Fic: All That's Left Are Promises (1/2)
Name: All That's Left Are Promises
Chapter: 1/2
Author: nighthawkms
Fandom: House MD
Story Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Major character death; mild romance, including Cameron/Foreman, House/Cameron, Wilson/Cuddy
Summary: He tries to remember the last time he felt like the present wasn’t moving at a million miles an hour.
Notes: For foreman_fest, Prompt 136: A weird disease takes down much of the staff at PPTH. Foreman is one of the few who escapes and must now help the others. Chapter 2 will be posted later on tonight. Concrit welcomed and appreciated. Haven't written House Fic in a while, so I'm a little rusty. Also, the disease is totally made up; I have no idea if it's even medically possible or maybe already exists.
Chapter Theme: Oxygen Tent- Craig Cardiff
Disclaimer: I do not own House MD, it is the creative property of its writers and Fox. I make no claims of ownership; I'm simply having fun with the characters.
As he stands there, hands covered in the last liquids of a patient’s stomach that have just been emptied out onto the floor, Foreman tries to remember the last time he felt like the present wasn’t moving at a million miles an hour.
He’s hard pressed to dig it out of his memory.
~
There’s a mention of it in one of the past few issues of the medical journals he frequents. Caputadflictatiomortis Syndrome. CAMS disease, since it doesn’t roll off the tongue otherwise.
House runs out of jokes to throw at Cameron after the first week of news of the outbreak; not that she or anyone else really finds them funny. The news coming in from around the country, around the world, is just not something to laugh about. There is nothing funny about AIDS. It’s the same for CAMS.
Wilson finally yells at House about it one day, glass walls not blocking the sound or view of House’s office, as the fellows watch the two men trade insults behind the doors. For once, House is cowed; or as cowed as House can get. He enters the meeting room with a snarking quip about Chase’s haircut, and they all know the subject is dropped.
~
There’s a delicate few days where everyone is on eggshells; watching and waiting. The disease hasn’t made a jump out of the Euro-Asian continental area yet, and people are hopeful that North America might be spared the run of the sickness.
House, in his continuing sensitivity towards delicate subjects, calls for bets on when it’s going to arrive. Threats of clinic duty by Cuddy ensure that no one ever takes him up on it.
Of course, it would be their luck that it starts on the East Coast. The bloated, red-faced South Dakota man Foreman saw on TV last night who was cawing about ‘germ proofing’ his house will probably never be within ten miles of someone with CAMS; rural dwellers are the lucky ones.
Cuddy orders the top floor of the hospital to be set up as a quarantine zone. No one gets up there without a special elevator key. No one gets down either.
The first few patients start trickling in, and of course, if there is a weird, wild new disease, House will be there, and that means the three fellows get dragged along for the ride.
Sometimes Foreman wonders what it would be like to have a boss who didn’t have these suicidal tendencies. Mostly he just tries not to think about it.
~
They’ve got a chart posted on the white-board in the conference room. It’s the latest information on symptom progression, as put out by the recent international medical conference that met to discuss what to do about the disease crisis.
Migranes. That’s where it starts; where the name came from. The suburban housewife who takes Excedrin every other week suddenly turns into a junkie, popping pills every hour. The pain comes fast and lasts much longer than normal headaches. Fainting spells and abnormal physical exhaustion are also reported.
The next stage is a Pepto Bismol commercial. Nausea, and upset stomach; with diarrhea for the unlucky ones. Or lucky, depending on your viewpoint. Those who get it are more likely to survive.
He hasn’t dealt with patients past this stage yet, hasn’t been assigned one, and doesn’t want to think about the rest of the chart right now. Ignorance is bliss, and he could kiss whoever invented that phrase.
~
Caneron pulls him out of a patient room on Tuesday morning. “House found Dr. Wilson passed out in the bathroom,” she says, twisting her fingers in agitation. He notices she’s been doing that a lot more lately; it seems there is something that can agitate her more than House. “They’re taking him upstairs to the quarantine.”
When he seemingly ignores her announcement and asks for the charts on their latest patient, she stares at him like he’s just confessed to a murder. “Don’t you care?”
He wishes he could. He wishes he had the time to be like Cameron; to sit by every patient’s bedside with comforting words, playing therapist (he’ll ask her later if she ever considered the profession).
But he is a doctor, and he has a doctor’s burden; when someone is a patient, they become a puzzle to be solved, and emotions, relationships; feelings shouldn’t get in the way of getting the answer.
When he thinks like this, he can see why people look at him as a House-in-training.
Cameron walks away, and, as if wanting to throw off hiss entire perception of reality, throws back an offhanded comment. “House hasn’t left the room since they brought Dr. Wilson in.”
Hearing that, he thinks maybe people’s assumptions about him and House were wrong after all.
~
Foreman does catch sight of House in Wilson’s room every once in a while. They’re pumping the younger doctor with a concoction of random drugs; he’s a voluntary guinea pig. Sometimes they make him delusional; and the last time Foreman spotted House in the room, he was listening to Wilson rave about the beauty of mallards.
“Something’s up with House.” Wilson’s having a rare moment of clarity while Foreman checks the patient chart. .”I think he’s actually worried about me; he’s, dare I say it, nicer.”
He asks Wilson if that’s a good thing. The other doctor glances out the window for a moment, and he actually looks like he’s trying to decide on an answer; an answer to a question that would be obvious if it were asked about anybody else in the world. But this is House.
Finally, Wilson looks at him. “I kind of want the arrogant bastard back.”
And he can’t help but admire Wilson a little. But if Foreman’s supposed to be another ‘House,’ then where is his Wilson?
~
Sometimes, if he concentrates, he can close his eyes and block out the world. He imagines that he’s on another planet, in another galaxy, where he has a wife, two point five kids, a sane boss, and a semi-normal work schedule. He’s happy, well off, respected, and his whole family adores him…
And then he finds Cameron’s fingers snapping in front of his face over the conference table, and House’s voice in his ear.
“Foreman, I hate to interrupt your daydreams about Cameron’s cleavage, since you seem to be so adamant at staring at them. But we do have some people to cure here.”
Damn it.
~
Patients develop a high fever at the next stage. For the lucky ones, this is the climax of CAMS disease; it will flush out of their system over the next few weeks, leaving them exhausted but alive. But for the unlucky ones, it will progress to the next stage: lower body paralysis.
When Wilson spiked a 103 degree fever, House shut himself inside his office for the day and drew the blinds. He told them to page him when the fever broke and he could go berate Wilson for missing so much work.
Now Foreman walks into the darkened room and delivers the news that Wilson can no longer walk. House is tossing his red ball up in the air with his cane handle, and he misses the last throw, ball bouncing to the floor below him.
He’s quiet, and Foreman can’t see House’s face well; either the man is a vampire or has night vision, because he seems to love the dark. But suddenly the cane handle is nudging against Foreman’s chest, and it seems House has found a way to invade his space yet again.
“If he can’t walk, he can use my cane.”
There’s a desperate begging that Foreman’s never heard before, evident in the sound of House’s voice echoing off the glass walls. It asks him, please, please say this is a bad joke.
And he really wishes it was.
~
Cameron’s been requesting for about a week now to be staffed full time on the quarantine floor during the duration of the outbreak, and Foreman wonders why the hell anyone would want to do that. He can barely stand to be up there for the short time absolutely needed to check on patients. He’s gotten good at rock-paper-scissors against Chase to see who has to go up there when their shifts come up; Cameron takes her shift willingly.
No one is allowed in the quarantine without a mask on, and when he finds her without one, clutched over a garbage can in a locker room, spilling her stomach across the hall from the worst of the CAMS patients, Foreman finally understands.
He ends up by her side, letting her clutch his shirt as she tries to keep herself standing. “I wanted to help out as long as I could, but away from you all so I wouldn’t endanger the rest of you with infection,” she says, voice cracking as she tries not to break into hysterics. “I can’t even believe I survived the migraines without you all catching on.”
When she vomits again, he holds back her hair, loose from its ponytail. He uses the time to reflect on life, and how it’s taken an apocalyptic plague to let a beautiful woman be vulnerable in front of him like this.
He should reprimand her for being this stupid; for going without treatment for so long in an attempt to play martyr once more. But when she rests her face against his shoulder and breathes out thank you against his starch white lab coat, he loses the urge.
He knows she’ll get it from House anyway.
~
He can picture the hospital staff alongside Atlas, who held up the earth on his shoulders in Greek mythology. They, in turn, hold the hospital on their shoulders, and there are fewer and fewer people to support it every day.
~
House says sometimes that he wishes either Chase or Foreman had gotten sick instead of Cameron; then they wouldn’t be drinking Chase’s god-awful coffee concoction every morning. But behind the snark, there’s concern, for both Wilson and Cameron.
In an odd twist, the two doctors are in rooms next to one another, dividing between the section reserved for the healthier patients and those worse off. Cameron hasn’t hit the fever stage yet, and Foreman wonders if House will lock himself in his office again when she does.
Wilson goes into a coma on the same day that Cameron’s temperature skyrockets. House is like a ping-pong ball; Foreman watches him go back and forth between their rooms, then hobbling away to check on other patients, and back to start the routine over again.
He peeks through Wilson’s door once, watching as House snags a handful of Doritos from the chip bag on the bed and points out something on TV to the unconscious man. Foreman tries to remember why it feels so routine; and it may just disturb him that this, of all things, brings some normalcy back to his life.
Later, he’s on his way past Cameron’s door when he hears a gruff voice coming through the slightly opened door. He looks through the crack cautiously, surprised to see House on a rolling chair next to the bed, grasping the sleeping woman’s hand in his own and staring moodily at her.
It’s different than the feeling he got from watching Wilson and House together; there’s an odd newness to it all.
And again, House converses with the silence. “Maybe when this is over, you’ll try to stop being so much of the self-sacrificing masochist that you are. Maybe this experience will have taught you a thing or two.”
Foreman can hear that there’s no energy behind his berating. It doesn’t surprise him as much as he thought it might when House presses his lips softly against the back of her hand through the paper mask and says, “Though I’m actually hoping it doesn’t, in case you’re interested, which of course, you are.”
House is House, and Cameron is Cameron, and to actually hear House confessing his desire for her to stay the way she is amazes and terrifies Foreman, because it just confirms how bad of a state House thinks they’re all in.
~
Chase confronts him in the lab one day, after he’s pulled a fifteen hour shift and is about to head home.
The blond doctor strides into the room, looking for all-the-world to be indignant about something; but Foreman couldn’t care less what it is right now; he just wants to get home and go to sleep. Chase has other plans for him; blocking the doorway as he tries to pass.
“What’s the deal, Foreman? House told me you haven’t been to see Dr. Wilson or Cameron all week. Brilliant way to show your support for them.”
House. Of course it would be that bastard who turned Chase against him. He can’t deal with this right now, and Chase really, really needs to move, or Foreman will burrow straight through the man’s chest just to escape.
He shouts at Chase to step aside, but the other man holds his ground. “Maybe Dr. Wilson isn’t a good friend, but Cameron is. At least, she seems to think so; she’s been asking for you.”
She’s been asking for him? Suddenly, he’s flashing back to confining glass walls and the feel of a syringe in his hand as it meets the flesh of Cameron’s leg. An old guilt reemerges as he pictures her looking over his bed as he blacks out, watching her lips move; speaking words to absolve him of his sins, like an ordained minister.
It seems the tables have turned, and damn it, that’s just not fair. Not fair, that she should expect Foreman to give the same comfort that she gave him when he was the patient dying of some mysterious disease.
Well, doesn’t that seem hypocritical after all?
And he’s been avoiding Dr. Wilson and Cameron for that reason; he doesn’t know how to give the comfort they deserve. He can’t deal with the ‘puzzle’ and the ‘person’ at the same time; not with people this close to him. It would mess him up; make his judgment clouded, and in turn, be harmful to the patient. He’s doing this to help them.
He hopes to God that that’s the truth, because if it’s not, he’s scared of what that says about him.
~
House is admitted to the quarantine ward with CAMS symptoms a week after Wilson goes into a coma. Cuddy threatens to double his clinic hours when he gets better if he doesn’t check in as a patient immediately.
Of course, the unspoken question of whether he will get better hangs in the air.
They’re circling closer to the drain; Foreman can feel it.
~
Dr. Cuddy is in their conference room more than in her own office nowadays. She’s taken to sitting with Foreman and Chase as they pour over medical textbooks; searching for some medical remedy that could possibly help alleviate their patients’ suffering.
Without House to keep the woman off of their backs, Foreman really gets a clear picture of what it’s like to have her as the next boss up in line; watching their every move and seeming to reprimand them at every turn. Not that she didn’t watch them before; but usually she spent too much time yelling at House about his insanity than to bother with any little things they did.
God, he can’t believe he wants House back.
Maybe it’s just the stress on them that’s making Cuddy prowl around the conference room like a caged animal, desperate to escape. She can’t be feeling too wonderful; it’s only when she’s out of the room that he and Chase ever begin to make progress, because having her snap at them to “check this article” and “look for that reference book” isn’t helping them actually find anything.
He’s scheduled to do a quick checkup on Dr. Wilson’s condition around three that afternoon, but when he gets to the room, he finds it already occupied.
Dr. Cuddy is standing at the foot of the bed, gripping the plastic end, and he wonders why, why he always ends up barging in on personal moments like this. And he knows it’s personal by the way that Cuddy’s entire body is shaking; her breath coming in gasps.
It’s too late for him to escape out the door; she’s heard him, and turns to reveal a tear-streaked face, mascara just barely starting to run.
“Oh,” she says.
He tries to back out, but she holds up a hand, shaking her head. “No, it’s okay.” She walks towards him and pauses in the doorway, looking back into the room.
“I just never got to tell him…”
Foreman thinks he might know what she means, but if he’s wrong, it would be pretty embarrassing… not that it isn’t already.
Still, he does advise her to say whatever she has to while she still can. Even if it might seem like Wilson can’t hear her or understand… well, they don’t all need to have House’s cynicism on things.
Cuddy is long gone by the time he finishes Wilson’s checkup, and Cameron’s door is cracked open; so he slips inside, standing there a while, watching her restless sleep.
He thinks he might have things to say too, but he’s not really sure of what. And he knows, in the back of his mind, how hypocritical he is, but stays quiet anyway, dependant on the steady beep of the heart monitor to give him more time to think.
Next Chapter
X-posted to foreman_fest and housefic
Chapter: 1/2
Author: nighthawkms
Fandom: House MD
Story Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Major character death; mild romance, including Cameron/Foreman, House/Cameron, Wilson/Cuddy
Summary: He tries to remember the last time he felt like the present wasn’t moving at a million miles an hour.
Notes: For foreman_fest, Prompt 136: A weird disease takes down much of the staff at PPTH. Foreman is one of the few who escapes and must now help the others. Chapter 2 will be posted later on tonight. Concrit welcomed and appreciated. Haven't written House Fic in a while, so I'm a little rusty. Also, the disease is totally made up; I have no idea if it's even medically possible or maybe already exists.
Chapter Theme: Oxygen Tent- Craig Cardiff
Disclaimer: I do not own House MD, it is the creative property of its writers and Fox. I make no claims of ownership; I'm simply having fun with the characters.
As he stands there, hands covered in the last liquids of a patient’s stomach that have just been emptied out onto the floor, Foreman tries to remember the last time he felt like the present wasn’t moving at a million miles an hour.
He’s hard pressed to dig it out of his memory.
~
There’s a mention of it in one of the past few issues of the medical journals he frequents. Caputadflictatiomortis Syndrome. CAMS disease, since it doesn’t roll off the tongue otherwise.
House runs out of jokes to throw at Cameron after the first week of news of the outbreak; not that she or anyone else really finds them funny. The news coming in from around the country, around the world, is just not something to laugh about. There is nothing funny about AIDS. It’s the same for CAMS.
Wilson finally yells at House about it one day, glass walls not blocking the sound or view of House’s office, as the fellows watch the two men trade insults behind the doors. For once, House is cowed; or as cowed as House can get. He enters the meeting room with a snarking quip about Chase’s haircut, and they all know the subject is dropped.
~
There’s a delicate few days where everyone is on eggshells; watching and waiting. The disease hasn’t made a jump out of the Euro-Asian continental area yet, and people are hopeful that North America might be spared the run of the sickness.
House, in his continuing sensitivity towards delicate subjects, calls for bets on when it’s going to arrive. Threats of clinic duty by Cuddy ensure that no one ever takes him up on it.
Of course, it would be their luck that it starts on the East Coast. The bloated, red-faced South Dakota man Foreman saw on TV last night who was cawing about ‘germ proofing’ his house will probably never be within ten miles of someone with CAMS; rural dwellers are the lucky ones.
Cuddy orders the top floor of the hospital to be set up as a quarantine zone. No one gets up there without a special elevator key. No one gets down either.
The first few patients start trickling in, and of course, if there is a weird, wild new disease, House will be there, and that means the three fellows get dragged along for the ride.
Sometimes Foreman wonders what it would be like to have a boss who didn’t have these suicidal tendencies. Mostly he just tries not to think about it.
~
They’ve got a chart posted on the white-board in the conference room. It’s the latest information on symptom progression, as put out by the recent international medical conference that met to discuss what to do about the disease crisis.
Migranes. That’s where it starts; where the name came from. The suburban housewife who takes Excedrin every other week suddenly turns into a junkie, popping pills every hour. The pain comes fast and lasts much longer than normal headaches. Fainting spells and abnormal physical exhaustion are also reported.
The next stage is a Pepto Bismol commercial. Nausea, and upset stomach; with diarrhea for the unlucky ones. Or lucky, depending on your viewpoint. Those who get it are more likely to survive.
He hasn’t dealt with patients past this stage yet, hasn’t been assigned one, and doesn’t want to think about the rest of the chart right now. Ignorance is bliss, and he could kiss whoever invented that phrase.
~
Caneron pulls him out of a patient room on Tuesday morning. “House found Dr. Wilson passed out in the bathroom,” she says, twisting her fingers in agitation. He notices she’s been doing that a lot more lately; it seems there is something that can agitate her more than House. “They’re taking him upstairs to the quarantine.”
When he seemingly ignores her announcement and asks for the charts on their latest patient, she stares at him like he’s just confessed to a murder. “Don’t you care?”
He wishes he could. He wishes he had the time to be like Cameron; to sit by every patient’s bedside with comforting words, playing therapist (he’ll ask her later if she ever considered the profession).
But he is a doctor, and he has a doctor’s burden; when someone is a patient, they become a puzzle to be solved, and emotions, relationships; feelings shouldn’t get in the way of getting the answer.
When he thinks like this, he can see why people look at him as a House-in-training.
Cameron walks away, and, as if wanting to throw off hiss entire perception of reality, throws back an offhanded comment. “House hasn’t left the room since they brought Dr. Wilson in.”
Hearing that, he thinks maybe people’s assumptions about him and House were wrong after all.
~
Foreman does catch sight of House in Wilson’s room every once in a while. They’re pumping the younger doctor with a concoction of random drugs; he’s a voluntary guinea pig. Sometimes they make him delusional; and the last time Foreman spotted House in the room, he was listening to Wilson rave about the beauty of mallards.
“Something’s up with House.” Wilson’s having a rare moment of clarity while Foreman checks the patient chart. .”I think he’s actually worried about me; he’s, dare I say it, nicer.”
He asks Wilson if that’s a good thing. The other doctor glances out the window for a moment, and he actually looks like he’s trying to decide on an answer; an answer to a question that would be obvious if it were asked about anybody else in the world. But this is House.
Finally, Wilson looks at him. “I kind of want the arrogant bastard back.”
And he can’t help but admire Wilson a little. But if Foreman’s supposed to be another ‘House,’ then where is his Wilson?
~
Sometimes, if he concentrates, he can close his eyes and block out the world. He imagines that he’s on another planet, in another galaxy, where he has a wife, two point five kids, a sane boss, and a semi-normal work schedule. He’s happy, well off, respected, and his whole family adores him…
And then he finds Cameron’s fingers snapping in front of his face over the conference table, and House’s voice in his ear.
“Foreman, I hate to interrupt your daydreams about Cameron’s cleavage, since you seem to be so adamant at staring at them. But we do have some people to cure here.”
Damn it.
~
Patients develop a high fever at the next stage. For the lucky ones, this is the climax of CAMS disease; it will flush out of their system over the next few weeks, leaving them exhausted but alive. But for the unlucky ones, it will progress to the next stage: lower body paralysis.
When Wilson spiked a 103 degree fever, House shut himself inside his office for the day and drew the blinds. He told them to page him when the fever broke and he could go berate Wilson for missing so much work.
Now Foreman walks into the darkened room and delivers the news that Wilson can no longer walk. House is tossing his red ball up in the air with his cane handle, and he misses the last throw, ball bouncing to the floor below him.
He’s quiet, and Foreman can’t see House’s face well; either the man is a vampire or has night vision, because he seems to love the dark. But suddenly the cane handle is nudging against Foreman’s chest, and it seems House has found a way to invade his space yet again.
“If he can’t walk, he can use my cane.”
There’s a desperate begging that Foreman’s never heard before, evident in the sound of House’s voice echoing off the glass walls. It asks him, please, please say this is a bad joke.
And he really wishes it was.
~
Cameron’s been requesting for about a week now to be staffed full time on the quarantine floor during the duration of the outbreak, and Foreman wonders why the hell anyone would want to do that. He can barely stand to be up there for the short time absolutely needed to check on patients. He’s gotten good at rock-paper-scissors against Chase to see who has to go up there when their shifts come up; Cameron takes her shift willingly.
No one is allowed in the quarantine without a mask on, and when he finds her without one, clutched over a garbage can in a locker room, spilling her stomach across the hall from the worst of the CAMS patients, Foreman finally understands.
He ends up by her side, letting her clutch his shirt as she tries to keep herself standing. “I wanted to help out as long as I could, but away from you all so I wouldn’t endanger the rest of you with infection,” she says, voice cracking as she tries not to break into hysterics. “I can’t even believe I survived the migraines without you all catching on.”
When she vomits again, he holds back her hair, loose from its ponytail. He uses the time to reflect on life, and how it’s taken an apocalyptic plague to let a beautiful woman be vulnerable in front of him like this.
He should reprimand her for being this stupid; for going without treatment for so long in an attempt to play martyr once more. But when she rests her face against his shoulder and breathes out thank you against his starch white lab coat, he loses the urge.
He knows she’ll get it from House anyway.
~
He can picture the hospital staff alongside Atlas, who held up the earth on his shoulders in Greek mythology. They, in turn, hold the hospital on their shoulders, and there are fewer and fewer people to support it every day.
~
House says sometimes that he wishes either Chase or Foreman had gotten sick instead of Cameron; then they wouldn’t be drinking Chase’s god-awful coffee concoction every morning. But behind the snark, there’s concern, for both Wilson and Cameron.
In an odd twist, the two doctors are in rooms next to one another, dividing between the section reserved for the healthier patients and those worse off. Cameron hasn’t hit the fever stage yet, and Foreman wonders if House will lock himself in his office again when she does.
Wilson goes into a coma on the same day that Cameron’s temperature skyrockets. House is like a ping-pong ball; Foreman watches him go back and forth between their rooms, then hobbling away to check on other patients, and back to start the routine over again.
He peeks through Wilson’s door once, watching as House snags a handful of Doritos from the chip bag on the bed and points out something on TV to the unconscious man. Foreman tries to remember why it feels so routine; and it may just disturb him that this, of all things, brings some normalcy back to his life.
Later, he’s on his way past Cameron’s door when he hears a gruff voice coming through the slightly opened door. He looks through the crack cautiously, surprised to see House on a rolling chair next to the bed, grasping the sleeping woman’s hand in his own and staring moodily at her.
It’s different than the feeling he got from watching Wilson and House together; there’s an odd newness to it all.
And again, House converses with the silence. “Maybe when this is over, you’ll try to stop being so much of the self-sacrificing masochist that you are. Maybe this experience will have taught you a thing or two.”
Foreman can hear that there’s no energy behind his berating. It doesn’t surprise him as much as he thought it might when House presses his lips softly against the back of her hand through the paper mask and says, “Though I’m actually hoping it doesn’t, in case you’re interested, which of course, you are.”
House is House, and Cameron is Cameron, and to actually hear House confessing his desire for her to stay the way she is amazes and terrifies Foreman, because it just confirms how bad of a state House thinks they’re all in.
~
Chase confronts him in the lab one day, after he’s pulled a fifteen hour shift and is about to head home.
The blond doctor strides into the room, looking for all-the-world to be indignant about something; but Foreman couldn’t care less what it is right now; he just wants to get home and go to sleep. Chase has other plans for him; blocking the doorway as he tries to pass.
“What’s the deal, Foreman? House told me you haven’t been to see Dr. Wilson or Cameron all week. Brilliant way to show your support for them.”
House. Of course it would be that bastard who turned Chase against him. He can’t deal with this right now, and Chase really, really needs to move, or Foreman will burrow straight through the man’s chest just to escape.
He shouts at Chase to step aside, but the other man holds his ground. “Maybe Dr. Wilson isn’t a good friend, but Cameron is. At least, she seems to think so; she’s been asking for you.”
She’s been asking for him? Suddenly, he’s flashing back to confining glass walls and the feel of a syringe in his hand as it meets the flesh of Cameron’s leg. An old guilt reemerges as he pictures her looking over his bed as he blacks out, watching her lips move; speaking words to absolve him of his sins, like an ordained minister.
It seems the tables have turned, and damn it, that’s just not fair. Not fair, that she should expect Foreman to give the same comfort that she gave him when he was the patient dying of some mysterious disease.
Well, doesn’t that seem hypocritical after all?
And he’s been avoiding Dr. Wilson and Cameron for that reason; he doesn’t know how to give the comfort they deserve. He can’t deal with the ‘puzzle’ and the ‘person’ at the same time; not with people this close to him. It would mess him up; make his judgment clouded, and in turn, be harmful to the patient. He’s doing this to help them.
He hopes to God that that’s the truth, because if it’s not, he’s scared of what that says about him.
~
House is admitted to the quarantine ward with CAMS symptoms a week after Wilson goes into a coma. Cuddy threatens to double his clinic hours when he gets better if he doesn’t check in as a patient immediately.
Of course, the unspoken question of whether he will get better hangs in the air.
They’re circling closer to the drain; Foreman can feel it.
~
Dr. Cuddy is in their conference room more than in her own office nowadays. She’s taken to sitting with Foreman and Chase as they pour over medical textbooks; searching for some medical remedy that could possibly help alleviate their patients’ suffering.
Without House to keep the woman off of their backs, Foreman really gets a clear picture of what it’s like to have her as the next boss up in line; watching their every move and seeming to reprimand them at every turn. Not that she didn’t watch them before; but usually she spent too much time yelling at House about his insanity than to bother with any little things they did.
God, he can’t believe he wants House back.
Maybe it’s just the stress on them that’s making Cuddy prowl around the conference room like a caged animal, desperate to escape. She can’t be feeling too wonderful; it’s only when she’s out of the room that he and Chase ever begin to make progress, because having her snap at them to “check this article” and “look for that reference book” isn’t helping them actually find anything.
He’s scheduled to do a quick checkup on Dr. Wilson’s condition around three that afternoon, but when he gets to the room, he finds it already occupied.
Dr. Cuddy is standing at the foot of the bed, gripping the plastic end, and he wonders why, why he always ends up barging in on personal moments like this. And he knows it’s personal by the way that Cuddy’s entire body is shaking; her breath coming in gasps.
It’s too late for him to escape out the door; she’s heard him, and turns to reveal a tear-streaked face, mascara just barely starting to run.
“Oh,” she says.
He tries to back out, but she holds up a hand, shaking her head. “No, it’s okay.” She walks towards him and pauses in the doorway, looking back into the room.
“I just never got to tell him…”
Foreman thinks he might know what she means, but if he’s wrong, it would be pretty embarrassing… not that it isn’t already.
Still, he does advise her to say whatever she has to while she still can. Even if it might seem like Wilson can’t hear her or understand… well, they don’t all need to have House’s cynicism on things.
Cuddy is long gone by the time he finishes Wilson’s checkup, and Cameron’s door is cracked open; so he slips inside, standing there a while, watching her restless sleep.
He thinks he might have things to say too, but he’s not really sure of what. And he knows, in the back of his mind, how hypocritical he is, but stays quiet anyway, dependant on the steady beep of the heart monitor to give him more time to think.
Next Chapter
X-posted to foreman_fest and housefic