a motherly, mocking smile - aren't they just so cute? But House is absorbed in the conversation, and she feels sidelined, knocked out. She looks down for a second before saying, a minute hesitation in her voice, "I think we've already got such a constellation, it can't hurt to put up dysgraphia."
Foreman does not smile, but he says "thank you" in this very entitled voice, and touches her hand beneath the table.
-----
Remedios has been losing weight steadily, violently; she picks at her food, and frowns. When Foreman holds a fork to her mouth, she chews listlessly, as though it takes all the energy in her bones. Eventually they resort to bringing in Cameron to try and coax her, but Remedios is quicker - she shoves the food off the tray, using it as a desk to write her notes on. Cameron sighs helplessly and tries not to be delighted when Remedios kisses her wrists. The note says, "lo siento, lo siento que no puedo hablar contigo, mi amor, mañana, mañana, yo he pasado tanto mi tiempo sin hablar, sin vivir," and Foreman's eyes get big when he reads it.
House adds "anorexia" onto the board, and they pace for awhile, each of them in their own way - House going back and forth with the insults, Foreman staring at his own interlaced fingers, Chase gnawing at anything within arm's reach. At one point, she leans over to slap his hand to keep him from biting his nails bloody. He gives her this quick thankful smile and she thinks I can't sleep with you and still be your babysitter.
Isn't that how it always goes: she can sleep with someone, or she can care for them. And each time she's sure she can get both at once. (Until she can't.) In some sick way she almost wants to crawl back to Remedios's arms, sleep together in the light crinkled hospital sheets. But it's also not what she wants. And she knows that, in some way, Remedios knows it too (a minute hesitation before she slipped into kisses and peals of laughter. Cameron's sure. She has to be.)
They are on a sixth round of debate, Chase now arguing for a psychosomatic cause. It's unlikely, but Cameron can't resist saying, "You'll diagnose conversion disorder for a planeful of people, but not one girl?"
"Cardiomyopathy doesn't just show up on a whim. Think of an explanation that doesn't suck."
"She's depressed, she's poor, she can't communicate. She could make herself a hell of a lot sicker than you think." She tries to hold herself very still and not think about how incredibly lonely a girl would have to be, to make her own heart literally break.
House stands across from her, palms on the table, cane slung over a chair. Staredown. "You would think that," he says, voice casual, "pretty rich white girl. Nobody really gets sick, they're just sad. If you just give someone a big hug, they'll get better!" And she knows he's getting frustrated when even his insults fail to make any sense, when he's run-down to the point where anything beyond the case is extraneous, too much thought, but he tries anyway because he's House and he does not get tired. He doesn't. His leg does, but he never ceases.
Something shifts together in her head. Pretty white girl and virtually every other stereotype House has managed to come up with. She jumps to her feet, crosses to the whiteboard, takes the marker before any of them realize what she is doing. She writes, loopy cursive next to House's scrawl: "anorexia nervosa"
Foreman reacts first. "That's bullshit."
"It makes perfect sense. Psychological disorders lead to psychological symptoms. The mutism, the dysgraphia, hallucinations, weight loss - a bunch of defense mechanisms for some other trauma. She makes herself throw up, she accidentally swallows a - a popsicle stick, or something, it tears a hole in her stomach, and causes the bleed. All that's left is the cardiomyopathy, and that could just be congenital disease - "
House turns on his heel (fairly quickly for a man with a bum leg.) "You're sad, therefore everyone else is sad. You won't eat a cheeseburger, therefore the patient is the one with the issue. Obviously."
"Oh, I've never seen you project onto a patient before - "
They are cut off by the quick, rapid-fire sounds of four beepers going off in a chain. They fumble and Chase is the first to mutter, "Well, fuck."
-----
"Well," House says brightly, "That shoots down your theory."
"She's dying!"
"Yeah, but she's not dying from your theory, so I don't know why you're still talking. So! What do the new bleeds tell us?"
And she stops short, and her heart catches in her throat and she realizes: they don't tell us a damn thing. She's bleeding into herself, and we'll never be able to tell her why. Because she's not stupid, she knows House has failed before and will fail again, and oh she can't bear to be around when it happens. Because sometimes it's Esther, and House turns it into a fixation, but sometimes he will just berate them, and berate them, until she collapses from grief.
She touches her throat, and tries to focus. Since when does she think like that? Even when - even when Joe died - she cried and shook and didn't eat, but some tiny part of her had always been steady and resolved to go on. To stay strong. Some tiny piece of diamond, shimmering and impossibly tough, buried in her chest where a heart should be. So why is she like this?
Remedios's mouth on hers. She touches her lips, this time, for a split second. Something besides disease, passing between them: something like love: the possibility of open arms and soft hands, of looking at the same people as always, with a new feeling of affection. Could that be it? The reason she's been leaning close, then pushing away (she thinks about sitting next to Foreman on the bus. That wasn't her. She feels assured of it. That was something Remedios planted in her, and she must simply cut it out, and she will be stable again.
She will be normal again.)
-----
She finds Chase sitting in the chapel, legs splayed, elbows on his knees. His hands are folded at his forehead. She sits behind him, barely breathing, and wants to touch his shoulder, but knows how he will take the gesture. She touches her own shoulders instead. Her arms cross and her hands tremble, closed over the rounded bones, and she breathes, and the scent of incense is in her throat.
She can hear him whispering:
"Just let her be okay, just let her go, I don't want to see her anymore" something shudders just beneath his skin, as if his muscles move like sharks under the waves, tensing. She wants to step forward and place her arms around him like a necklace. He goes on: "just take her away, just make it stop make it stop," and a crucifix falls from his clenched hands, hits the floor, makes a soft tinkling noise. As if it's no more than a toy.
-----
House tells her during a differential, "You're getting soft," and she has to restrain the urge to burst out weeping.
-----
They are in the lab when Chase sighs and looks up from a microscope and says, "You know, I think he's right."
"House is always right." Foreman doesn't miss a beat, turned away, looking at the computer. "ANCAs negative."
"About Cameron, I mean."
"I told you, I'm not interested in your sex life."
Chase looks at him, and the light reflecting off the back of his head, and how severely delineated the line is: bright and dark, skin and light. "There is none. And - and don't say, 'I don't care about that either', because this is unrelated, okay?" Foreman sighs and slumps his shoulders a little, and Chase takes it as encouragement to go on. "I was in the chapel this morning, right, and I... she came in. And she just sat down, right behind me, and didn't say anything to me, and after awhile she started..." There's a split second where he hesitates, thinks, it's too personal and then he thinks no, there's no such line anymore. "She was crying, Foreman."
Foreman looks over his shoulder. "Why were you in the chapel?"
Pause. "I was avoiding House."
Foreman just keeps looking, eyes level, not speaking, and finally Chase turns back to the microscope. He can practically hear the sarcasm: I work with a bunch of emotional fuck-ups. (But that's not Foreman; that's someone else entirely, a louder voice he's never gotten rid of. And Chase closes his eyes and shuts it off, kills the sounds.)
-----
Cameron dreams that Remedios is singing into her ear, "mi mariposa, esta noche eres mía, mi luna," and when she awakes she finds that the words reverberate in her head with a startling force. She opens a dictionary she bought (just in case, of course. Of course) and looks the words up, and finds herself blushing red at the words you're mine.
But it is nearly two in the morning, and she falls asleep with the dictionary tumbling to the side of the bed. Upon waking she accidentally kicks it under the bed entirely, and believes the entire thing to have been a hazy, ridiculous dream, and does not think of it again until late that afternoon, when a butterfly lands on the railing of the bed and Remedios begins to vomit blood again.
-----
Dr. Buendía from Pediatrics has taken to sitting by her bedside when they're not running tests, holding her hand, reading her excerpts from Octavio Paz. At first, House tries to kick him out, but ends up leaving him alone, making some sneering remark about pediatricians with hearts three sizes too big.
"The opposite of yours, huh, Grinch," Foreman says. A hint of a smirk slides across his face, just enough to raise his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth.
House pulls an ugly face, tongue stuck out. "That's Mr. Grinch to you."
"It's weird, though," Chase says, as if in the middle of some conversation none of them were invited to. Cameron looks up. "Buendía's a man, but Remedios treats him like he's no one. Cameron's a woman, and..." He trails off as if to preserve some delicacy, but instead leaves the space wide open for House's obscene gestures. Cameron resists the urge to cover her face. Foreman laughs, then cuts himself off abruptly. "Seriously, though. She writes love letters to a man. Isn't this all - isn't it a little weird?"
And to her surprise, Cameron finds some spark of rage in her belly, hot and fierce: her palms hitting the table: "They're hallucinations! They're not rational, all right?" Thinking defensive thinking I want her to get better, shut up with the tangents, can't we get back to healing? Like we're supposed to?
Chase raises his eyebrows, hands in the air, but he returns to the differential with a more appeasing tone to his voice. She settles back down. Thinking I want to protect you, Remedios, I want to be there for you.
-----
House has stolen a banana from Wilson, and is enjoying the victory in her room: she's asleep, and with Vegetative State Guy gone, he could always use a new lunch buddy. (The victory is slightly tarnished by the fact that the banana is a touch overripe. Mental note: tell Wilson he needs to hit the grocery store.)
Remedios rolls over in her sleep and makes a soft sound. Her eyelashes flutter, resting against her cheeks briefly, opening, a cocoon splitting in the warm damp air.
She sees the banana and smiles a tiny bit, and stretches out her hand, clutching it like a child for a toy. To anyone else, it would be endearing; House scowls at her and takes a bite with a snap of his teeth. "Mine." She clenches her hand open and shut again, insistent.
She is losing weight... He looks at the tray, untouched, by her bed. No wonder. Even a healthy girl could drop twenty pounds, between poverty and hospital food. He breaks off a tiny piece of banana and sets it in her palm (though he looks about furtively first to make sure Cameron, for example, is not lurking outside, prepared to accuse him of caring.)
Remedios shoves it into her mouth. Her eyes pop open, wide, and he can see her tongue poking about in her mouth. She's... disgusted? No. Surprised. It didn't taste right.
click
He picks a chunk of potato off her tray. He has to practically peel her lips open, but he gets it in her mouth; she chews stubbornly, looking miserable at the taste. But not shocked. Just the banana.
What was she expecting? His mind starts and goes and does not stop, ever.
-----
Mi casa, mi corazón. Buendía's song echoes in her head as she watches House barrel out the door and down the hallway. Mi casa she thinks. Mi país, mi amor. Mi alimento y mi alma.
When she squints into the light, halos form around everyone's faces. Mauricio in her dreams saying te regresaré, Mauricio disappearing in a whirl of butterflies, the woman stepping forward from them. The woman with tiny delicate hands and Remedios can see them, in dreams, making fluttering motions over the broad plain of her body. Hands and belly and thighs. She dreams Mauricio, ¿me has regresado? and Mauricio promising to take her to the movies, and fried plantains, and whispers mi gitano, and her mother Fernanda with candles in her eyes spitting bits of hot wax, more than hot enough to burn.
The plantains sweet and hot on their tongues. She refused to eat the bananas because of what the plantations were doing to their town. Mauricio brought her gifts, and she eventually let him make her a dress of banana leaves, but made him cut it away with fingernails and teeth. They ate slices of plantain after, sucking the starch off their fingers, off each other's lips.
-----
"All along we've gone under the assumption that she was just some Hispanic girl from the wrong side of town."
For some inane reason, Chase feels the need to put in, "A perfectly valid assumption"; House just gives him that look and Chase sighs and shuts up.
"Valid, but a lie. She's South American. That opens up a whole new set of possibilities, including..." He begins to mime a drumroll, then sighs when the three just stare at him blankly. "God damnit, do I have to spell it out? Cardiological and digestive malfunction, plus dementia. A first-year student could figure this crap out - "
Chase sits bolt upright, snapping his fingers. (Foreman cringes a bit off to the side.) "Chagas disease. Of course - "
"It still doesn't explain the mutism." Cameron has been perfectly still but she speaks now, thinking, Those hallucinations. You can't force that kind of passion. "It isn't the best explanation, it's just an explanation."
"You don't believe me?" House is gesturing with the cane now, leaning heavily on the table, eyes narrowed. "Do the goddamn tests! The mutism - all our theories about it were based on incorrect assumptions. She doesn't have to communicate, she barely speaks the language. She doesn't know a person for a thousand miles!"
How sad someone would have to be, to literally break their own heart. Cameron's chest feels as if it is about to cave inward, crumpled. Chagas can't be cured, only managed. She won't make it. The purity and force of Remedios's hands on Cameron's, her palms cupped around her cheeks, pulling Cameron in don't think about kissing her. Nobody that dramatic about an impossible love could ever survive.
(Believe me she thinks I know impossible love. Because everything is impossible. Because she cannot surmount her own desperate, clutching hands.) She stands and turns to go to the lab, and knows that House already has a whole course of drugs planned. Nothing she says or does will alter the future. She is still just as she has always been. House begins to talk about prescriptions for Remedios (once she leaves) and Cameron knows: she will not leave. She will heal from the Chagas, but her desperation, her heart split in shreds: that will send her to the graveyard.
-----
"In a way," she whispers, sitting in the chapel, "I'd almost rather have it that way."
The space does not even echo her own thoughts back. Silence absorbs everything and she thinks, no wonder Chase left. She does not think about tearstains on her own cheeks. She certainly does not think about the last time someone held her as she cried. (Foreman's hand, as he slipped into a coma: the closest she's gotten since Joe.)
When the world works like that, how can love possibly be pure? Sonnets don't speak truth. She knows that, now. (And yet Remedios says, maybe some do.)
------
In fact, when Remedios is walking through the sliding doors into the golden May sunlight, Cameron could nearly believe it is a dream.
You're dead and I'm dreaming watching you go into heaven. The hospital is just the world, sick sad tired, and you are dressed in your plain blue dress, and you are stepping barefoot into heaven.
But she's not barefoot (María Aurelia bought her shoes; in a fit of one-upping, the others proceeded to buy her a new dress, a set of hair ribbons, and a crucifix). She's walking slow, steady, her heart beating strongly now; she has a little difficulty swallowing, but ate a whole apple. The bleeds have stopped and been cauterized. And in the most heartbreaking turn of events, she looked Cameron clear in the eye and wrote, in a steady, elegant hand, "¿Dónde está?"
"Who?" And then, glancing at Foreman, him mouthing the Spanish translation, "¿Quién?"
Mauricio. Cameron's heart stuttered and fell, very delicately, like a crystal cobweb. She whispered, head tipped down, hair in her eyes, "So the haloperidal's working too, then. That's... everything, really."
"I guess it is."
Watching now, from the balcony, she thinks Where do you go now? This girl, silent beautiful, wandering into the lilacs and the peonies with her hands spread wide. The doors slide open, shimmering like opal in the light, casting prisms over the tile floors. The sunlight spills like honey. Before they discharged her, Cameron sat on the bed next to her and brushed her hair, plaited it into one long, graceful braid. The light catches a few loose strands and makes her sparkle.
The last thing she wrote, as Cameron tied the braid off: "Renata."
"Mm?"
A few more delicate movements. "Renata Remedios." Cameron nodded solemnly and left without saying goodbye. What a precious thing, to hold someone's name - to be the only one for a thousand miles who knows the true name. She did not tell Foreman. She did not tell Chase (thinking about the bright colors of the stained glass in the chapel, thinking about the color of his hair lit blue.) Certainly not House.
And yet holding it is not worth a thing at all, if Remedios continues to walk about the world with it. If she will ever prepare again to offer it to someone else.
-----
"It's - "
"Don't say sick." The twilight falls around them in waves of perfect, warm air, growing darker and cooler constantly. They are side-by-side and do not look at each other. The concrete of the curb looks rough, and she shoves her hands farther into her pockets. "Because it's not," she continues.
"I wasn't going to say that."
There's a long pause. She asks, "Where's your car?"
"In the shop. The suspension - " He catches some look in her eye, and he cuts himself off. "Never mind. What're you doing here?"
"Talking. To you. About it."
They are just a few inches apart. He's still wearing a heavy winter coat, and she feels the wind slice through gaps in her shirt, and she thinks, he's so... rational. Remedios is alive. He's happy. It's that cut-and-dry. (She knows it's not, but some vicious part of her cannot stop. She's alive, he figured out the puzzle. Isn't he just like -)
"What I was going to say is," he says, "it's concerning." A flash of a smile, teeth bright in his mouth. "Friends get concerned about each other." She has to laugh. It is sort of funny, in a way; still, she does not speak, and waits for him to go on. "Chase told me you were upset before... but this goes beyond upset. Even for you, and even for how much you normally connect with patients."
She stares out into the empty sky. Too bright for stars, too clear for even a wisp of cloud. "She seemed like she loved him so much. Like it was going to kill her. And then it didn't."
"And... you wish it had?"
"See. You'd call that sick, if I hadn't stopped you."
She looks at him with her lips parted, ever so slightly, as if holding her breath. Maybe she is and doesn't know it. The concrete is like sand beneath her feet, shifting, making her dizzy. He shifts an inch (or does she?) But she thinks nobody ever really shifts. We all just stand here and think we're holding hands when really the bridge is collapsing beneath us
He says, "I'd call it misguided. You want love to be something out of a story, or a movie - " hesitate hesitate - "Cameron, it's not like that. Love is the hard work, the day-in day-out crap." He's turned toward her now.
"Are you going to tell me a story about your parents again?"
There's a moment, and then he bursts into surprised laughter, the kind that spirals out of control until he is bent double, palms on his knees, nearly choking. She presses her hands to her mouth to keep in a giggle. "Jesus," he finally says, wiping at his eyes with the back of a hand. "You are something else."
"Yeah, well." She bites her lip. - but don't give in. And what do you know about love, anyway? And is it so wrong to want to believe -
He continues on, serene, "Whenever you get some crazy idea in your head about what love is, you end up taking it out on one of your coworkers. Quite frankly, if you decide love isn't real, I don't want to be the one you use to get over that."
It's spring, but her breath freezes in her throat.
"How dare you - "
He steps forward and both his hands are on her shoulders, firm, keeping her pressed to the ground. Keeping the concrete in place. "Hey," he says, "hey. I like you too much, okay? I don't want you to get caught up in this bullshit you tell yourself. It's not healthy, and it certainly won't make you happy."
-----
Remedios with her mouth soft and wet, insistent, slipping a cool palm under Cameron's blouse. Remedios pushing Cameron's hair aside to dip and kiss her neck. Remedios breathing slow, then fast, then gasping to breathe at all.
-----
She jerks herself back, knocking his hands off her shoulders. "It's not bullshit."
-----
If Remedios kissed him, he would've kissed back. Lie. He would have stepped back and held her hands and said lo siento, niña. He would have pulled the sheets over her body and then, once she was calm, he would've done a full neurological workup and left her lying there hollow, a husk of herself.
If he'd kissed me, I... I think I'd have kissed back. Lie. She knows she would have kissed back. (Because after seeing his father, so devoted, she thinks wouldn't it be nice? I want to grow old with fidelity. I want to spend years with that kind of intensity.)
If I'd kissed him
-----
"It is bullshit! Love doesn't have to be forever and perfect to be love, and expecting anything else will just get you hurt." He cocks his head a little. "But then again, going by your past choices, that seems to be what you like."
She's on the tips of her toes now, facing him, shoulders squared. Her voice has gone from high-pitched (angry) back down to low and deadly, deadly serious. "Don't you ever dare talk about me like that. My personal life is really none of your business, Eric."
There is a long silence. The bus pulls up, and he steps back and says, "If I piss you off enough, maybe I can save myself from your affections." And he laughs as he says it, wry and almost bittersweet, and he steps onto the bus and she watches him go away, helpless, hands open at her sides.
-----
She wakes to find a flock of butterflies on her windowsill, not moving, barely twitching with the faintest breath of wind. When she turns over, the moment hangs in a perfect balance for a split second; then the butterflies, all at once, rise up in a whirlwind and expand into her room like a cloud before disappearing back out the window.
He looked so sad. Like he knew I cared and he couldn't stop it.
She makes breakfast and tries to eat a banana and finds it sticky and heavy in her mouth. She spits it out and leaves the rest on the windowsill as a treat for the pigeons.
If I'd kissed him
Driving to work, she finds herself thinking about his car, and wondering how long it will be in the shop. Wondering what kind of car it is, and how it smells inside, and what kind of music he plays in it. How far back the seat goes - if she could prop her feet on the dashboard and fall asleep with her sunglasses on.
If I'd kissed him, I think he'd have kissed back, even though neither of us want him to.
-----
Driving down narrow one-lane roads in his car, with her legs dangling out the window, her head propped against his shoulder. She's reading a novel. Every now and then she licks her finger to turn the page. He cannot put his arm around her at this angle, but the space between his chest and shoulder is more than embrace enough. She gets to sad parts, sometimes, and turns her head up to kiss his jaw, and he makes a quick, startled sound.
"You know," she says.
"I know."
The beach is still about ten minutes away, and she shifts in her seat, excited to get out of the car, stretch, strip off the baggy T-shirt she stole out of his closet. (Even though it smells like him. She's so used to that scent, and she wants ocean breezes in her hair.) "Settle down," he says, and she pulls her feet back into the car so she can sit on her knees and turn to him and kiss his throat and face and mouth, arms tight around his neck. "I still have to drive," he says, but it's feeble at best.
Yellow butterflies make their way in and out of the open windows. She whispers in his ear, breath hot, voice low, "I'm glad - "
"I know."
"Let me tell you anyway," she says.