(no subject)
Author: Blueheronz
Title: The Walking Wounded
Ship: House/Cameron
Rating: PG
Challenge #5 - Title Love
Episode title: Love Hurts
Spoilers: S1, S2, S3
Comments: Feedback is appreciated
Summary: An angsty look at Cameron's state of mind & body as she prepares to turn in her third letter of resignation to House.
Beta: The delightful author and my good friend
athousandsmiles
And it's the damage that we do
And never know
It's the words that we don't say
That scare me so
- Elvis Costello from “Accidents Will Happen”
Dr. Allison Cameron did not classify herself as accident-prone. On the contrary, from the time she was a child, she’d personified grace.
Beginning at age five she’d lived en pointe in leotards, tutus, and slippers as she learned ballet at a dance studio in Winnetka. Seeing her perform a grand jete in La Slyphide, her instructor had cried at the way her body hovered like a hummingbird, and the audience had breathed a collective sigh when her feet floated back down to the stage.
In college, her track coach had once described her as having the elegance of a gazelle. It wasn’t the most original compliment she’d ever received, but Coach Carter was a strictly meat and potatoes kind of guy, and he’d meant well.
She’d put her ballet slippers away long ago, and running was now merely a hobby.
But her colleagues still perceived her as a woman who had her own special way. The loss of her husband had left her with a poise that came from the inside out.
Today was different.
Grace eluded her.
It was resignation day.
Again.
Since she’d made the decision to quit, she’d felt as if she had vertigo.
Her lithe, nimble body now moved in a kind of stupor, and she felt like a clumsy oaf.
Crawling out of bed that morning had been like extracting a fly from a jar of molasses. A heaviness weighed her body down, and everything she saw around her seemed to be from a distance.
Depression had set in.
Anguish.
As her slim fingers skimmed her computer keyboard - the gist of her resignation letter memorized from the first two times she’d written it - her mind multi-tasked. Images from her three years under House’s peculiar tutelage appeared with the frequency of television commercials, only she couldn’t quell them with a remote.
His eyes flicking over hers when she’d told him, “Happy birthday.”
His mouth close to her ear, breath warm against it, as he pointed out Gravedigger at the Monster Truck rally.
The look on his face when he had turned to her and promised, “I’m not going to crush you.”
His warm hand squeezing her shoulder in the hospital chapel after she’d euthanized her first patient. “I’m proud of you,” he’d assured her in his gravelly voice: words she had always hoped to hear from him.
The way his inscrutable eyes scanned hers as she brought her hands up to hold and caress his face. And the flood of warmth when their mouths touched, pressed, opened, explored.
A series of Lucy Ball-like pratfalls were the by-products of her attempts to resign from her fellowship.
First she sustained a paper cut while folding her letter of resignation and slipping it into an envelope for House, and then she slammed her elbow against the copy machine. To top it all off, she broke the heel of her Via Spiga ankle highs on her way to drop her resignation in House’s office, sprawling on the floor. The envelope skittered across the shiny surface. As her chin hit linoleum, her skull resonated from the impact, and she bit her tongue.
The iron tang of blood filled her mouth and her face puckered in disgust.
“Ugh,” she uttered. It was an understatement, but she could hardly scream obscenities in the quiet passages of Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Although, come to think of it, House had opened the door to such behavior with his frequent outbursts.
Pain radiated from her tender tongue, and the ache in her head rivaled the ache in her heart.
She got to her feet, kicking off the offending boot and limping over to pluck the envelope off the floor.
“Cameron, wait up.”
A sigh escaped her as she recognized Wilson’s voice, but she slowed her steps and waited for the oncologist.
“We need to talk,” he said, and then did a double take as he surveyed her face. “Um, you’re … bleeding?”
A small smile formed on her face. “I can see why Cuddy made you head of oncology. Okay … fix me up.”
Wilson led her into an examining room. Shining a light into her eyes, he asked the usual questions of a patient who’s fallen.
“No, no dizziness. The pain is cutaneous,” she reported, dutifully.
“Nausea?”
Only when I think about leaving this place, leaving House, she thought grimly.
“Nope.”
And then he asked this:
“Have you been … crying? Your eyes are puffy and red. Is the pain that bad?”
You don’t know the half of it, she longed to tell him. But maybe he did.
“This … hurts.” She placed her hand on her heart.
He scrutinized her. “You’re talking about House.” Wilson sat down next to her on the bed. He shook his head. “Love … hurts, doesn’t it? When I look back at my marriages, my wives, do you know what I think about? I think about their names. How simple and pretty they were. First there was Abby. She wore sundresses and strappy sandals, or she went bare. Bare naked, bare feet, free and easy. That was Abby. There was a radiance to her. How could you go wrong with someone like that? And then when that didn’t work out, I met Bonnie. There’s something hopeful about the name Bonnie, don’t you think? I could have done so little and she still would have loved me. But … something got in the way. Well, Julie. Women named Julie are the kind that stand by you, even when you’re trying to run an oncology wing and micromanage your best friend’s troubled life. Or so I thought.”
Wilson exhaled heavily. “What’s harder? Telling a patient she has terminal cancer, or watching your best friend self-destruct?”
Cameron was quiet as Wilson cleaned the scrape on her chin. She winced as he brushed against her elbow.
“Good girl. There’s no right answer to that,” Wilson said. “Anyway. Do you want to talk … about House?”
What could she say? That she had fallen in love with an anomaly?
Once she’d believed that love was a choice. You picked whom you loved, and then it was a matter of show and tell. You showed your love through actions as simple as washing the dishes, or massaging his neck after a long day at work.
And you said it.
“I love you.”
You said it often, like the irresistible refrain of a pop song.
If the man you loved was terminal, you changed his feeding tube, and swabbed his throat out at the end. And when he died, you threw dirt on the grave, turned, and walked away.
You kept walking.
Cameron had chosen to love her husband; she had chosen to be with him.
With House, she’d had no choice. They had happened.
He was.
She loved.
As is.
In his eyes she saw truth, pain, bravado, humor, and (yes), a heart that beat, a humanity that gripped her and held fast.
He was flesh and bone and blood; he was a ghost in a wishing well.
“I’m … complicated,” he’d once said.
That he was.
And yet she ached for House, yearned for him to let her in, but the words and tune that looped through her memory track were from Paul Simon: “I am a rock; I am an island.”
House stood alone, the “me” in team.
What could she tell Wilson that he didn’t already know about the heartache that came with loving House?
A House who in so many ways remained remote: an island; a rock. Closed up. Locked.
How many words were there, after all, to describe a pain in the heart?
Cameron had learned a few: squeeze, wrench, smart, tear, stab, prick, sting, shoot, twinge, twist.
House had taught her that physical pain could be managed with drugs.
She had learned on her own about the ravages of psychological and emotional pain. It would be masochism to stay with him, especially without Foreman and Chase as buffers.
“I know this will sound like I’m crying wolf,” she finally said to Wilson, once he’d checked the cut on her tongue. “But I’m resigning.”
Again.
Wilson folded his arms across his white lab coat. “You do know that he still … likes you,” he presented the words to her like a consolation prize on a game show.
“Hmm. That’s why he’s flirted with Cuddy all year, and the reason he ogled that hippie chick a few weeks ago. I’m pretty sure she’s replaced his regular hooker,” Cameron spoke bitterly, the edgier side of her personality emerging.
“To be fair, you’ve been riding Chase as if he was the black stallion … except, of course, that he’s white,” Wilson pointed out.
“I was desperate - not for sex, but for a life,” Cameron replied, or at least for something to fill in the gaps House had left in her heart. “Love hurts, but the pain makes you crazy.”
Wilson nodded sagely, as was his way. “Yes … and that applies to House. The pain drives him to do that which is unorthodox. He’s not going to bring you a box of candy like Forrest Gump. But did you ever think that he was trying to capture your attention with his flirtations with Cuddy? Or faking cancer? Or spiking my coffee with speed? If that’s not attention-seeking behavior, I don’t know what is. Cameron, he wants us. He needs us. And on some level, he cares.”
She remembered what she had said to Wilson and Cuddy, when they refused to tell House that he’d cured the quadriplegic.
“Why does he have to be like other people?” She’d argued.
And still she stood by his right to be himself, no matter how hurtful it was to her.
But somehow she had to cope with her feelings. And the only way she knew how to address the wounds that came from loving an anomaly was to run away.
She had no delusions that House would come after her this time.
As she turned to leave the examining room, resignation letter in hand, Wilson added one more thing.
“Don’t forget this: he bought you a corsage.”
Title: The Walking Wounded
Ship: House/Cameron
Rating: PG
Challenge #5 - Title Love
Episode title: Love Hurts
Spoilers: S1, S2, S3
Comments: Feedback is appreciated
Summary: An angsty look at Cameron's state of mind & body as she prepares to turn in her third letter of resignation to House.
Beta: The delightful author and my good friend
athousandsmiles
And it's the damage that we do
And never know
It's the words that we don't say
That scare me so
- Elvis Costello from “Accidents Will Happen”
Dr. Allison Cameron did not classify herself as accident-prone. On the contrary, from the time she was a child, she’d personified grace.
Beginning at age five she’d lived en pointe in leotards, tutus, and slippers as she learned ballet at a dance studio in Winnetka. Seeing her perform a grand jete in La Slyphide, her instructor had cried at the way her body hovered like a hummingbird, and the audience had breathed a collective sigh when her feet floated back down to the stage.
In college, her track coach had once described her as having the elegance of a gazelle. It wasn’t the most original compliment she’d ever received, but Coach Carter was a strictly meat and potatoes kind of guy, and he’d meant well.
She’d put her ballet slippers away long ago, and running was now merely a hobby.
But her colleagues still perceived her as a woman who had her own special way. The loss of her husband had left her with a poise that came from the inside out.
Today was different.
Grace eluded her.
It was resignation day.
Again.
Since she’d made the decision to quit, she’d felt as if she had vertigo.
Her lithe, nimble body now moved in a kind of stupor, and she felt like a clumsy oaf.
Crawling out of bed that morning had been like extracting a fly from a jar of molasses. A heaviness weighed her body down, and everything she saw around her seemed to be from a distance.
Depression had set in.
Anguish.
As her slim fingers skimmed her computer keyboard - the gist of her resignation letter memorized from the first two times she’d written it - her mind multi-tasked. Images from her three years under House’s peculiar tutelage appeared with the frequency of television commercials, only she couldn’t quell them with a remote.
His eyes flicking over hers when she’d told him, “Happy birthday.”
His mouth close to her ear, breath warm against it, as he pointed out Gravedigger at the Monster Truck rally.
The look on his face when he had turned to her and promised, “I’m not going to crush you.”
His warm hand squeezing her shoulder in the hospital chapel after she’d euthanized her first patient. “I’m proud of you,” he’d assured her in his gravelly voice: words she had always hoped to hear from him.
The way his inscrutable eyes scanned hers as she brought her hands up to hold and caress his face. And the flood of warmth when their mouths touched, pressed, opened, explored.
A series of Lucy Ball-like pratfalls were the by-products of her attempts to resign from her fellowship.
First she sustained a paper cut while folding her letter of resignation and slipping it into an envelope for House, and then she slammed her elbow against the copy machine. To top it all off, she broke the heel of her Via Spiga ankle highs on her way to drop her resignation in House’s office, sprawling on the floor. The envelope skittered across the shiny surface. As her chin hit linoleum, her skull resonated from the impact, and she bit her tongue.
The iron tang of blood filled her mouth and her face puckered in disgust.
“Ugh,” she uttered. It was an understatement, but she could hardly scream obscenities in the quiet passages of Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Although, come to think of it, House had opened the door to such behavior with his frequent outbursts.
Pain radiated from her tender tongue, and the ache in her head rivaled the ache in her heart.
She got to her feet, kicking off the offending boot and limping over to pluck the envelope off the floor.
“Cameron, wait up.”
A sigh escaped her as she recognized Wilson’s voice, but she slowed her steps and waited for the oncologist.
“We need to talk,” he said, and then did a double take as he surveyed her face. “Um, you’re … bleeding?”
A small smile formed on her face. “I can see why Cuddy made you head of oncology. Okay … fix me up.”
Wilson led her into an examining room. Shining a light into her eyes, he asked the usual questions of a patient who’s fallen.
“No, no dizziness. The pain is cutaneous,” she reported, dutifully.
“Nausea?”
Only when I think about leaving this place, leaving House, she thought grimly.
“Nope.”
And then he asked this:
“Have you been … crying? Your eyes are puffy and red. Is the pain that bad?”
You don’t know the half of it, she longed to tell him. But maybe he did.
“This … hurts.” She placed her hand on her heart.
He scrutinized her. “You’re talking about House.” Wilson sat down next to her on the bed. He shook his head. “Love … hurts, doesn’t it? When I look back at my marriages, my wives, do you know what I think about? I think about their names. How simple and pretty they were. First there was Abby. She wore sundresses and strappy sandals, or she went bare. Bare naked, bare feet, free and easy. That was Abby. There was a radiance to her. How could you go wrong with someone like that? And then when that didn’t work out, I met Bonnie. There’s something hopeful about the name Bonnie, don’t you think? I could have done so little and she still would have loved me. But … something got in the way. Well, Julie. Women named Julie are the kind that stand by you, even when you’re trying to run an oncology wing and micromanage your best friend’s troubled life. Or so I thought.”
Wilson exhaled heavily. “What’s harder? Telling a patient she has terminal cancer, or watching your best friend self-destruct?”
Cameron was quiet as Wilson cleaned the scrape on her chin. She winced as he brushed against her elbow.
“Good girl. There’s no right answer to that,” Wilson said. “Anyway. Do you want to talk … about House?”
What could she say? That she had fallen in love with an anomaly?
Once she’d believed that love was a choice. You picked whom you loved, and then it was a matter of show and tell. You showed your love through actions as simple as washing the dishes, or massaging his neck after a long day at work.
And you said it.
“I love you.”
You said it often, like the irresistible refrain of a pop song.
If the man you loved was terminal, you changed his feeding tube, and swabbed his throat out at the end. And when he died, you threw dirt on the grave, turned, and walked away.
You kept walking.
Cameron had chosen to love her husband; she had chosen to be with him.
With House, she’d had no choice. They had happened.
He was.
She loved.
As is.
In his eyes she saw truth, pain, bravado, humor, and (yes), a heart that beat, a humanity that gripped her and held fast.
He was flesh and bone and blood; he was a ghost in a wishing well.
“I’m … complicated,” he’d once said.
That he was.
And yet she ached for House, yearned for him to let her in, but the words and tune that looped through her memory track were from Paul Simon: “I am a rock; I am an island.”
House stood alone, the “me” in team.
What could she tell Wilson that he didn’t already know about the heartache that came with loving House?
A House who in so many ways remained remote: an island; a rock. Closed up. Locked.
How many words were there, after all, to describe a pain in the heart?
Cameron had learned a few: squeeze, wrench, smart, tear, stab, prick, sting, shoot, twinge, twist.
House had taught her that physical pain could be managed with drugs.
She had learned on her own about the ravages of psychological and emotional pain. It would be masochism to stay with him, especially without Foreman and Chase as buffers.
“I know this will sound like I’m crying wolf,” she finally said to Wilson, once he’d checked the cut on her tongue. “But I’m resigning.”
Again.
Wilson folded his arms across his white lab coat. “You do know that he still … likes you,” he presented the words to her like a consolation prize on a game show.
“Hmm. That’s why he’s flirted with Cuddy all year, and the reason he ogled that hippie chick a few weeks ago. I’m pretty sure she’s replaced his regular hooker,” Cameron spoke bitterly, the edgier side of her personality emerging.
“To be fair, you’ve been riding Chase as if he was the black stallion … except, of course, that he’s white,” Wilson pointed out.
“I was desperate - not for sex, but for a life,” Cameron replied, or at least for something to fill in the gaps House had left in her heart. “Love hurts, but the pain makes you crazy.”
Wilson nodded sagely, as was his way. “Yes … and that applies to House. The pain drives him to do that which is unorthodox. He’s not going to bring you a box of candy like Forrest Gump. But did you ever think that he was trying to capture your attention with his flirtations with Cuddy? Or faking cancer? Or spiking my coffee with speed? If that’s not attention-seeking behavior, I don’t know what is. Cameron, he wants us. He needs us. And on some level, he cares.”
She remembered what she had said to Wilson and Cuddy, when they refused to tell House that he’d cured the quadriplegic.
“Why does he have to be like other people?” She’d argued.
And still she stood by his right to be himself, no matter how hurtful it was to her.
But somehow she had to cope with her feelings. And the only way she knew how to address the wounds that came from loving an anomaly was to run away.
She had no delusions that House would come after her this time.
As she turned to leave the examining room, resignation letter in hand, Wilson added one more thing.
“Don’t forget this: he bought you a corsage.”