badfic: consume
Title: Consume
Author: modernsaints
Pairings: Cameron/Chase, Cameron/House if you squint real close.
Rating: PG-13 for language and brief sexual content.
Summary: House: "You are damaged, aren't you?" Cameron: no response.
Warnings: Eating disorder triggers. Heavily so. I cannot emphasize that enough. Also, references S3 relationship dramas, 'Love Hurts', 'No Reason', & the Cameron+Foreman thing in 'Sleeping Dogs Lie'.
Notes: For bad!fic prompt 52, "Ppl are meen to Cameron and she becomes anorexic! then ppl feel bad for her." I promise I do not use the word "ppl" at any point in this fic. ~4600 words.
She had this boyfriend, right, her junior year of high school, and he watched old Audrey Hepburn movies with her and fed her popcorn, and let his fingertips touch her mouth and she licked the salt off them. For her birthday he bought her this record player he'd fixed up and he played her a waltz on it and they slow-danced in her living room with the lights off and the curtains shut. They lay down on the carpet and kissed each other, rolling over and over, desperate like all teenagers, not wanting to show it, hands too frantic, hips not quite locking together.
Except, sometimes, he'd do this thing where he'd pinch her stomach. They'd be lying in his bed naked and he'd say "I love that you don't worry about your weight like most girls," and she'd roll over in the bed and wrap the sun-warmed blankets about herself. He was trying, he really was. He didn't know any better. Really.
-----
Med school takes a lot out of your time, and your energy, and after awhile eating is so hard. Memorizing multisyllabic names and exact doses, yeah, second nature, but a granola bar? Fuck that, she is on the psych ward rotation and last night a schizophrenic patient spit on her, spit on her, and if she does not feel like choking down some raisin-sugar bullshit, no. Hell no. She is going to have a couple drinks and then she is going to sleep the beautiful, heavy sleep of the intoxicated college student (until her alarm goes off at five because she agreed to volunteer at that fundraiser, and setup starts at six). And she's expected to get three square meals? Haha. Hahaha. Ha.
-----
She wants to tell House: pretty girls go into med school because being pretty is so much work, so much effort, that anything else in the world is a breeze.
-----
She's having sex with Chase and he is holding her like she is impossibly fragile, like he must balance himself perfectly so that not an inch of their skin touches, save the necessary places, because she might collapse.
After, she knows he's going to hold too tight, and tell her she's beautiful. He's going to touch her cheek with the back of his knuckles, and put his mouth up against her clavicle.
For now she arches her back and presses her hips and breasts up. She feels him shudder and sink closer for a moment, and then straighten his arms to push farther away. This is why she keeps going. Something, low in her stomach, fizzles and snaps with sharp light, and she digs her nails into the back of his neck. And still he lies beside her after, and cradles her shoulderblades like she is a kitten or a skeleton. She makes a tiny sighing noise and buries her face into his warm, damp neck.
-----
At first it's just, you know, a little challenge. She's gotten weak with the night shifts, the days spent on her ass reading House's mail, and she just... hasn't made it to the gym lately. So really she just needs to cut some stuff out of her lunch. Honestly, why not cut all of it; it'll give her time to get her hair trimmed and take her car to get checked (it's making odd noises) and all those other little errands. It's really just a matter of convenience.
And, hey, if she drops the five pounds that cling to her hips and belly, so be it. She can do that. She's got enough willpower.
She'll still be eating breakfast, and dinner, and the occasional late-night snack. It won't be a problem at all.
-----
A memory, still etched into her head: she walked into House's office for the interview, and for a split second his eyes dropped, then bounced back up. Of course he'd never admit it but she remembers.
So: after all the rumors she'd heard, after the legends of his vicious tongue and apathy towards human contact. After all that, just another man, inspecting her calves and waist. Later he would explain it, in his own way, and she would be angry, but she would understand; in the moment, she thought, frantic, I shouldn't have worn this suit. It makes me look fat.
-----
The five pounds drop, according to the scale, but she can't tell. She pinches her own stomach. Well - perhaps she should start buying the nonfat yogurt for breakfast. It's probably got less sugar, too, which is good, because hypoglycemia runs in the family, so she can't afford to let her blood sugar crash. She really should watch it more closely. And isn't her Aunt Marjorie diabetic? Yes, definitely the nonfat yogurt, and no more desserts either.
Another five pounds ought to do it. Just so she can fit in those patched-up jeans she wore in college. They were so comfy, when she wore them lying around on weekends, and she misses that. Softer than blankets, more threadbare, more intimate. She used to joke about wearing them to her wedding. If I can fit back in those, maybe I can be the person I was back then.
-----
On their date - their stupid, awkward, horrific date - they were outside after the meal and she didn't want to go but didn't know what to do. He took out a pack of cigarettes and she said, "Nice of you to ask if I minded."
"I was hoping you would." He blew smoke in the air, then turned and blew it at her face, and waggled his eyebrows as if to say, scoot, get along. I'm done playing your game.
But she just leaned over, and took the cigarette, fingertips right close to his. She hadn't smoked for a long time (Miss Perfect, MD, no icky chemicals in her body!) but there was something delightful about the slow, easy rhythm of the drag in-wait-exhale. She smirked at him. He looked back and, if it weren't for a momentary twitch at the corner of his mouth, she'd think he was unaffected completely. She handed the cigarette back and licked her lips slow and careful.
He said, "I'm not going to fuck you."
Her heart trembled and broke inside her, spilling the ocean through her chest and veins, but she just shrugged and pulled on her little woven shawl and strode off, heels clicking on the concrete, waving over her shoulder with just a few motions of her fingertips. She waited at least till she was out of earshot to start crying.
-----
After awhile, not eating tastes as good as eating. She drinks water to maintain a purity, her tongue tasting nothingness, her teeth never really closing shut. The glasses feel fragile between her lips. She wants to bite down and shatter them; she wants her bones to feel the same way beneath her palms. At night she runs her hands over her hips and loves, fiercely, the ridges that are starting to be revealed. The skin falls away like curtains in her head. The fat melting, running off in rivers, to form somewhere else, on some girl that is not her.
-----
Chase presses his nose to her neck and whispers against the skin, "You're getting so skinny."
"I know." She sighs and rolls her eyes, pretending she's not basking in the warm light of his words. You noticed. Someone noticed. "Things are just so stressful lately... You know."
"Once we get a break, then," and he scoops her into his arms, one arm hooked under her legs, pulling her onto his lap, "all the hamburgers you want." He spaces the words out with kisses against her ear, her shoulder, her jawline. "Sound good?"
She manages to beam and say, "Delicious," all the time fighting the urge to gag. Meat sizzling and throwing off bits of spattering, hot fat - she can't even imagine it. The grease smearing itself over her lips, clotting up. No wonder people become vegetarians. She presses her mouth up against his to block out the thoughts.
-----
Later on, after that date, she would find herself shamed most of all by the cigarette. I was supposed to be better than that. I was supposed to have more control. If a girl can't control what she puts into her body, how can she control what goes on in there? Or inside her head, or what comes out of her mouth? If she lets in nicotine, she lets her thoughts speed and flicker like lightbulbs going out on film. She can't do that. She can't. That's why she cried; that's why, later, she stood in the shower and screamed herself hoarse, and slipped her fingers between her legs, and rubbed the skin raw with a hairbrush to mimic the pain of stubble against skin. That's why I'm crazy, she tells herself, but I was crazy then, and I'm not now. I'm under control now.
The line between science and magical thinking is so thin, like a DNA helix, like a tightrope woven of a witch's spell. There is a way to balance it, she knows. Somewhere out there.
-----
Once, while they were Not Friends, Foreman told her, "You know what I don't get? Why you're so damn anxious to be friends with me."
She gave him this look.
He shrugged it off. "Look, this is a stupid way to put it, but - maybe it'll make sense to you. Picture us together, in high school, okay?" She sighed and turned back to the microscope, and he went on, as if he'd thought the piece through, felt some need to let it go. "You're Allison, and you're very pretty and very popular. You have some jock boyfriend that takes you to prom when you're only a sophomore."
She fought the urge to respond, I was a junior, and he was in the art club.
"And I'm Eric. And I'm kind of big, and my brother's in jail, and I never really had a girlfriend."
"Your stereotypes are dead-on." She sighed and clicked the microscope through to another level of focus.
"Now tell me." He hadn't touched her, but she turned around, as easily as if he'd done it for her, one hand on her shoulder. His eyes were leveled exactly at hers. "Allison, do you smile at me in the hallway? I've sat behind you in English for the past three years. Do you ask me what the homework was?"
"This is a bullshit metaphor. I was - I was in high school, I was a different person - "
"People who think high school doesn't mean anything are people who were happy. Most people weren't happy." He stared her down, full in the face, the avenging angel of her past and she trembled under his gaze without knowing why (it could be rage or it could be fear). "So okay. Something happened to make you really, really fucked up, and now you want to be everyone's friend."
"Who the hell are you to talk about this, if we're just colleagues - " She spat the words like venom, like bile, wanting to burn his eyes out, and he talked over her and knocked her back.
"I don't want your pity, and I sure as hell don't want to be your friend to soothe your ego. The article only hurts because you thought we were friends. Well, here's the truth," and his shoulders squared back, his face casual, a mask for his self-righteous anger, "you only thought we were friends because it made you feel like a human being. I'm not going to do that for you."
She turns her face away and whispers "You are just like House," knowing he will hear, knowing it will cut deeper than any tears or fury. Sure enough, she hears quick, heavy footsteps, and when she turns back he is gone.
-----
They got over it. Mostly.
-----
So the next five pounds are gone and her breasts now fit in one hand, easily, without any excess, but she is unhappy: her stomach still sags. Just a little. She's too goddamn young for that, clearly it's just her own weakness, so - off with a little more weight. Maybe skip dinner every third night. Yes, and she can use that time to run more; she likes the stickiness of her own skin, sweating, her impurities and chemicals coming out. She likes the feeling of the hot water in the shower, nearly scalding, running down her back and sloughing off the exhaustion.
Five pounds wasn't enough, so maybe ten, this time. Just in case.
-----
Even later, what she is most ashamed of is that it's okay to get strung out on crystal meth, but cigarettes made her stomach heat with self-deprecation. And there is no justification: she didn't know what that was cut with. She had no reason. Her feelings are irrational, and she wants to punch herself in the stomach.
There's no control anymore. That's the only thing she can hold onto.
She remembers feeling like the world was about to fall apart, and only moving would stop it. She remembers not being hungry and knowing she would never be hungry again. She remembers counting her ribs compulsively. She remembers being, finally, happy.
The next morning she was miserable and said happiness isn't real when you have to force it. She wouldn't touch Chase thinking it wouldn't have been good if I wasn't high. It was just chemical interactions. Really. But she remembered what it felt like to see clear through her muscles and skin, to see her own bones, and be able to touch each one, and there was a spark of real happiness there. Joy at her own existence. That's what it is to be human.
-----
Wilson looks sad, and old, and the bags under his eyes are heavy with too much time. "This will sound ridiculous, coming from me, but... how the hell can you love him? He's - he's miserable!"
Her voice pours smooth like morning sunlight. "I could ask you the same thing."
"Because I'm a masochist, because he hasn't got anyone else, because I haven't got anyone else. Take your pick." He sits back in his chair and waves his hand as if the question is a small insect; still, his hand moves slow and weary, even that gesture too much.
"Or because you find misery beautiful." She tips her head, ever so slightly, hair brushing against her cheek. "You wouldn't be a doctor if you didn't."
"That's absurd. I became a doctor to end misery." A moment and a sigh; he is remembering something, perhaps, that an ex-wife said. She can tell from the way he touches his left hand. "Just like everyone else in the goddamn practice."
"Maybe." She's remembering too: the look of her own body, that morning, in the mirror. Heavy with its own misery; she is stripping it away, turning herself to colored sunshine and opalescent bone. "You started for that reason. But you stayed because on some level you loved it, too."
He opens his mouth and then shuts it, then opens it again, pausing before he speaks. "You... you don't really believe that, you know. You're saying it because you're in pain. Because House isn't buying this bullshit with Chase."
She rises to her feet in one quick, effortless motion (so much less to weigh her down.) "I think you started this conversation under some very incorrect assumptions." Look into his eyes and see the small animal there, wounded, cringing and beaten. "I don't love House and I haven't for a long time. You, on the other hand - " She cuts her eyes at him sideways, tipping her chin upwards slightly, feeling tall and gorgeous and willow-branch slender. "If you're so desperate for psychoanalysis, maybe you should try it on yourself."
-----
Of course she doesn't really believe it.
Misery is only beautiful in retrospect. Only looking at old photos, and seeing her face round and moon-full, and laughing with bright cold sparkling glee at how ugly she was. At how close she is to being perfect. When she was in the moment - when she was (don't say it) fat - she was misguided but here she is, standing on the other side, all that cut away from her. Now it's beautiful, though, because she knows she got away.
-----
In time, she's sure Chase will be beautiful, too.
She tells him this, lying in bed with him: "One day I'm gonna look back and think, 'Oh, wow, he was so pretty, what was I doing with a guy like that?'"
"You like your guys manly and rugged, huh?" He grins, as if to acknowledge, yeah, I'm kinda the inverse of that.
"Mmhm." She laughs at the conceit - neither of them believe what she is saying to be true - and stretches her arms over her head like a cat lying in the sun. "I like guys who build things - " she turns and presses a kiss to his naked shoulder - "and drag me around by the hair - " a kiss to his chest - "and make me feel really tiny." And a kiss to his stomach, flat, undefined, blurring at the edges. A knife-edge of victory spikes through her my stomach is nicer than yours.
When she looks up, his eyes are wide, eyebrows raised up. "Allison," he says, mouth open. "Like you don't feel tiny all the time?" He runs his fingertips over one of her cheekbones.
Her belly heats up and she curls in on that feeling, nursing it, keeping it safe. "Sometimes, I guess," she says, just to feel him touch the notches of her spine and say, ugh, women. "Like you could not know how skinny you are," he mutters, and she giggles and peeks over the edge of his arm and says, "You up for one more?"
------
Twenty more pounds. As long as she's doing well so far.
If she hits twenty, maybe her breasts will disappear entirely. They're so useless. Do they do anything for her, but mark her as a woman? And what good has being a woman done her anyway - made her jealous and heavy with sadness. Made her bleed and made her violently, desperately sexual, until she gave men bruises and made girls bleed from the mouth.
If she can just step of her own skin. If she can peel herself clean and pure, down to the soul she used to be. She thinks of her mother, saying, my pretty, smart little girl - if she can be the eye of the storm again and let the world revolve and not fall down -
-----
She touches the sides of her skull, where the ventricles are in her brain, and nearly imagines she can feel them enlarged and pressing against the bone. She touches her wrist and thinks bradycardia. The place below her belly where she knows the hard fist of her uterus is and thinks amenorrhea. She doesn't bleed anymore. There is nothing left to bleed out.
She makes sure to wash her hands constantly. Reduced immune system function. She wears lots of chapstick, and paints her nails clear to make sure they do not snap off. She carries moisturizer in her purse and is cautious where she steps, as not to fall and bruise herself. She hears something creak and snap when she bends her knees. She does not toy with her hair, lest a handful come off in her fist, thin and golden in the light.
Something inside her is sick and dying off (some terrible part, she will be glad when it is gone, working with House has taught her: you must suffer the pain to reap the rewards. You must put yourself into the fire. No one else will do it for you.) She is not sick, but some distant part of her is, and no one knows it.
-----
That's the best part, probably. No one knows it at all.
-----
There's this one moment where she thinks maybe -
The patient crashes, and she's trying to intubate him and her hands are clattering like a loose sack of marbles, and Foreman stares at her for a split second before pushing her aside to take over.
After, he says, "You need a few?"
"I'm fine."
He looks, for a moment, as if he will reach out. He does not. His eyes skim over her wrists (the knobs of bone), her shoulders (the fabric draping loose about them), her belt loose, even in the smallest hole. But it is a mere skim - a dragonfly skittering across the water's surface - and she remembers telling him, you're just like House. But that's not true, because House notices, especially when it hurts; Foreman notices but only if it's convenient.
Sure enough, he tells her, "Then we've got a diagnosis to argue about," and they walk back to the office in silence.
-----
She sweeps blush on her cheeks strategically, making them look round and full, and she hates it and shudders, stomach cramping at the thought: House will think I am gaining weight. But she would rather his vicious jokes be lies than truth (if he saw her clean, washed-out, he would call her pathetic. She can't have that. Not again.)
On the walk upstairs to her apartment she thinks when I take off my clothes, thinking about washing her face and when I take off my skin. She's so close to her goal. So terribly, terribly close.
-----
"I'm gonna care about you," Chase whispers, "even - even if you get old and ugly and fat - " and he laughs, he laughs like this is a normal thing to say, and it is not funny. She does not laugh at all. She crosses her arms tight over her stomach and turns away, and feels her own flesh pressing against her thick weighted-down arms, and wants to vomit. She wants to kneel on the tile and cough and spit until everything, everything is out of her body, forever, especially his words and his face.
She stands up, and he is grabbing for her shoulder. She's wearing panties only, and no bra, and she grabs her own shoulders. Her hair has come loose, and long strands are all over his pillow. Good. I hope I fall apart all over him and he never tries anything again. "I'm going now," she says.
"Please - Allison - "
"don't"
"I know you don't want anything serious, I know that." She turns to see him with his hands in his lap, bangs in his face. "I'm sorry. I just... I got caught up in the moment. That's it. I swear."
Incredulous: you don't know me at all. There is nothing worse than going back to before. Nothing worse than moving in reverse, the shed layers of herself crowding back on, like burdens heaped on, like thick chains looped back round her neck. I won't be fat. Not again. Not ever. And he has the gall to think she could react this way about something petty and tiny as love -
She smiles at him, feeling like the Virgin Mary, benevolent towards the idiots at her feet. She kisses the top of his head. "We'll talk about it tomorrow," she says, feeling something still twitching back and forth in her chest, making her thoughts speed and stutter. "I promised a friend I'd spend today with her. But tomorrow."
He nods, kisses the inside of her wrist, whispering "okay thanks." Like: thank you for giving me another chance.
-----
What she really does with her day:
Stares at a container of ice cream she never threw out. Why didn't she? She should just throw it out now and be done with it.
Throws said container out, burying it under a heap of crumpled papers and old shopping bags.
Goes through the garbage. Shaking. Not breathing I haven't tasted anything but air in two days, heart pounding I deserve a fucking reward. Finds it and stares at it, half-melted, leaking through the container. It's mint chocolate chip. It's pastel green. She does not even want to take the moment to reach for a spoon. Finally, lets it drop back, stomach cramping and sending iron-hot spikes into her ribcage, you're so fucking weak, so fucking weak, there's a reason they all treat you the way they do. Because you're weak. Because you could never handle it and why did you pretend you could?
Takes three Ativan, courtesy of Dr. Hurley in the psych wing, who is a sucker for a pretty face with so-called insomnia.
Passes out on the couch. During her dreams, she convulses occasionally with the pinned-insect movements of the truly terrified.
-----
She dreams she is lying on an operating table. There's a machine hovering over her, with delicate slender fingers.
How did I get here?
"I'm going to start now." House's voice echoes in the room and she jerks up, instinctively, head snapping back and forth and he says, loud, "Fuck! If you'd done that two seconds later I would've cut your jugular open. Which, while admittedly pretty cool, not the intended effect. At all."
"House...?"
"Lie the hell back down."
She obliges without knowing why. A razor blade passes above her face and sinks down to her collar, barely brushing it, and she holds her breath. The top button on her shirt comes off. Her hair comes undone, the rubber band sliced cleanly. "Not a good idea," she whispers. Her throat is dry and her mouth feels stiff. The razor is like tiny piano-player fingertips, knowing where to move to expose thin slits of her body. One. Then another. Hesitate - make her wait a split second, like water torture - and another.
"And why would that be?"
She reaches up with one arm, delicate, like a dancer's movement. She pulls out a loose clump of hair. "See."
"You shouldn't be losing your hair."
"I know. I'm too young." She laughs, rueful, thinking about the streaks of gray shot through his mess of a haircut. Something in his voice, though, has tensed and caught her quite suddenly.
"No," he says. "And I shouldn't have had to move the blade that far down. Not to reach your shirt." There's a few pauses and then, "You're not right. You're not the Cameron I've been hallucinating." She opens her mouth to ask, and then suddenly whips into the crystal-pointed clarity of a lucid dream, none of this is even real, just let him talk. He tells her: "When I wake up, you damn well better be back to normal."
"Would you miss me?"
He is already gone.
-----
She's on the table again.
House is babbling, and then the knife is speeding about, seizing in midair, right above her belly
"That's okay," she whispers to the blade, mouth pursed like a kiss. "That's okay. Cut me open."
House screams a single word, and the blade rushes like teeth and veins, and she feels herself stabbed gushing blood, House is screaming no meaning, no fucking meaning, she hears the steady rhythm of her own blood dripping to the floor and puddling and being washed away. She feels herself scrubbed clean on the autopsy table. lucid, allison, lucid, wake up but she loves it too much: they lift out her stomach, now her intestines, now her thick liver. Her entire self is opened and emptied.
-----
She wakes to find herself stiff-necked, mouth dry. It's the middle of the night. The simple blinking of the clock is too much, her head pounds.
She touches where the scar should be on her belly. She touches the lowest of her ribs. The next pair. The next one. Between the ribs, where her lungs sit, inflating, deflating, fat and heavy with air and space. I want you out she thinks. Touches her lower back, at her kidneys want you out. Her heart. Too heavy, what good have you done me? I want you out.
Remembering the dreams and the sharp intensity of House's eyes, cutting through glass walls and air and time, to say I see you, you are different, I will make you who you want to be. Remembering. Two more Ativan and maybe I can get back. She curls up on the couch again and passes through life into death, into dreaming and forever.
Author: modernsaints
Pairings: Cameron/Chase, Cameron/House if you squint real close.
Rating: PG-13 for language and brief sexual content.
Summary: House: "You are damaged, aren't you?" Cameron: no response.
Warnings: Eating disorder triggers. Heavily so. I cannot emphasize that enough. Also, references S3 relationship dramas, 'Love Hurts', 'No Reason', & the Cameron+Foreman thing in 'Sleeping Dogs Lie'.
Notes: For bad!fic prompt 52, "Ppl are meen to Cameron and she becomes anorexic! then ppl feel bad for her." I promise I do not use the word "ppl" at any point in this fic. ~4600 words.
She had this boyfriend, right, her junior year of high school, and he watched old Audrey Hepburn movies with her and fed her popcorn, and let his fingertips touch her mouth and she licked the salt off them. For her birthday he bought her this record player he'd fixed up and he played her a waltz on it and they slow-danced in her living room with the lights off and the curtains shut. They lay down on the carpet and kissed each other, rolling over and over, desperate like all teenagers, not wanting to show it, hands too frantic, hips not quite locking together.
Except, sometimes, he'd do this thing where he'd pinch her stomach. They'd be lying in his bed naked and he'd say "I love that you don't worry about your weight like most girls," and she'd roll over in the bed and wrap the sun-warmed blankets about herself. He was trying, he really was. He didn't know any better. Really.
-----
Med school takes a lot out of your time, and your energy, and after awhile eating is so hard. Memorizing multisyllabic names and exact doses, yeah, second nature, but a granola bar? Fuck that, she is on the psych ward rotation and last night a schizophrenic patient spit on her, spit on her, and if she does not feel like choking down some raisin-sugar bullshit, no. Hell no. She is going to have a couple drinks and then she is going to sleep the beautiful, heavy sleep of the intoxicated college student (until her alarm goes off at five because she agreed to volunteer at that fundraiser, and setup starts at six). And she's expected to get three square meals? Haha. Hahaha. Ha.
-----
She wants to tell House: pretty girls go into med school because being pretty is so much work, so much effort, that anything else in the world is a breeze.
-----
She's having sex with Chase and he is holding her like she is impossibly fragile, like he must balance himself perfectly so that not an inch of their skin touches, save the necessary places, because she might collapse.
After, she knows he's going to hold too tight, and tell her she's beautiful. He's going to touch her cheek with the back of his knuckles, and put his mouth up against her clavicle.
For now she arches her back and presses her hips and breasts up. She feels him shudder and sink closer for a moment, and then straighten his arms to push farther away. This is why she keeps going. Something, low in her stomach, fizzles and snaps with sharp light, and she digs her nails into the back of his neck. And still he lies beside her after, and cradles her shoulderblades like she is a kitten or a skeleton. She makes a tiny sighing noise and buries her face into his warm, damp neck.
-----
At first it's just, you know, a little challenge. She's gotten weak with the night shifts, the days spent on her ass reading House's mail, and she just... hasn't made it to the gym lately. So really she just needs to cut some stuff out of her lunch. Honestly, why not cut all of it; it'll give her time to get her hair trimmed and take her car to get checked (it's making odd noises) and all those other little errands. It's really just a matter of convenience.
And, hey, if she drops the five pounds that cling to her hips and belly, so be it. She can do that. She's got enough willpower.
She'll still be eating breakfast, and dinner, and the occasional late-night snack. It won't be a problem at all.
-----
A memory, still etched into her head: she walked into House's office for the interview, and for a split second his eyes dropped, then bounced back up. Of course he'd never admit it but she remembers.
So: after all the rumors she'd heard, after the legends of his vicious tongue and apathy towards human contact. After all that, just another man, inspecting her calves and waist. Later he would explain it, in his own way, and she would be angry, but she would understand; in the moment, she thought, frantic, I shouldn't have worn this suit. It makes me look fat.
-----
The five pounds drop, according to the scale, but she can't tell. She pinches her own stomach. Well - perhaps she should start buying the nonfat yogurt for breakfast. It's probably got less sugar, too, which is good, because hypoglycemia runs in the family, so she can't afford to let her blood sugar crash. She really should watch it more closely. And isn't her Aunt Marjorie diabetic? Yes, definitely the nonfat yogurt, and no more desserts either.
Another five pounds ought to do it. Just so she can fit in those patched-up jeans she wore in college. They were so comfy, when she wore them lying around on weekends, and she misses that. Softer than blankets, more threadbare, more intimate. She used to joke about wearing them to her wedding. If I can fit back in those, maybe I can be the person I was back then.
-----
On their date - their stupid, awkward, horrific date - they were outside after the meal and she didn't want to go but didn't know what to do. He took out a pack of cigarettes and she said, "Nice of you to ask if I minded."
"I was hoping you would." He blew smoke in the air, then turned and blew it at her face, and waggled his eyebrows as if to say, scoot, get along. I'm done playing your game.
But she just leaned over, and took the cigarette, fingertips right close to his. She hadn't smoked for a long time (Miss Perfect, MD, no icky chemicals in her body!) but there was something delightful about the slow, easy rhythm of the drag in-wait-exhale. She smirked at him. He looked back and, if it weren't for a momentary twitch at the corner of his mouth, she'd think he was unaffected completely. She handed the cigarette back and licked her lips slow and careful.
He said, "I'm not going to fuck you."
Her heart trembled and broke inside her, spilling the ocean through her chest and veins, but she just shrugged and pulled on her little woven shawl and strode off, heels clicking on the concrete, waving over her shoulder with just a few motions of her fingertips. She waited at least till she was out of earshot to start crying.
-----
After awhile, not eating tastes as good as eating. She drinks water to maintain a purity, her tongue tasting nothingness, her teeth never really closing shut. The glasses feel fragile between her lips. She wants to bite down and shatter them; she wants her bones to feel the same way beneath her palms. At night she runs her hands over her hips and loves, fiercely, the ridges that are starting to be revealed. The skin falls away like curtains in her head. The fat melting, running off in rivers, to form somewhere else, on some girl that is not her.
-----
Chase presses his nose to her neck and whispers against the skin, "You're getting so skinny."
"I know." She sighs and rolls her eyes, pretending she's not basking in the warm light of his words. You noticed. Someone noticed. "Things are just so stressful lately... You know."
"Once we get a break, then," and he scoops her into his arms, one arm hooked under her legs, pulling her onto his lap, "all the hamburgers you want." He spaces the words out with kisses against her ear, her shoulder, her jawline. "Sound good?"
She manages to beam and say, "Delicious," all the time fighting the urge to gag. Meat sizzling and throwing off bits of spattering, hot fat - she can't even imagine it. The grease smearing itself over her lips, clotting up. No wonder people become vegetarians. She presses her mouth up against his to block out the thoughts.
-----
Later on, after that date, she would find herself shamed most of all by the cigarette. I was supposed to be better than that. I was supposed to have more control. If a girl can't control what she puts into her body, how can she control what goes on in there? Or inside her head, or what comes out of her mouth? If she lets in nicotine, she lets her thoughts speed and flicker like lightbulbs going out on film. She can't do that. She can't. That's why she cried; that's why, later, she stood in the shower and screamed herself hoarse, and slipped her fingers between her legs, and rubbed the skin raw with a hairbrush to mimic the pain of stubble against skin. That's why I'm crazy, she tells herself, but I was crazy then, and I'm not now. I'm under control now.
The line between science and magical thinking is so thin, like a DNA helix, like a tightrope woven of a witch's spell. There is a way to balance it, she knows. Somewhere out there.
-----
Once, while they were Not Friends, Foreman told her, "You know what I don't get? Why you're so damn anxious to be friends with me."
She gave him this look.
He shrugged it off. "Look, this is a stupid way to put it, but - maybe it'll make sense to you. Picture us together, in high school, okay?" She sighed and turned back to the microscope, and he went on, as if he'd thought the piece through, felt some need to let it go. "You're Allison, and you're very pretty and very popular. You have some jock boyfriend that takes you to prom when you're only a sophomore."
She fought the urge to respond, I was a junior, and he was in the art club.
"And I'm Eric. And I'm kind of big, and my brother's in jail, and I never really had a girlfriend."
"Your stereotypes are dead-on." She sighed and clicked the microscope through to another level of focus.
"Now tell me." He hadn't touched her, but she turned around, as easily as if he'd done it for her, one hand on her shoulder. His eyes were leveled exactly at hers. "Allison, do you smile at me in the hallway? I've sat behind you in English for the past three years. Do you ask me what the homework was?"
"This is a bullshit metaphor. I was - I was in high school, I was a different person - "
"People who think high school doesn't mean anything are people who were happy. Most people weren't happy." He stared her down, full in the face, the avenging angel of her past and she trembled under his gaze without knowing why (it could be rage or it could be fear). "So okay. Something happened to make you really, really fucked up, and now you want to be everyone's friend."
"Who the hell are you to talk about this, if we're just colleagues - " She spat the words like venom, like bile, wanting to burn his eyes out, and he talked over her and knocked her back.
"I don't want your pity, and I sure as hell don't want to be your friend to soothe your ego. The article only hurts because you thought we were friends. Well, here's the truth," and his shoulders squared back, his face casual, a mask for his self-righteous anger, "you only thought we were friends because it made you feel like a human being. I'm not going to do that for you."
She turns her face away and whispers "You are just like House," knowing he will hear, knowing it will cut deeper than any tears or fury. Sure enough, she hears quick, heavy footsteps, and when she turns back he is gone.
-----
They got over it. Mostly.
-----
So the next five pounds are gone and her breasts now fit in one hand, easily, without any excess, but she is unhappy: her stomach still sags. Just a little. She's too goddamn young for that, clearly it's just her own weakness, so - off with a little more weight. Maybe skip dinner every third night. Yes, and she can use that time to run more; she likes the stickiness of her own skin, sweating, her impurities and chemicals coming out. She likes the feeling of the hot water in the shower, nearly scalding, running down her back and sloughing off the exhaustion.
Five pounds wasn't enough, so maybe ten, this time. Just in case.
-----
Even later, what she is most ashamed of is that it's okay to get strung out on crystal meth, but cigarettes made her stomach heat with self-deprecation. And there is no justification: she didn't know what that was cut with. She had no reason. Her feelings are irrational, and she wants to punch herself in the stomach.
There's no control anymore. That's the only thing she can hold onto.
She remembers feeling like the world was about to fall apart, and only moving would stop it. She remembers not being hungry and knowing she would never be hungry again. She remembers counting her ribs compulsively. She remembers being, finally, happy.
The next morning she was miserable and said happiness isn't real when you have to force it. She wouldn't touch Chase thinking it wouldn't have been good if I wasn't high. It was just chemical interactions. Really. But she remembered what it felt like to see clear through her muscles and skin, to see her own bones, and be able to touch each one, and there was a spark of real happiness there. Joy at her own existence. That's what it is to be human.
-----
Wilson looks sad, and old, and the bags under his eyes are heavy with too much time. "This will sound ridiculous, coming from me, but... how the hell can you love him? He's - he's miserable!"
Her voice pours smooth like morning sunlight. "I could ask you the same thing."
"Because I'm a masochist, because he hasn't got anyone else, because I haven't got anyone else. Take your pick." He sits back in his chair and waves his hand as if the question is a small insect; still, his hand moves slow and weary, even that gesture too much.
"Or because you find misery beautiful." She tips her head, ever so slightly, hair brushing against her cheek. "You wouldn't be a doctor if you didn't."
"That's absurd. I became a doctor to end misery." A moment and a sigh; he is remembering something, perhaps, that an ex-wife said. She can tell from the way he touches his left hand. "Just like everyone else in the goddamn practice."
"Maybe." She's remembering too: the look of her own body, that morning, in the mirror. Heavy with its own misery; she is stripping it away, turning herself to colored sunshine and opalescent bone. "You started for that reason. But you stayed because on some level you loved it, too."
He opens his mouth and then shuts it, then opens it again, pausing before he speaks. "You... you don't really believe that, you know. You're saying it because you're in pain. Because House isn't buying this bullshit with Chase."
She rises to her feet in one quick, effortless motion (so much less to weigh her down.) "I think you started this conversation under some very incorrect assumptions." Look into his eyes and see the small animal there, wounded, cringing and beaten. "I don't love House and I haven't for a long time. You, on the other hand - " She cuts her eyes at him sideways, tipping her chin upwards slightly, feeling tall and gorgeous and willow-branch slender. "If you're so desperate for psychoanalysis, maybe you should try it on yourself."
-----
Of course she doesn't really believe it.
Misery is only beautiful in retrospect. Only looking at old photos, and seeing her face round and moon-full, and laughing with bright cold sparkling glee at how ugly she was. At how close she is to being perfect. When she was in the moment - when she was (don't say it) fat - she was misguided but here she is, standing on the other side, all that cut away from her. Now it's beautiful, though, because she knows she got away.
-----
In time, she's sure Chase will be beautiful, too.
She tells him this, lying in bed with him: "One day I'm gonna look back and think, 'Oh, wow, he was so pretty, what was I doing with a guy like that?'"
"You like your guys manly and rugged, huh?" He grins, as if to acknowledge, yeah, I'm kinda the inverse of that.
"Mmhm." She laughs at the conceit - neither of them believe what she is saying to be true - and stretches her arms over her head like a cat lying in the sun. "I like guys who build things - " she turns and presses a kiss to his naked shoulder - "and drag me around by the hair - " a kiss to his chest - "and make me feel really tiny." And a kiss to his stomach, flat, undefined, blurring at the edges. A knife-edge of victory spikes through her my stomach is nicer than yours.
When she looks up, his eyes are wide, eyebrows raised up. "Allison," he says, mouth open. "Like you don't feel tiny all the time?" He runs his fingertips over one of her cheekbones.
Her belly heats up and she curls in on that feeling, nursing it, keeping it safe. "Sometimes, I guess," she says, just to feel him touch the notches of her spine and say, ugh, women. "Like you could not know how skinny you are," he mutters, and she giggles and peeks over the edge of his arm and says, "You up for one more?"
------
Twenty more pounds. As long as she's doing well so far.
If she hits twenty, maybe her breasts will disappear entirely. They're so useless. Do they do anything for her, but mark her as a woman? And what good has being a woman done her anyway - made her jealous and heavy with sadness. Made her bleed and made her violently, desperately sexual, until she gave men bruises and made girls bleed from the mouth.
If she can just step of her own skin. If she can peel herself clean and pure, down to the soul she used to be. She thinks of her mother, saying, my pretty, smart little girl - if she can be the eye of the storm again and let the world revolve and not fall down -
-----
She touches the sides of her skull, where the ventricles are in her brain, and nearly imagines she can feel them enlarged and pressing against the bone. She touches her wrist and thinks bradycardia. The place below her belly where she knows the hard fist of her uterus is and thinks amenorrhea. She doesn't bleed anymore. There is nothing left to bleed out.
She makes sure to wash her hands constantly. Reduced immune system function. She wears lots of chapstick, and paints her nails clear to make sure they do not snap off. She carries moisturizer in her purse and is cautious where she steps, as not to fall and bruise herself. She hears something creak and snap when she bends her knees. She does not toy with her hair, lest a handful come off in her fist, thin and golden in the light.
Something inside her is sick and dying off (some terrible part, she will be glad when it is gone, working with House has taught her: you must suffer the pain to reap the rewards. You must put yourself into the fire. No one else will do it for you.) She is not sick, but some distant part of her is, and no one knows it.
-----
That's the best part, probably. No one knows it at all.
-----
There's this one moment where she thinks maybe -
The patient crashes, and she's trying to intubate him and her hands are clattering like a loose sack of marbles, and Foreman stares at her for a split second before pushing her aside to take over.
After, he says, "You need a few?"
"I'm fine."
He looks, for a moment, as if he will reach out. He does not. His eyes skim over her wrists (the knobs of bone), her shoulders (the fabric draping loose about them), her belt loose, even in the smallest hole. But it is a mere skim - a dragonfly skittering across the water's surface - and she remembers telling him, you're just like House. But that's not true, because House notices, especially when it hurts; Foreman notices but only if it's convenient.
Sure enough, he tells her, "Then we've got a diagnosis to argue about," and they walk back to the office in silence.
-----
She sweeps blush on her cheeks strategically, making them look round and full, and she hates it and shudders, stomach cramping at the thought: House will think I am gaining weight. But she would rather his vicious jokes be lies than truth (if he saw her clean, washed-out, he would call her pathetic. She can't have that. Not again.)
On the walk upstairs to her apartment she thinks when I take off my clothes, thinking about washing her face and when I take off my skin. She's so close to her goal. So terribly, terribly close.
-----
"I'm gonna care about you," Chase whispers, "even - even if you get old and ugly and fat - " and he laughs, he laughs like this is a normal thing to say, and it is not funny. She does not laugh at all. She crosses her arms tight over her stomach and turns away, and feels her own flesh pressing against her thick weighted-down arms, and wants to vomit. She wants to kneel on the tile and cough and spit until everything, everything is out of her body, forever, especially his words and his face.
She stands up, and he is grabbing for her shoulder. She's wearing panties only, and no bra, and she grabs her own shoulders. Her hair has come loose, and long strands are all over his pillow. Good. I hope I fall apart all over him and he never tries anything again. "I'm going now," she says.
"Please - Allison - "
"don't"
"I know you don't want anything serious, I know that." She turns to see him with his hands in his lap, bangs in his face. "I'm sorry. I just... I got caught up in the moment. That's it. I swear."
Incredulous: you don't know me at all. There is nothing worse than going back to before. Nothing worse than moving in reverse, the shed layers of herself crowding back on, like burdens heaped on, like thick chains looped back round her neck. I won't be fat. Not again. Not ever. And he has the gall to think she could react this way about something petty and tiny as love -
She smiles at him, feeling like the Virgin Mary, benevolent towards the idiots at her feet. She kisses the top of his head. "We'll talk about it tomorrow," she says, feeling something still twitching back and forth in her chest, making her thoughts speed and stutter. "I promised a friend I'd spend today with her. But tomorrow."
He nods, kisses the inside of her wrist, whispering "okay thanks." Like: thank you for giving me another chance.
-----
What she really does with her day:
Stares at a container of ice cream she never threw out. Why didn't she? She should just throw it out now and be done with it.
Throws said container out, burying it under a heap of crumpled papers and old shopping bags.
Goes through the garbage. Shaking. Not breathing I haven't tasted anything but air in two days, heart pounding I deserve a fucking reward. Finds it and stares at it, half-melted, leaking through the container. It's mint chocolate chip. It's pastel green. She does not even want to take the moment to reach for a spoon. Finally, lets it drop back, stomach cramping and sending iron-hot spikes into her ribcage, you're so fucking weak, so fucking weak, there's a reason they all treat you the way they do. Because you're weak. Because you could never handle it and why did you pretend you could?
Takes three Ativan, courtesy of Dr. Hurley in the psych wing, who is a sucker for a pretty face with so-called insomnia.
Passes out on the couch. During her dreams, she convulses occasionally with the pinned-insect movements of the truly terrified.
-----
She dreams she is lying on an operating table. There's a machine hovering over her, with delicate slender fingers.
How did I get here?
"I'm going to start now." House's voice echoes in the room and she jerks up, instinctively, head snapping back and forth and he says, loud, "Fuck! If you'd done that two seconds later I would've cut your jugular open. Which, while admittedly pretty cool, not the intended effect. At all."
"House...?"
"Lie the hell back down."
She obliges without knowing why. A razor blade passes above her face and sinks down to her collar, barely brushing it, and she holds her breath. The top button on her shirt comes off. Her hair comes undone, the rubber band sliced cleanly. "Not a good idea," she whispers. Her throat is dry and her mouth feels stiff. The razor is like tiny piano-player fingertips, knowing where to move to expose thin slits of her body. One. Then another. Hesitate - make her wait a split second, like water torture - and another.
"And why would that be?"
She reaches up with one arm, delicate, like a dancer's movement. She pulls out a loose clump of hair. "See."
"You shouldn't be losing your hair."
"I know. I'm too young." She laughs, rueful, thinking about the streaks of gray shot through his mess of a haircut. Something in his voice, though, has tensed and caught her quite suddenly.
"No," he says. "And I shouldn't have had to move the blade that far down. Not to reach your shirt." There's a few pauses and then, "You're not right. You're not the Cameron I've been hallucinating." She opens her mouth to ask, and then suddenly whips into the crystal-pointed clarity of a lucid dream, none of this is even real, just let him talk. He tells her: "When I wake up, you damn well better be back to normal."
"Would you miss me?"
He is already gone.
-----
She's on the table again.
House is babbling, and then the knife is speeding about, seizing in midair, right above her belly
"That's okay," she whispers to the blade, mouth pursed like a kiss. "That's okay. Cut me open."
House screams a single word, and the blade rushes like teeth and veins, and she feels herself stabbed gushing blood, House is screaming no meaning, no fucking meaning, she hears the steady rhythm of her own blood dripping to the floor and puddling and being washed away. She feels herself scrubbed clean on the autopsy table. lucid, allison, lucid, wake up but she loves it too much: they lift out her stomach, now her intestines, now her thick liver. Her entire self is opened and emptied.
-----
She wakes to find herself stiff-necked, mouth dry. It's the middle of the night. The simple blinking of the clock is too much, her head pounds.
She touches where the scar should be on her belly. She touches the lowest of her ribs. The next pair. The next one. Between the ribs, where her lungs sit, inflating, deflating, fat and heavy with air and space. I want you out she thinks. Touches her lower back, at her kidneys want you out. Her heart. Too heavy, what good have you done me? I want you out.
Remembering the dreams and the sharp intensity of House's eyes, cutting through glass walls and air and time, to say I see you, you are different, I will make you who you want to be. Remembering. Two more Ativan and maybe I can get back. She curls up on the couch again and passes through life into death, into dreaming and forever.