Outside Athens Part 11
Title: Outside Athens Part 11
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
Foreman was sitting in his office doing paperwork. He had managed to talk Cuddy into giving him his own office by promising to take over of the Diagnostic Department’s charting and insurance company billings. It stung to have to crawl on his hands and knees to Cuddy and beg, make promises just to get his own office. He was still happy with it. It was a benchmark of success. He was an attending with his own office at teaching hospital, things could be worse. Several years ago, that line of thinking never would have crossed his mind, he would have been purple with rage over the miniscule size of the office he had been forced to beg for. Cameron’s office probably had eight fountains and a Starbuck’s in it, and everyone who mattered knew he was a better doctor than she was.
He accessorized his space with a faux mahogany desk. He told patients it was a solid oak family heirloom, even though he had picked it up for a couple hundred dollars at the Salvation Army. It hurt every time he told that lie, because he did deserve an 18th Century Amish masterpiece of a desk and he didn’t have one, wasn’t even close to one. Still, he was happy when he found it because it was a passably decent imitation of what he really wanted.
He had a fight with Remy, it started out as her chastising him for his star fucking behavior (he had managed to snag a couple backstage passes to a show in New York) and had almost degenerated into a shouting match when he accused her of not appreciating him. He was faced with a massive dilemma, because she was right but he wanted to stay mad at her.
Sometimes, He felt like she didn’t care enough about the things he cared about. They went antiquing in Rhode Island the weekend of the fight, to look for inexpensive antiques and paintings to use as accent pieces for his office. He found a couple of passable fake Picasso drawings in one old, hand carved frame. They were obviously fakes, but the seller only wanted seventy five dollars for them. He was sure that the frame was worth that much. At the very same store, he also found a great Gingham Springs knock off, and a really great Impressionist take on Piccadilly Circus (he later found out that the painter’s name was Krackowizer). He liked to memorize bullet points about paintings and know enough to keep up his end of the conversation if someone asked about them.
Impressionist painting were great to showcase in offices. Piccadilly Circus hung behind his desk and Gingham Springs hung on the wall beside his tiny window. He was over the Moon but Remy seemed unimpressed. She bitched about helping him carry them back to the car. How heavy could a bag with a couple of rolled up canvases be? They were late for lunch and the restaurant didn’t have soft shell crabs. Remy complained loudly and he was embarrassed.
“Has anyone actually ever fallen for this?”
“Fallen for what?”
Chase had made his way into the office, without knocking. Foreman bristled. He was very clear that the rest of the team should knock. He probably shouldn’t have been so clear, because now House made it a point of not knocking and Chase, of course, followed suit.
“These Picasso drawings are obviously fakes. Did you get them at the same place you got your Rolex?”
“Not everyone in this room was born with a silver spoon in their mouth,” he couldn’t bully Chase as much as he used to.
“So they’re just here for the benefit of your poorer patients? When was the last time We treated someone whose net worth wasn’t in the top five percent of the entire world?”
“You don’t know who I treat, I have my own patients too.”
“You treat entertainment lawyers with tennis elbow.”
“Only rich people think that money doesn’t matter,” he liked Chase, he could admit that now.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Fight with Remy…”
“Seafood-Gate? You have to apologize.”
“What do you want?”
Chase looked ashen, and it wasn’t just because he had been drinking too much lately. He sat down on one of Foreman’s comfortable Ikea chairs. Foreman liked to present an air of comfortable elegance in his office. He didn’t want it to seem like he lived there and he didn’t want it to look like a mass of quirky throw up, like Wilson’s office. When he finally saw Chase, really looked at him, he immediately realized something was very wrong. He mentally kicked himself for not noticing it the minute Chase walked into the room.
He realized that it might be a problem that he couldn’t readily realize which ethical lapse Chase might currently be worried about. There was the Munchhausen By Proxy a few weeks ago, whose death House faked in order to prove his diagnosis. There was the litigious patient who no else would touch that House eventually misdiagnosed with Mucormycosis, so that he would freak out and admit that the whole thing was an extremely elaborate scam. He was threatening to press assault charges. Foreman was angling to leave, trying to line everything up, but Mercy still haunted him and no one would answer his queries, no one would even give him an interview. He was so sure that things would eventually blow over, that he would be hirable again. Now, he was almost sure that he would be at PPTH, working with House until the day he died.
“What is it?”
“Cameron called,” he murmured through gritted teeth.
“Fuck,” Foreman sighed, wondering if he should just take the rest of the day and go to the bar with Chase, so there wouldn’t be a repeat of the last time Chase got upset about Cameron.
“She didn’t really want to talk to me. I don’t understand how she could be such a bitch. She’s getting calls from that reporter, about the Dibala case.”
“She didn’t call me,” she never called him, she also never returned his calls and he practically called her weekly to see if she could get him a job at Indio Labs, well he had started calling when he read the story in the Wall Street Journal.
“I took care of the reporter,” he was forced to talk to her for hours, engaging in verbal Judo, using every obscure medical term he could possibly think of to throw her off the scent.
“Apparently it didn’t work, maybe it did. Cameron thinks she might be suspected.”
“That actually makes sense,” all of the documentation had been painstakingly washed; they fixed every chart, every prescription.
“What do you mean,” Chase was taken aback, he sat up rigidly in the chair.
“Think about it. No paper record is going to show any wrongdoing or even the slightest discretion. We fixed everything after the M&M but anyone who was in the room with Dibala knows the situation. We’re talking about a Modern Day Tito here, at least that was how they referred to him in the New York Times. He was holding together a very unstable place and when he died, that was what really fueled the massive conflict that came afterward. Conspiracy theorists on the Internet have been saying that from day one and when things get bad enough, people always look for a conspiracy. Which one of us said anything about the ethical quandaries inherent in taking that case? You were nice to him, you talked to him about religion. Any one of us would be lying if we didn‘t say that Cameron had a very intense moral aversion to treating Dibala. She actually voiced that aversion to House, to Cuddy, to you, to me.”
“I did the right thing. I just don’t know if I can stay silent if Allison,” Chase sucked in air and looked away, he was still adamant and his voice only softened when he mentioned Cameron.
“It hasn’t come to that yet. It won’t come to that. Cameron is under no obligation to talk to anyone. We need to sit down face to face with her and figure out what we’re going to do. This isn’t just going to go away.