House fic: Juxtaposition
For: gabesaunt
Title: Juxtaposition
Character(s)/Paring(s): House, Cameron, House/Cameron
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2120
Prompt: H/C, repercussion of changes
Summary: It’s apparent that there are some things that have evolved naturally. Arguably, her distance from House is something that was born out of the simple need to protect herself from the ever-shifting mechanics of their relationship. She didn’t trust it and perhaps, perhaps it was the best decision she had made for herself. Consequently, her level of understanding herself had evolved in the process- but something has been lost.
Author's Notes: This one clung more to the subtleties than I expected. But alas, I still am pretty happy about the direction and how it turned out. The idea spawned from an essay I was reading, unfortunately if I remembered more than it was about music and juxtaposition, I would sound much cooler. Oh, well. Enjoy.
“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)
The sheets on her bed are skewed.
Her pillows fall off to the side, some are on the floor and the others mix in the direction of her head and feet. She lies flat on her back, her gaze turned upwards to the ceiling and staring at the white paint. It looks more like cream, but she never paid any attention when she moved in. She sees a chip, counts another one but doesn’t think past any of it. Significance of the mundane is something that is only a child’s luxury.
She has the weekend off for the first time in- does it even matter? She doesn’t remember. Then again, the last time she remembers being this tired is just one of those things that she’d rather not think about it.
But her thoughts are directed towards the week, the emotional rollercoaster that plagued everyone. It scares her that something came so close to peaking her past a knowing exhaustion, one that she hasn’t felt in years. Yet, it goes beyond this. Change is so evident now, that being confronted with it is becoming something that she’s got to learn to grapple with. Particularly when it’s with him.
It’s apparent that there are some things that have evolved naturally. Arguably, her distance from House is something that was born out of the simple need to protect herself from the ever-shifting mechanics of their relationship. She didn’t trust it and perhaps, perhaps it was the best decision she had made for herself. Consequently, her level of understanding herself had evolved in the process- but something has been lost.
The price of self-awareness.
Things she had forgotten became things she remembered and somehow, somehow this made her even more enigmatic- or so Wilson tells her, she muses with amusement.
Now, she doesn’t know what to make of the shift. She’s fiercely protective of her place, of her abilities, and no matter how much he tells her or Foreman and even Chase, she’s more than aware of the significance of her empathy. Her ability to read people. It’s crucial to her functioning, something she’s not going to apologize for. But in this, in this self-awareness, she’s made something known.
Especially to him.
The sound of her phone ringing vibrates through her apartment. She gives a soft groan, stretching in her bed and then shifting to sit up. She reaches across to the phone on her night table and picks up. All she wanted was the quiet.
“Hello?” She yawns.
“Cameron.”
She groans again, flopping back onto her bed. Her hair spills out of her ponytail, a mess of curls and waves against the white of her pillows. She tries to decide on an answer, on something neutral. Her exhaustion could resurface at any point.
“It’s my day off,” she murmurs.
House snorts, traces of amusement laced in his voice. He’s done this before, call her in on her days off. And she’s been furious. It’s rare to have time to herself nowadays and she takes each moment and covets carefully. She can’t help herself, but the inevitable sensation of wariness starts to stir.
His voice breaks through her thoughts. “I’m well-aware of it,” he shoots back. “And to think, I was hoping you missed me during our hours apart.”
“You’re an ass.”
“It’s the charm.”
A silence falls and suddenly, she just knows that it’s going to be one of those conversations. The kind that fall and there’s no control and she, she usually ends up wondering what the-
Her voice is quiet. “What do you need?”
There’s a sigh and a shift. She wonders where he is. If he’s at his place, sitting and drinking his scotch. She’s been there once. And still remembers, remembers the smell of scotch and cigar smoke, a strange erotic air that surrounded him. There is always a dangerous difference between the public and private spheres. And he’s no exception to this rule of thumb. She wonders if they’re going to- even that is a dangerous thought.
“Are you busy?” He counters dryly.
She raises an eyebrow, settling further against the blankets. She’s quiet because she could be reading into implications that she shouldn’t be reading into and yet, yet that color in his voice is pushing her into thoughts she hasn’t had for awhile. This is discerning and always- the moments start like this- she listens. For the time being.
She lets the wariness slip into her voice. “Why?”
She hears another shift again, followed by a sigh. She’s sure she’s due for a flashback to high school by now, where it took twenty minutes for a boy to ask a question. It’s odd that there’s such a spectrum of emotions with them now, an uncertainty and conflict of things that are emerging because they’ve ignored them for too long. It’s a strange bit of punishment.
She can almost see him shrug. “I want coffee.”
“So go buy coffee,” she returns. “I don’t know why you’re calling to tell me this.”
A strange amusement is being stirred inside of her. She doesn’t know what expect from him like this, dabbling in the planes of ease and unease. But then again, what do they expect from each other- other than the superficial. Some of this is already a ridiculous routine.
“I like your coffee.”
“Absolutely not.” Her answer is quick to surface and that need, that awful need to protect herself starts to wind around her. Alerting her defenses. It’s as if she already recognized what he was going for. Even though she didn’t know.
She hates this.
“Cameron,” he begins to wine. “It’s not that complicated. All I-”
She cuts him off. “No,” she says simply.
Her reasoning is scathingly clear and somehow, she feels like she’s giving him much more room to pursue whatever it is he wants. She always finds safety in ambiguity, regardless of the unknown. But she finishes. If anything, she always finishes.
Her sigh is more defeated than anything else. “We see each other enough during the week. Whatever it is, you can wait until Monday.”
She hangs up.
+
She’s canceling drinks with friends when a knock sounds through her apartment.
Her brow furrows and she stifles a yawn as she brushes her hands against her sweatpants, moving to the door. She grabs her tea on the way, her attention span turning in and out as she fades from the conversation with one of her friends- Janie?- trying to convince her to go with them anyhow. Peering into the keyhole, her eyes widen in surprise.
You should’ve expected this, she tells herself. No is one of those answers that House just doesn’t listen to unless the course of action benefits and turns in his favor. Sighing, she knows she can’t avoid this and opens the door.
“Look, Jane,” she murmurs. “I’ve had a long week. We’ll have lunch some time soon. I just can’t today. I’m tired.”
She hangs up the phone before her friend can protest, leaning against the frame of her door. She moves to cross her arms over her chest but, her gaze wavering- she has to look away. She just doesn’t know if she’s ready to do this now. But it means nothing anyway.
He plays with the sleeve of his leather jacket and she notices that his cane is resting against the wall. He sighs. “I don’t know why I’m here.”
She drops her phone on the chair she has by her door, her hands circling her mug with tea. “Neither do I,” she quietly returns.
They stare at each other silently and in this, in this a lot of things come to pass. Acknowledgments and failures, assumptions and slivers of truths, moments and corners- everything falls to the unspoken, ready and waiting for them to begin. Again. But even this notion has changed. They’re two entirely different people within the context of each other.
“You should,” he says finally. He watches her as if he expects to be let in.
But she doesn’t move, her voice soft. “I never claimed to understand you.”
She watches with a small burst of fascination as his lips start to curl slightly. He shakes his head and reaches for his cane, starting to tap it against the wall. Sometimes it’s a nervous habit. Other times it’s an annoyance. The strange rhythm against the wall leads to neither.
“But you do.”
“I don’t,” she pauses, shaking her head. Is this that conversation that they were expecting? “A vast majority of the time.”
He shrugs and it becomes obvious to her that she’s going to have to push him to get an answer- and she knows that’s exactly what he expects. It’s funny, she muses. That in all of this, he clings to the baseless assumptions of her and she sticks to distance. Regardless of the evidence of change.
Change. It’s a haunting word.
“Are you going to invite me in? I’m a cripple, you know,” he blurts.
She snorts, but shakes her head. She continues to keep to the silence, watching him. She’s more than aware at how unnerving her silence is to him- he isn’t the only one being faced with an answer and not knowing how to proceed in light of it.
“I like your coffee.”
She snorts, recognizing the attempt to push her. “I’m drinking tea.”
“Too bad.”
“Not really.”
And then he starts to laugh. The sound is a surprise, a dangerous, dangerous surprise and she doesn’t know what to make of it. She stares at him with a gaze of mixed wariness and fascination because he’s laughing and it’s genuine. And she, she is just tired of jumping around like this.
She shakes her head. Asks finally, “What do you want from me?”
He shrugs and leans against the doorframe, staring at her for a moment. His eyes are dark and he seems to be taking her in like this, piecing her together out of nothing. He starts to tap his cane against his foot. A nervous habit.
“You’re different,” he murmurs. He holds up his hand and stills any words that want to come from her mouth. “I don’t know what it is. Or if I should really give a rat’s ass. But there’s something different about you or maybe it’s just you and I’ve missed something-”
He cuts himself off. She shrugs.
“I don’t know what you want me to say to you,” she begins. Her gaze falls to the amber of her tea. “You’ve always carried these assumptions about me. We dance around them for a bit. It’s good fun and then I end up extremely pissed off at you. It’s the comfort of the superficialities of our formula.”
House snorts. “We have a formula?”
She shakes her head, brushing the hair that falls into her eyes away. “We don’t.”
“But you just said-”
“I know.”
She looks up at him and then away, uncomfortable for the first time. He’s never given her reason to, ironically, and it’s here, here where exposure becomes the only clear answer to moving forward in whatever this was.
She’s starting to want to know.
“Cameron.”
She jumps and nearly spills her tea when his fingers brush against her jaw. She puts the cup down, by her phone. Her eyes are wide with surprise. He’s standing closer and she feels herself grappling with the contingency of her own emotional spectrum.
He’s too close. But she doesn’t move.
She finds herself falling to the measure of sensation that his fingers draw by the simple act of brushing against her jaw. He looks down at her- not into her eyes- and watches her. She doesn’t know what he’s watching and maybe, maybe he’s not watching anything at all.
He sighs softly. “You did good this week.”
It takes her awhile to notice that her lips are quivering and that something inside of her is rising to the surface, unraveling right before and she can’t control it. It’s the first time she doesn’t understand the gravity of her own emotions, the spiral that it creates or had been created.
Something’s happening.
“I’m tired,” she says quietly. The words fall without any hesitation and she looks up at him, biting her lips. She runs a hand through her hair.
“I’m very, very tired.”
Somewhere between the admission and the simplicity of the moment, House reaches for her and winds an arm around her shoulders. Her fingers curl around the lapels of his jacket and she finds herself sighing once. Then twice. She swears that his lips brush against her forehead, but stepping into that thought is something that she can’t do right now.
He says nothing. And she understands.
+
Title: Juxtaposition
Character(s)/Paring(s): House, Cameron, House/Cameron
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2120
Prompt: H/C, repercussion of changes
Summary: It’s apparent that there are some things that have evolved naturally. Arguably, her distance from House is something that was born out of the simple need to protect herself from the ever-shifting mechanics of their relationship. She didn’t trust it and perhaps, perhaps it was the best decision she had made for herself. Consequently, her level of understanding herself had evolved in the process- but something has been lost.
Author's Notes: This one clung more to the subtleties than I expected. But alas, I still am pretty happy about the direction and how it turned out. The idea spawned from an essay I was reading, unfortunately if I remembered more than it was about music and juxtaposition, I would sound much cooler. Oh, well. Enjoy.
“I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.” Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)
The sheets on her bed are skewed.
Her pillows fall off to the side, some are on the floor and the others mix in the direction of her head and feet. She lies flat on her back, her gaze turned upwards to the ceiling and staring at the white paint. It looks more like cream, but she never paid any attention when she moved in. She sees a chip, counts another one but doesn’t think past any of it. Significance of the mundane is something that is only a child’s luxury.
She has the weekend off for the first time in- does it even matter? She doesn’t remember. Then again, the last time she remembers being this tired is just one of those things that she’d rather not think about it.
But her thoughts are directed towards the week, the emotional rollercoaster that plagued everyone. It scares her that something came so close to peaking her past a knowing exhaustion, one that she hasn’t felt in years. Yet, it goes beyond this. Change is so evident now, that being confronted with it is becoming something that she’s got to learn to grapple with. Particularly when it’s with him.
It’s apparent that there are some things that have evolved naturally. Arguably, her distance from House is something that was born out of the simple need to protect herself from the ever-shifting mechanics of their relationship. She didn’t trust it and perhaps, perhaps it was the best decision she had made for herself. Consequently, her level of understanding herself had evolved in the process- but something has been lost.
The price of self-awareness.
Things she had forgotten became things she remembered and somehow, somehow this made her even more enigmatic- or so Wilson tells her, she muses with amusement.
Now, she doesn’t know what to make of the shift. She’s fiercely protective of her place, of her abilities, and no matter how much he tells her or Foreman and even Chase, she’s more than aware of the significance of her empathy. Her ability to read people. It’s crucial to her functioning, something she’s not going to apologize for. But in this, in this self-awareness, she’s made something known.
Especially to him.
The sound of her phone ringing vibrates through her apartment. She gives a soft groan, stretching in her bed and then shifting to sit up. She reaches across to the phone on her night table and picks up. All she wanted was the quiet.
“Hello?” She yawns.
“Cameron.”
She groans again, flopping back onto her bed. Her hair spills out of her ponytail, a mess of curls and waves against the white of her pillows. She tries to decide on an answer, on something neutral. Her exhaustion could resurface at any point.
“It’s my day off,” she murmurs.
House snorts, traces of amusement laced in his voice. He’s done this before, call her in on her days off. And she’s been furious. It’s rare to have time to herself nowadays and she takes each moment and covets carefully. She can’t help herself, but the inevitable sensation of wariness starts to stir.
His voice breaks through her thoughts. “I’m well-aware of it,” he shoots back. “And to think, I was hoping you missed me during our hours apart.”
“You’re an ass.”
“It’s the charm.”
A silence falls and suddenly, she just knows that it’s going to be one of those conversations. The kind that fall and there’s no control and she, she usually ends up wondering what the-
Her voice is quiet. “What do you need?”
There’s a sigh and a shift. She wonders where he is. If he’s at his place, sitting and drinking his scotch. She’s been there once. And still remembers, remembers the smell of scotch and cigar smoke, a strange erotic air that surrounded him. There is always a dangerous difference between the public and private spheres. And he’s no exception to this rule of thumb. She wonders if they’re going to- even that is a dangerous thought.
“Are you busy?” He counters dryly.
She raises an eyebrow, settling further against the blankets. She’s quiet because she could be reading into implications that she shouldn’t be reading into and yet, yet that color in his voice is pushing her into thoughts she hasn’t had for awhile. This is discerning and always- the moments start like this- she listens. For the time being.
She lets the wariness slip into her voice. “Why?”
She hears another shift again, followed by a sigh. She’s sure she’s due for a flashback to high school by now, where it took twenty minutes for a boy to ask a question. It’s odd that there’s such a spectrum of emotions with them now, an uncertainty and conflict of things that are emerging because they’ve ignored them for too long. It’s a strange bit of punishment.
She can almost see him shrug. “I want coffee.”
“So go buy coffee,” she returns. “I don’t know why you’re calling to tell me this.”
A strange amusement is being stirred inside of her. She doesn’t know what expect from him like this, dabbling in the planes of ease and unease. But then again, what do they expect from each other- other than the superficial. Some of this is already a ridiculous routine.
“I like your coffee.”
“Absolutely not.” Her answer is quick to surface and that need, that awful need to protect herself starts to wind around her. Alerting her defenses. It’s as if she already recognized what he was going for. Even though she didn’t know.
She hates this.
“Cameron,” he begins to wine. “It’s not that complicated. All I-”
She cuts him off. “No,” she says simply.
Her reasoning is scathingly clear and somehow, she feels like she’s giving him much more room to pursue whatever it is he wants. She always finds safety in ambiguity, regardless of the unknown. But she finishes. If anything, she always finishes.
Her sigh is more defeated than anything else. “We see each other enough during the week. Whatever it is, you can wait until Monday.”
She hangs up.
+
She’s canceling drinks with friends when a knock sounds through her apartment.
Her brow furrows and she stifles a yawn as she brushes her hands against her sweatpants, moving to the door. She grabs her tea on the way, her attention span turning in and out as she fades from the conversation with one of her friends- Janie?- trying to convince her to go with them anyhow. Peering into the keyhole, her eyes widen in surprise.
You should’ve expected this, she tells herself. No is one of those answers that House just doesn’t listen to unless the course of action benefits and turns in his favor. Sighing, she knows she can’t avoid this and opens the door.
“Look, Jane,” she murmurs. “I’ve had a long week. We’ll have lunch some time soon. I just can’t today. I’m tired.”
She hangs up the phone before her friend can protest, leaning against the frame of her door. She moves to cross her arms over her chest but, her gaze wavering- she has to look away. She just doesn’t know if she’s ready to do this now. But it means nothing anyway.
He plays with the sleeve of his leather jacket and she notices that his cane is resting against the wall. He sighs. “I don’t know why I’m here.”
She drops her phone on the chair she has by her door, her hands circling her mug with tea. “Neither do I,” she quietly returns.
They stare at each other silently and in this, in this a lot of things come to pass. Acknowledgments and failures, assumptions and slivers of truths, moments and corners- everything falls to the unspoken, ready and waiting for them to begin. Again. But even this notion has changed. They’re two entirely different people within the context of each other.
“You should,” he says finally. He watches her as if he expects to be let in.
But she doesn’t move, her voice soft. “I never claimed to understand you.”
She watches with a small burst of fascination as his lips start to curl slightly. He shakes his head and reaches for his cane, starting to tap it against the wall. Sometimes it’s a nervous habit. Other times it’s an annoyance. The strange rhythm against the wall leads to neither.
“But you do.”
“I don’t,” she pauses, shaking her head. Is this that conversation that they were expecting? “A vast majority of the time.”
He shrugs and it becomes obvious to her that she’s going to have to push him to get an answer- and she knows that’s exactly what he expects. It’s funny, she muses. That in all of this, he clings to the baseless assumptions of her and she sticks to distance. Regardless of the evidence of change.
Change. It’s a haunting word.
“Are you going to invite me in? I’m a cripple, you know,” he blurts.
She snorts, but shakes her head. She continues to keep to the silence, watching him. She’s more than aware at how unnerving her silence is to him- he isn’t the only one being faced with an answer and not knowing how to proceed in light of it.
“I like your coffee.”
She snorts, recognizing the attempt to push her. “I’m drinking tea.”
“Too bad.”
“Not really.”
And then he starts to laugh. The sound is a surprise, a dangerous, dangerous surprise and she doesn’t know what to make of it. She stares at him with a gaze of mixed wariness and fascination because he’s laughing and it’s genuine. And she, she is just tired of jumping around like this.
She shakes her head. Asks finally, “What do you want from me?”
He shrugs and leans against the doorframe, staring at her for a moment. His eyes are dark and he seems to be taking her in like this, piecing her together out of nothing. He starts to tap his cane against his foot. A nervous habit.
“You’re different,” he murmurs. He holds up his hand and stills any words that want to come from her mouth. “I don’t know what it is. Or if I should really give a rat’s ass. But there’s something different about you or maybe it’s just you and I’ve missed something-”
He cuts himself off. She shrugs.
“I don’t know what you want me to say to you,” she begins. Her gaze falls to the amber of her tea. “You’ve always carried these assumptions about me. We dance around them for a bit. It’s good fun and then I end up extremely pissed off at you. It’s the comfort of the superficialities of our formula.”
House snorts. “We have a formula?”
She shakes her head, brushing the hair that falls into her eyes away. “We don’t.”
“But you just said-”
“I know.”
She looks up at him and then away, uncomfortable for the first time. He’s never given her reason to, ironically, and it’s here, here where exposure becomes the only clear answer to moving forward in whatever this was.
She’s starting to want to know.
“Cameron.”
She jumps and nearly spills her tea when his fingers brush against her jaw. She puts the cup down, by her phone. Her eyes are wide with surprise. He’s standing closer and she feels herself grappling with the contingency of her own emotional spectrum.
He’s too close. But she doesn’t move.
She finds herself falling to the measure of sensation that his fingers draw by the simple act of brushing against her jaw. He looks down at her- not into her eyes- and watches her. She doesn’t know what he’s watching and maybe, maybe he’s not watching anything at all.
He sighs softly. “You did good this week.”
It takes her awhile to notice that her lips are quivering and that something inside of her is rising to the surface, unraveling right before and she can’t control it. It’s the first time she doesn’t understand the gravity of her own emotions, the spiral that it creates or had been created.
Something’s happening.
“I’m tired,” she says quietly. The words fall without any hesitation and she looks up at him, biting her lips. She runs a hand through her hair.
“I’m very, very tired.”
Somewhere between the admission and the simplicity of the moment, House reaches for her and winds an arm around her shoulders. Her fingers curl around the lapels of his jacket and she finds herself sighing once. Then twice. She swears that his lips brush against her forehead, but stepping into that thought is something that she can’t do right now.
He says nothing. And she understands.
+