Fic - Night Shift
What? Fic? Looks like mainlining House for a week has prodded something in my brain into life...
Title: Night Shift
Fandom: House MD
Pairing/Characters: Chase/Cameron
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Pinched, and I make no money here.
Summary: Cameron wakes up in darkness and it's hard to adjust to the light.
She wakes up two minutes before the alarm, and stares at the glaring red digits for a few moments before switching the sound off. Rob normally sleeps right through it anyway, but she wants to make sure. His head lolls over as she slips out of bed, and the thin moonlight creeping through the gap in the curtains outlines the shadows of his face.
She watches the corner of his mouth twitch into a small smile, and thinks of the muscles moving under his skin, the flashing signals in his brain that command them. She knows a hundred things that could go wrong, could be going wrong right this second; bacteria in that chicken sandwich he’d had for lunch, a virus sneezed by some woman in the street, a single malignant cell, somewhere, dividing and dividing and dividing like a dark cloud welling up across the sun...
Relationships are never the same when you know exactly how the other person might die. She remembers coming home for the summer after her first year of med school and watching her mom boil potatoes on the stove, unable to think of anything but solanine and both her parents lying on hospital beds with only machines to speak for them. Most people realise that the people they love are fragile things, but they don’t know how easy they are to break.
Except she’s still not sure if she loves Rob, and she wonders how the pain of that fact would register on the mental scale of agonies she’s constructed. Half her clothes seem to have migrated into his closet, her favourite mug is upside down on his drain board, and she knows somewhere deep, deep down that she doesn’t want to break the only good thing she’s had that wasn’t broken already, but she still catches glimpses of his face in every smashed up patient she runs beside through the ER’s double doors, and she can’t help thinking she’s doomed to break him somehow anyway, if she stays too long. So her second favourite mug stays in the cupboard in her apartment, and that’s not love, really, if you’re thinking of the day you’ll have to leave.
She’s in the kitchen, trying not to make too much noise retrieving milk from the fridge, when she hears his footsteps on the stairs.
“Allison?” He’s wearing a faded Foster’s t-shirt that he got in some bar just for being Australian, and a pair of check pyjama bottoms.
“Hey,” she says, pouring cereal into a bowl. His cereal, some sugar-laden crap that’s the natural diet of hyperactive nine-year-olds. “I’m starting early today, you can go back to bed.”
He screws up his face, stretching, and she’s reminded of some sort of cat, tawny-haired and tousled. “Well I’m up now, might as well join you.” He pads blearily over to the coffee maker and there’s something in the way he tilts his head and pulls out the pot that’s too familiar for comfort, and she tries desperately not to feel twenty-one as she takes out another bowl for him.
It’s still a little strange to be here at all; not eating in his kitchen, which she did plenty enough times before when they had lines that she could almost stop her fears from crossing, but eating like this, like she has a right to be here. He touches her hand absent-mindedly, she leans over to pat down a particularly rebellious lock of his hair. It’s comfortable. Domestic. And there’s no deadline on it, no doom set down by Rob’s distant God that she can’t cure and can’t control. His face is reflected on the back of her spoon and she thinks she can see the future. It’s harder to look at than the shape of a body under a sheet.
He hovers behind her in the hallway in his pyjamas while she wraps a scarf around her neck and searches for her hat. He spots it first, and pulls it right down over her head, covering her eyes, and she laughs and can’t resist kissing him, because it was such a... normal thing to do.
Outside its still dark, punctured by the grimy light of the streetlamps that wash the horizon in dull orange, but she when she reaches her car she looks up, and thinks she sees a glimmer of starlight.
Title: Night Shift
Fandom: House MD
Pairing/Characters: Chase/Cameron
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Pinched, and I make no money here.
Summary: Cameron wakes up in darkness and it's hard to adjust to the light.
She wakes up two minutes before the alarm, and stares at the glaring red digits for a few moments before switching the sound off. Rob normally sleeps right through it anyway, but she wants to make sure. His head lolls over as she slips out of bed, and the thin moonlight creeping through the gap in the curtains outlines the shadows of his face.
She watches the corner of his mouth twitch into a small smile, and thinks of the muscles moving under his skin, the flashing signals in his brain that command them. She knows a hundred things that could go wrong, could be going wrong right this second; bacteria in that chicken sandwich he’d had for lunch, a virus sneezed by some woman in the street, a single malignant cell, somewhere, dividing and dividing and dividing like a dark cloud welling up across the sun...
Relationships are never the same when you know exactly how the other person might die. She remembers coming home for the summer after her first year of med school and watching her mom boil potatoes on the stove, unable to think of anything but solanine and both her parents lying on hospital beds with only machines to speak for them. Most people realise that the people they love are fragile things, but they don’t know how easy they are to break.
Except she’s still not sure if she loves Rob, and she wonders how the pain of that fact would register on the mental scale of agonies she’s constructed. Half her clothes seem to have migrated into his closet, her favourite mug is upside down on his drain board, and she knows somewhere deep, deep down that she doesn’t want to break the only good thing she’s had that wasn’t broken already, but she still catches glimpses of his face in every smashed up patient she runs beside through the ER’s double doors, and she can’t help thinking she’s doomed to break him somehow anyway, if she stays too long. So her second favourite mug stays in the cupboard in her apartment, and that’s not love, really, if you’re thinking of the day you’ll have to leave.
She’s in the kitchen, trying not to make too much noise retrieving milk from the fridge, when she hears his footsteps on the stairs.
“Allison?” He’s wearing a faded Foster’s t-shirt that he got in some bar just for being Australian, and a pair of check pyjama bottoms.
“Hey,” she says, pouring cereal into a bowl. His cereal, some sugar-laden crap that’s the natural diet of hyperactive nine-year-olds. “I’m starting early today, you can go back to bed.”
He screws up his face, stretching, and she’s reminded of some sort of cat, tawny-haired and tousled. “Well I’m up now, might as well join you.” He pads blearily over to the coffee maker and there’s something in the way he tilts his head and pulls out the pot that’s too familiar for comfort, and she tries desperately not to feel twenty-one as she takes out another bowl for him.
It’s still a little strange to be here at all; not eating in his kitchen, which she did plenty enough times before when they had lines that she could almost stop her fears from crossing, but eating like this, like she has a right to be here. He touches her hand absent-mindedly, she leans over to pat down a particularly rebellious lock of his hair. It’s comfortable. Domestic. And there’s no deadline on it, no doom set down by Rob’s distant God that she can’t cure and can’t control. His face is reflected on the back of her spoon and she thinks she can see the future. It’s harder to look at than the shape of a body under a sheet.
He hovers behind her in the hallway in his pyjamas while she wraps a scarf around her neck and searches for her hat. He spots it first, and pulls it right down over her head, covering her eyes, and she laughs and can’t resist kissing him, because it was such a... normal thing to do.
Outside its still dark, punctured by the grimy light of the streetlamps that wash the horizon in dull orange, but she when she reaches her car she looks up, and thinks she sees a glimmer of starlight.