Outside Athens Finale (H/C)
Title: Outside Athens Finale
Author: Razor840
Pairing: H/C, W/C (W/C friendship, H/W friendship)
Summary: "Thank you for showing me who I really am. I can't change who I am, I might not have been as aware of it as I should have been. Maybe I was. Maybe you were the only person who really saw how ugly and contemptable I could be. I've decided to thank you for that because really seeing myself makes me feel incredibly free."
Warning: Spoilers for the Cameron plot in Season 6
She wouldn’t answer her phone. House was fairly convinced that she would answer his calls and he was absolutely sure that she would give in to Foreman or Chase, if she was going to be stubborn with him. He could almost always make her give in. Chase and Foreman were past worried, way past paranoid about the reporter. They seemed to expect the police to kick down the door of Diagnostics at any minute, screaming ‘get the fuck down!’
Paranoia always interested House, as it seemed like one’s level of paranoia was always intrinsically linked to one’s level of guilt, or one’s level of arrogance, the trick was to figure out which one it was. He was getting hundreds of calls a day, or more accurately, Cuddy was getting hundreds of calls a day ever since the Dibala story broke in the New York Times. He was the reclusive, possibly insane genius who had a blind spot because he didn’t like people, taken to the level of a Tragic Greek Hero by the reporter’s little piece of fiction. Chase was the loving husband who couldn’t believe that his wife could actually kill a man, the loving husband who broke with reality and helped his wife cover up a murder because he couldn’t bare to lose her. It seemed as though the whole situation could be boiled down to melodramatics and the evil scheming of Allison Cameron, who manipulated progressive thought and used it for her own passions. She was a dictator with a compassionate mask, like an Ayn Rand villain, the female Ellsworth Toohey. Cameron was right. She probably realized how little that meant now, he was sure that particular blind spot didn’t exist anymore.
He joked that Chase should be happy. Mitchell’s piece was so over the top that only people with tin foil hates would believe it. Cameron left PPTH and found success in a company that eventually procured some government funding, the leap to a CIA plot was fairly easy to make if you ignored all logic and reason, as conspiracy theorists tended to do. Cameron was afraid of the truth because she operated under the deluded notion that the truth actually mattered. Even this battle scarred, morose version of Cameron couldn’t really escape who she was. Still, she wouldn’t answer her phone.
...
His leg hurt, flying tended to do that. It was just one of the million things he didn’t do because it hurt. A simple plane ride to Columbus was like torture for him. His leg felt like it had gravel and chunks of concrete in it. He tried to stay utterly still.
They ended up doing nothing. They just let the scandal wash over them like a cold tide. When Chase and Foreman started coming into work at the same time every day, when he noticed Chase’s hands shaking around lunch time, he assumed that Foreman was doing some sort of tough love detox thing with him. It angered him that they were friends now, that they some how made it through this ordeal, had some how grown closer. People didn’t really do that. Stressful events didn’t reveal the fictional good side of humanity, they tended to make something already pathetic and small even smaller.
He was surprised when Foreman angrily shut him down when he questioned him about Chase, then he realized what he should have realized all along. Foreman was doing this for Foreman, he was worried and he felt that he had to keep Chase on a short leash which entailed pretending that he was his friend. He was a doctor, so it wasn’t as if Chase didn’t have a physician to look after him if the shakes got too bad.
Even he missed things from time to time.
He hadn’t ruined Chase, he’d ruined Cameron. He hadn’t done Chase any favors but he was still a doctor, he was still in the fight, he was still a rat drowning in piss but he was trying to tread water. Cameron put weights in her pockets and just gave up.
…
She wasn’t answering her door. It was dark and it smelled like wet hay and cold, the cold penetrated every pore of his skin, it felt like daggers jamming into his thigh. He slammed his cane against her door but he could barely make out the sound in the whistling wind. Cameron’s place looked bleak, sagging, and old in the cold night. It looked like a place a crazy hermit would live. Had he turned her into a recluse?
He heard the metallic sound of locks turning, he heard heavy footsteps coming toward the door, but the person who swung the door open wasn’t Cameron. He could tell that the person standing in the door way, looking confused, was high. He could make out red eyes, he could smell marijuana. Was this Cameron’s boyfriend, this slovenly, disheveled guy in a dirty bathrobe?
“Can I help you? Are you lost or something?”
They were so polite in the Midwest. He knocked on this guy’s door, at midnight, in the middle of nowhere and the guy was still smiling, albeit confused.
“I’m looking for Cameron.”
“Cameron?”
“This is the right address,” House was sure of it.
“Do you mean Allison?”
“Yes."
He stepped back and motioned for House to come inside. House collapsed on the couch, the travel had destroyed his leg. He reached for his pills.
“You House?”
“Yes. I’m looking for Cameron.”
“She isn’t here. I’m watching her house for her while she’s out of the Country.”
“Did she go to Africa or something?”
“No. She went to Amsterdam. She said she needed a break. She got all upset about some article. Hey, are you going to share, I’ve got weed,” he motioned to the bottle of pills House had clutched in his hand.
“I’ve been trying to get hold of her about that article for a few weeks now. My colleagues and I have been trying to get together, find the right blood sucker to defend us, you know, adult stuff,” he slipped the pills back in his pocket, ignoring the request.
“You know it wasn’t her fucking job to make sure you guys were all ok. It wasn’t her fucking job to take care of you. She was lonely, she was up here all alone and none of you even sent her a congratulatory note when she did her medicine stuff. You only started to care when the bad shit went down and you needed her. That isn’t how friends operate,” he was rummaging through a backpack.
“I’m sure that is how it works in the hood, when they catch you with a dime bag and your grandmother has to bail you out but in the real world, people don’t ‘stick’ together. We were never friends.”
“Look, just take this fucking letter and get the fuck out of here,” he shoved it into his hands and stormed out of the room.
He didn’t read the letter for several weeks. He actually had to talk to the police again. Thankfully, he didn’t have to talk to Tritter. Instead, he had to talk to the FBI. He knew that they didn’t have anything the minute they started questioning him. Foreman and Chase had done a great job covering it up. They thanked him for coming, the story was starting to lose steam in the news cycle. They plastered Cameron’s picture on the 24 hour stations, House watched interviews with Cameron’s brother, Cameron’s co-workers at Indio Labs, an interview with Chase where he looked grey and corpse-like. Nancy Grace wanted answers. Foreman was perfect for this particular situation. He organized the damage control, he gave a captivating interview to Larry King that almost convinced House that Foreman was a human being. There wasn’t any proof. It was a great story, a true story, but the only people who could confirm it were either lying or eating hash brownies in Amsterdam. They went weeks without taking patients, some of his other transgressions came to light and what was right didn’t seem to matter anymore. Foreman and Chase were actively looking for excuses not to work.
He finally read the letter, after Wilson had been at him about it like a rabid terrier about it for a couple weeks. When he finished reading it, he smiled, sometimes it was alright to be proven wrong.
“House,
I left this letter with my friend, because I think eventually someone from the hospital is going to come and look for me. I don’t really know what is going to happen. I don’t know if I’m going to go to jail or lose my license, at this point I don’t really care about that. Letting something go is hard, you know that. When I told you that I loved you, I was telling you the truth but you never defined who I was. I think that sometimes you felt like you did, sometimes you thought I was your yes woman. I think I’ve revised why I liked you thousands of times, and it was never good enough for you. I finally figured it out. I’m not like you, I don’t want to heal you, I don’t view your intellectual purity with romantic lenses on. I wanted to fuck you, I wanted to have you and I wanted you to have me. There wasn’t a reason. There wasn’t a reason for Chase, there wasn’t a reason for David (my first husband,) sometimes the things we do have no significance at all, sometimes things are purely random. I found that I could get what I needed from you, so I took it. I needed other things, I tried to take those, and you wouldn’t let me have them.
I don’t want to ramble on forever. I guess I have to say thanks again. You trying to prove to me how logical and vile the world is has shown me how random and vile the world is. I think you’ll always be misanthropic, I think you’ll always be a bastard because you’re angry. You’re angry that this world is random and you can’t keep the threads together, they will always unravel. I can accept that now but I don’t think you ever will.
Best Wishes,
Cameron”