fic: And softly close your doors (1/1)
title: And softly close your doors
rating: PG-13
words: 1,755
pairings/characters: Cameron, House/Cameron.
notes: For
we_take_five. Thank you so much to
lynettinspaghet and
diagnosticmad for doing an amazing job as betas. :)
Would you sail to distant shores?
And hide within the hills
And softly close your doors
Pretend the world is safe
The Cat Empire {No Longer There}
She had perfected the art of disguising her emotions since she was a very young girl.
At age eight, her father left. She had crouched on the landing, peering down through the white bars of the staircase at the scene before her in the living room; her mother whimpering and her father snarling, both screaming at each other. She squeezed her eyes shut when her father stopped yelling to whisper those fatal words: I can’t do this anymore. I’m leaving.
From then on she had been subjected to lying in bed night after night hearing strains of her mother’s sobs, muffled slightly by the walls between them, but still loud enough to keep her awake for the better part of those cold nights.
Still she never shed a tear herself, never uttered a word about it. She fell behind the façade of apathy. Apathy was the easiest to maintain of the three emotions she was consumed with: anger, helplessness and apathy. So she immersed herself in the easy feeling of not caring. But it never suited her, even then.
One night, her mother had hugged her close and actually asked her what she was feeling. Allison didn’t tell her mother that she hated her father now, hated what he had done to them in leaving and she didn’t tell her mother that she wished she had a time machine to go back and rewrite the sequence of their lives.
Later in the night, she had curled herself into a ball under her blanket, wrapped her arms around her pillow and finally let the hot tears she’d kept at bay for months streak silently down her cheek, praying that her mother wouldn’t find her in that state: weak and vulnerable. Lock.
+
She first met her husband in college, when they literally ran into each other on a stairwell, the impact sending her weighty Gray’s Anatomy text tumbling back down the stairs again. She chuckled when he apologised profusely and rushed down the stairs to retrieve it for her, a look of absolute embarrassment on his face. She took it from him gratefully when he returned and introduced herself. He smiled and told her his name was Chris.
They married twelve months later.
And when he told her about his condition, she felt herself sliding back into her old ways. Where she had always been able to be completely open with her feelings around him, she now shrank back behind her walls. Lock.
He never said anything, but she knew that he felt the change.
+
And then she’d met Gregory House.
All of her well-practiced ways of quashing her feelings into hiding, cultivated throughout her twenty-something years, were for nothing when he was around. Her true emotions would spill out and although she knew they were plain for all to see, only he seemed able to.
For all his claims that she was a puzzle, a contradiction, she thought that although he would probably never realise it, he had the power to know everything if he ever wanted to. To be the one who knew the full story of Allison Cameron, rather than the misconstrued, broken bits of puzzle that others knew. Key.
December 2004
At the time of the Echo 11 virus epidemic at PPTH, she had to fight going to pieces as she watched infant after infant fall ill, until eventually the hospital’s maternity ward had been shut down completely.
While she hated to think what would have happened if House hadn’t been so observant to connect the dots and prove to Cuddy that they did indeed have an epidemic on their hands, she couldn’t help but wish he wasn’t so all-seeing when it came to her. She could feel his gaze on her every time she looked at the sick babies and their worried parents with compassion and empathy. Key.
She asked the parents to hold their baby up, while the nurse exchanged her old sheets for fresh ones. She remembered how comforting it was to just be able to be in the same room and to just touch the child, after being separated by a glass wall for too long.
She both hated and felt a twisted form of gratitude for how he made sure she was the one to deliver the news of the child’s death to the patient. He had tried to force her to face her daemons, and for all his bluster, she knew in her heart of hearts that she needed that closure.
Wilson had saved her that time, but in the locker room, as she changed from her scrubs, she knew that it would have been better in the end for her to do it.
Avoiding him seemed a necessary step in self-preservation. Lock.
But he managed to corner her in the end.
Any one who’s that awkward either has no experience around death or too much, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the former. Chase told me about that idea you had: the parents holding the baby. Where’d you get that? Did you lose someone? Did you lose a baby?
She knew better than to think that he had taken an interest because he cared even the slightest about her. He was only looking for new information, to catalogue her in his mind, like he did with anyone and everyone he met.
You can be a real bastard.
She meant it with every pulse of blood flowing through her in that moment. He was prying where no one had a right to delve without her permission and acknowledgement. She wanted to slap him. Yet, she carefully guarded her features and settled for gazing back at him neutrally. He had the power to know everything, but she knew he would never do anything but abuse it. Lock.
March 2005
Those clichéd self-help, steps to confidence books were her last desperate hope against him. By this point he had well and truly fractured her defences against him. She was powerless under his piercing stare. No wonder he thought her to be unbelievably weak. Key.
Do you?
I have to know.
A rushing filled her ears and she was oblivious to her surroundings. Keykeykey. As always, he had the almighty power to break her with his reply.
A creeping finality filled her throughout his pause, and she found she knew what the answer would be before he even replied (whether it was the truth or not).
No.
She wasn’t sure how much more she could take.
[Rust. She dreaded the day when the key wouldn’t open the lock, regardless of who it was that tried.]
March 2007
Times had changed.
She didn’t like to think about how it took two years, but instead focused on the fact that she’d finally done it. She never so much as faltered beneath his gaze anymore and even though no one actually believed that she was over House, she could at least pretend that they did. At any rate, she was never questioned on it beyond the odd eyebrow raise.
Since she started the thing with Chase, she was more confident that House knew nothing of the remnants of feeling she felt for him beneath the surface. Lock.
And then what she found out from Wilson in the PPTH parking lot, brought her to her knees again.
He had brain cancer.
Nothing could have prepared her for that kind of news. For a second time in her life, she was going to lose someone she couldn’t imagine her life without. Both to the same disease.
The first time, she’d only been halfway through med school. This time, she could do something about it; despite the fact that she knew he wouldn’t let her.
As the days passed, she grew desperate. They needed a blood sample if they were ever going to have a hope of helping him. And yet, the idea of pulling him aside and politely requesting such a blood sample was laughable.
What are you doing? I know this must be a turn on for you, but -
And this is what she came up with.
He kissed her back and if she wasn’t so utterly determined to get the blood and help him, she might have dwelled on that longer, even confronted him about it.
His tongue probed her mouth roughly, his stubble scraped her face. Surreal.
And yet, through it all, she managed to somehow keep her cool. She’d like to think she had him (and everyone else) deceived, but in reality, to have him fooled was to have everyone fooled.
She was determined that he would not pick up even the slightest trace of the anguish in her heart; not in her expressions, not in her movements, not in her words. Lock.
+
He’d done it to get high. He’d done it to get fucking high. What, wasn’t Vicodin or even morphine enough anymore?
She felt sick, and a dark, twisted, almost-hatred curled around her heart, hiding it from him more firmly than any of her feeble previous attempts had done.
When he came into that restaurant, where the three of them were enjoying a dinner together, she resisted scowling at him as she felt like doing. Instead, she carefully set her face into a polite expression and spoke to him coolly, only at times when he spoke to her or about her.
Better to seem completely benign to him. Any degree of anger would show that she still cared, despite herself. Lock.
May 2007
My resignation letter.
She noted the carefully masked flicker of surprise that briefly crossed his features.
I've gotten all I can from this job.
She wasn’t lying. She could now firmly keep her emotions hidden from the one man she would ever meet that had the power to strip her down mentally. And that was an achievement in itself, let alone even mentioning how far she’d come as a doctor.
What do you expect me to do? Break down and apologise? Beg Chase to come back?
No. He thought that was what she wanted, but for him to do something so out of character would throw her off balance. A twinge of regret and sadness hit her when she realised how little he knew her even after these years.
No, I expect you to do what you always do. I expect you to make a joke and go on. I expect you to be just fine. I'll miss you.
He would always have the key, only now she had refitted the lock.
fin.