A Figment of His Imagination (8)
Title: Epiphany Is a Name For A Blond Girl
Fandom: House m.d.
Summary: This mutated story was inspired by the one scene I got to see of 4x13, so it's kind of spoilery for that particular episode. And yes, now I've seen the rest of the season as well. So spoilery up to Wilson's Heart now.
Rating: What about Teen for this one?
Disclaimer: Written out of fan-appreciation I do neither own House m.d. nor any other characters that appear on that show, I just borrowed them to play around with, so don't sue, please? Oh, and I kind of snatched parts of the dialogue between House and Amber from the bus scene in Wilson's Heart...
previous chapters:
1. It's All In Your Head * 2. It's Not Just In Your Head * 3. Mind Games * 4. Daydreaming * 5. Nightmare * 6. In Your Wildest Dreams * 7. Freudian Dilemma
She is standing in the doorframe watching him, not sure she wants to enter, because if she does everything’s going to change. Cause and effect, just like that French guy in the Matrix movie said - a funny thing to think of in a situation like that. But maybe not at all, because any thought is better right now than acknowledging reality. It means perceiving things all too clearly, like that unpleasant smell of disinfectant and sickness hovering in the air, like that bleeping of the heart rate monitor or that dripping of the IV-running into his arm. So if she steps into that room now, everything will become a little bit more real. Details will imprint in her mind, which she really doesn’t want to linger there.
There’s Cuddy sitting on the chair next to his bed, holding his hand. She is not even turning around to acknowledge her presence. Seeing her there should make her feel something. Anything. She tries to remember what the feeling is she’s supposed to feel right now. Jealousy? Maybe. But after a day like this she feels too hollow for such a potent emotion.
A strand of hair falls from her gradually dissolving ponytail and tickles her skin. She smoothes it back impatiently, almost annoyed. After all that she’s been through today, even minor things manage to irritate her. She’s seen someone die, someone she knew. Amber wasn’t even a friend. In her heart of hearts she knows that they would have never become friends, but nevertheless…nevertheless what? She feels relieved it hasn’t been her sitting on that bus with House, ending up dead because of him. She feels guilty because she feels relieved, angry because she can still hear his arrogant voice echoing in her ears even hours after she checked up on her voice mail and sad because a human being died - basically too many things at once.
She wants to be able to hate him. As a matter of fact there would have been many occasions over the past couple of years that should have inspired a deep and heartfelt hatred for him, but surprisingly it never actually set in. Not even now. Resignedly she enters the room. Cuddy turns around, finally noticing her presence. She starts to say something, maybe apologize but Cameron is not interested in apologizes and too exhausted for small talk so she just shakes her head. After that her eyes settle on House again, taking in his pale skin, the circles under his eyes, the way he looks so disquietingly fragile lying in that hospital bed. The soft pressure of Cuddy’s hand on her shoulder brings her back to reality.
“You sit with him,” she tells her. “I just didn’t want him to be alone when he’s like that…” On the verge of death she doesn’t say. Doctors aren’t necessarily known for their penchant for melodrama. Surprisingly there is no reproach in her voice. She knows where Cameron has been before, that she's been with Wilson. Cameron remembers the odd feeling of that conversation or better of that non-conversation that was all unfinished sentences and unpleasant pauses. In the end she settled on offering Wilson an awkward hug. There would have been nothing she could have said to make it better anyways.
“Thank you,” Cameron says finally, trying to smile at the other woman but failing miserably.
“You must be exhausted,” Cuddy says gently, taking in the younger doctor’s tired eyes and her slumped shoulders.
“I don’t know,” she answers truthfully. “I think I’m just going to sit there with him for awhile.”
“You do that.” She gives her one last awkward smile that tries for reassuring before she leaves the room.
Cameron suddenly feels terrified being alone with him in that sterile hospital room. It’s strange that she should feel like that. Being a doctor, she should be used to hospital rooms and bleeping heart monitor, but she isn’t. How could she bee prepared for a situation like that? To think that only a couple of days ago she fussed about something minor like staying overnight at his flat, which now seems utterly ridiculous.
She sits down on the chair next to his bed. It lets out an obnoxious screeching noise when she moves it over the linoleum floor, positioning it closer to his bed. The sound should wake him up. It should wake up the dead, but it doesn’t. She wants to reach for his hand but stops mid movement, her hand hovering motionlessly over his. Then she thinks better of it and pulls back.
It’s still too early for touching. She hasn’t forgiven him yet. She was lucky she had to pull a double shift that night when he tried to call her and only ended up talking to her voice mail instead.
“Why won’t you answer that damned phone?” he drawled, behind him the background noise of some bar was audible. “Geeze, let me tell you, you’re not much of a girlfriend. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be working. I get drunk, you come and pick me up. But you have to be all dull and pull a double shift. I’m very disappointed in you. Bad Cameron.” Hopefully not the last words he’d ever say to her.
*
“Why is this bus white?” is the first thing he’s thinking. When his eyes fall on Amber, Amber his best friend's dead girlfriend, who is looking all beautiful and serene, another thought hits him. Am I dead? Strangely this question doesn’t make him panic. He’s calmly sitting next to her, but can’t stop himself from shooting her astonished sideway glances. He’s surprised she’s there. He’s surprised the afterlife is a white bus. But he’s not surprised to be there.
He asks the inevitable questions. She shoots him enigmatic looks, smiling a bit because quite obviously she knows more than him, which makes him the butt of the joke. So he’s not dead yet. Not sure how he is supposed to feel about that particular information. But it sort of makes sense, because the pain in his leg is gone.
What do old people say again? A good thing the pain’s there, lets you know you’re still alive.
So not dead yet… Rather a good state to be in painwise. Not a good state to be in when it comes to the guilt. Because he does feel guilty. How could he not?
One look at her and you can’t help but feel guilty. Beautiful, young, cutthroat, sorry, make that ambitious, certainly a lot of potential there. Potential which he’s destroyed. He tries to apologize the best way he can, talks about how life is random and unfair, basically about things he can’t change. It’s never bothered him much that life is cruel until now, but sitting here with her, it’s starting to.
She calls him on it. “Self-pity isn’t like you.” Simple, clear to the point. A cut executed with almost surgical precision. As he was saying before - potential.
But if this mess wasn’t reason enough for self-pity, what was? He killed his best friend’s girlfriend, nearly got Cameron killed as well. You always hurt the ones you love. But in the end everything you do has consequences.
“They are going to hate me,” he says. Part of him recoils, fearing her answer, which she delivers without any scruples or second thoughts.
As a matter of fact she does look sort of relaxed, when she answers. “You kind of deserve that.”
He’s scared to death by her reply, because however much he tries to deny it, however much he tries to tell himself day by day that he’s an island, that he doesn’t need anyone, he knows deep down that he does. It’s people like Wilson and Cameron that keep him going. If it weren’t for them, he would have long since ended up on that white bus of doom. But what makes her reply even scarier is the fact that even before she said those words he had thought them.
He’s close to tears, blinking and blinking so they will go away. “They’re my family. He’s my best friend. She’s…Well, she’s…”
“I know,” is her calm and infuriating reply. For a while she’s dangling her naked feet almost gleefully over the clinical white floor, then she turns and asks “What now?”
“I stay here with you,” he answers too afraid of facing the real world, where there are pain and broken friendships that may never be mended again. Relationships with a deep chink, he doesn’t know how to fix.
She shakes her head. “Get off the bus.”
“I can’t,” his words are nothing more than a whisper. How is he supposed to face Cameron or Wilson after everything that has happened? He’s feeling so fucking guilty. He’s got enough guilt for a small country. Maybe even an entire continent.
Of course, she has to know the reason. She has to wring it out of him.
“Because it doesn’t hurt here.” What he doesn’t say is that he knows that it will hurt a lot once he goes back. Not only physically, but emotionally as well. For once in his life he’s actually fearing pain. He’s not ready to face the consequences of his actions, whatever they might be. He usually doesn’t deal with them, so he has no idea at all how to handle them.
He finally cracks, finally makes himself vulnerable and confesses. “I don’t want to be in pain. I don’t want to be miserable.” He has trouble getting out the next words. “And I don’t want them to hate me.” As he says them he realizes that they are true. They hit him like a ton of pricks, like punches to the stomach and make him want to catch his breath.
She’s Cutthroat Bitch right to the end. “Well…you can’t always get what you want.” That sentence is so neat, it could have been something he said. Maybe he did even say it once upon a time. He looks at her questioningly. Is she really that cruel? She is. She’s not going to cuddle him. That’s not part of her personality. She’s all bluntness and brutal honesty. Just like him. Just what he deserves. Measure for measure.
She even has the audacity to smile a little at him. So what else is he supposed to do but get up and walk away before this gets anymore pathetic?
And then he’s back. He knows immediately because the pain has returned as well. He wakes up to Wilson standing in the doorway and Cameron sleeping cuddled up on the chair next to his bed. It should be consoling that they’re there, but it’s not. It immediately puts him under a considerable amount of pressure to fix this deadlock. He wants to say something to Wilson, but there are no words to mend this. Since nobody has come up yet with a patented excuse that would nicely paraphrase the rather crude words ‘Sorry, I killed your girlfriend’ and guarantee instant forgiveness, he is doomed to stay silent and just endure Wilson’s accusing looks. Then he turns and slowly walks away and makes House wish he had stayed on that bus. Or maybe this is exactly what he deserves, just like Amber said.
tbc
Fandom: House m.d.
Summary: This mutated story was inspired by the one scene I got to see of 4x13, so it's kind of spoilery for that particular episode. And yes, now I've seen the rest of the season as well. So spoilery up to Wilson's Heart now.
Rating: What about Teen for this one?
Disclaimer: Written out of fan-appreciation I do neither own House m.d. nor any other characters that appear on that show, I just borrowed them to play around with, so don't sue, please? Oh, and I kind of snatched parts of the dialogue between House and Amber from the bus scene in Wilson's Heart...
previous chapters:
1. It's All In Your Head * 2. It's Not Just In Your Head * 3. Mind Games * 4. Daydreaming * 5. Nightmare * 6. In Your Wildest Dreams * 7. Freudian Dilemma
She is standing in the doorframe watching him, not sure she wants to enter, because if she does everything’s going to change. Cause and effect, just like that French guy in the Matrix movie said - a funny thing to think of in a situation like that. But maybe not at all, because any thought is better right now than acknowledging reality. It means perceiving things all too clearly, like that unpleasant smell of disinfectant and sickness hovering in the air, like that bleeping of the heart rate monitor or that dripping of the IV-running into his arm. So if she steps into that room now, everything will become a little bit more real. Details will imprint in her mind, which she really doesn’t want to linger there.
There’s Cuddy sitting on the chair next to his bed, holding his hand. She is not even turning around to acknowledge her presence. Seeing her there should make her feel something. Anything. She tries to remember what the feeling is she’s supposed to feel right now. Jealousy? Maybe. But after a day like this she feels too hollow for such a potent emotion.
A strand of hair falls from her gradually dissolving ponytail and tickles her skin. She smoothes it back impatiently, almost annoyed. After all that she’s been through today, even minor things manage to irritate her. She’s seen someone die, someone she knew. Amber wasn’t even a friend. In her heart of hearts she knows that they would have never become friends, but nevertheless…nevertheless what? She feels relieved it hasn’t been her sitting on that bus with House, ending up dead because of him. She feels guilty because she feels relieved, angry because she can still hear his arrogant voice echoing in her ears even hours after she checked up on her voice mail and sad because a human being died - basically too many things at once.
She wants to be able to hate him. As a matter of fact there would have been many occasions over the past couple of years that should have inspired a deep and heartfelt hatred for him, but surprisingly it never actually set in. Not even now. Resignedly she enters the room. Cuddy turns around, finally noticing her presence. She starts to say something, maybe apologize but Cameron is not interested in apologizes and too exhausted for small talk so she just shakes her head. After that her eyes settle on House again, taking in his pale skin, the circles under his eyes, the way he looks so disquietingly fragile lying in that hospital bed. The soft pressure of Cuddy’s hand on her shoulder brings her back to reality.
“You sit with him,” she tells her. “I just didn’t want him to be alone when he’s like that…” On the verge of death she doesn’t say. Doctors aren’t necessarily known for their penchant for melodrama. Surprisingly there is no reproach in her voice. She knows where Cameron has been before, that she's been with Wilson. Cameron remembers the odd feeling of that conversation or better of that non-conversation that was all unfinished sentences and unpleasant pauses. In the end she settled on offering Wilson an awkward hug. There would have been nothing she could have said to make it better anyways.
“Thank you,” Cameron says finally, trying to smile at the other woman but failing miserably.
“You must be exhausted,” Cuddy says gently, taking in the younger doctor’s tired eyes and her slumped shoulders.
“I don’t know,” she answers truthfully. “I think I’m just going to sit there with him for awhile.”
“You do that.” She gives her one last awkward smile that tries for reassuring before she leaves the room.
Cameron suddenly feels terrified being alone with him in that sterile hospital room. It’s strange that she should feel like that. Being a doctor, she should be used to hospital rooms and bleeping heart monitor, but she isn’t. How could she bee prepared for a situation like that? To think that only a couple of days ago she fussed about something minor like staying overnight at his flat, which now seems utterly ridiculous.
She sits down on the chair next to his bed. It lets out an obnoxious screeching noise when she moves it over the linoleum floor, positioning it closer to his bed. The sound should wake him up. It should wake up the dead, but it doesn’t. She wants to reach for his hand but stops mid movement, her hand hovering motionlessly over his. Then she thinks better of it and pulls back.
It’s still too early for touching. She hasn’t forgiven him yet. She was lucky she had to pull a double shift that night when he tried to call her and only ended up talking to her voice mail instead.
“Why won’t you answer that damned phone?” he drawled, behind him the background noise of some bar was audible. “Geeze, let me tell you, you’re not much of a girlfriend. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be working. I get drunk, you come and pick me up. But you have to be all dull and pull a double shift. I’m very disappointed in you. Bad Cameron.” Hopefully not the last words he’d ever say to her.
*
“Why is this bus white?” is the first thing he’s thinking. When his eyes fall on Amber, Amber his best friend's dead girlfriend, who is looking all beautiful and serene, another thought hits him. Am I dead? Strangely this question doesn’t make him panic. He’s calmly sitting next to her, but can’t stop himself from shooting her astonished sideway glances. He’s surprised she’s there. He’s surprised the afterlife is a white bus. But he’s not surprised to be there.
He asks the inevitable questions. She shoots him enigmatic looks, smiling a bit because quite obviously she knows more than him, which makes him the butt of the joke. So he’s not dead yet. Not sure how he is supposed to feel about that particular information. But it sort of makes sense, because the pain in his leg is gone.
What do old people say again? A good thing the pain’s there, lets you know you’re still alive.
So not dead yet… Rather a good state to be in painwise. Not a good state to be in when it comes to the guilt. Because he does feel guilty. How could he not?
One look at her and you can’t help but feel guilty. Beautiful, young, cutthroat, sorry, make that ambitious, certainly a lot of potential there. Potential which he’s destroyed. He tries to apologize the best way he can, talks about how life is random and unfair, basically about things he can’t change. It’s never bothered him much that life is cruel until now, but sitting here with her, it’s starting to.
She calls him on it. “Self-pity isn’t like you.” Simple, clear to the point. A cut executed with almost surgical precision. As he was saying before - potential.
But if this mess wasn’t reason enough for self-pity, what was? He killed his best friend’s girlfriend, nearly got Cameron killed as well. You always hurt the ones you love. But in the end everything you do has consequences.
“They are going to hate me,” he says. Part of him recoils, fearing her answer, which she delivers without any scruples or second thoughts.
As a matter of fact she does look sort of relaxed, when she answers. “You kind of deserve that.”
He’s scared to death by her reply, because however much he tries to deny it, however much he tries to tell himself day by day that he’s an island, that he doesn’t need anyone, he knows deep down that he does. It’s people like Wilson and Cameron that keep him going. If it weren’t for them, he would have long since ended up on that white bus of doom. But what makes her reply even scarier is the fact that even before she said those words he had thought them.
He’s close to tears, blinking and blinking so they will go away. “They’re my family. He’s my best friend. She’s…Well, she’s…”
“I know,” is her calm and infuriating reply. For a while she’s dangling her naked feet almost gleefully over the clinical white floor, then she turns and asks “What now?”
“I stay here with you,” he answers too afraid of facing the real world, where there are pain and broken friendships that may never be mended again. Relationships with a deep chink, he doesn’t know how to fix.
She shakes her head. “Get off the bus.”
“I can’t,” his words are nothing more than a whisper. How is he supposed to face Cameron or Wilson after everything that has happened? He’s feeling so fucking guilty. He’s got enough guilt for a small country. Maybe even an entire continent.
Of course, she has to know the reason. She has to wring it out of him.
“Because it doesn’t hurt here.” What he doesn’t say is that he knows that it will hurt a lot once he goes back. Not only physically, but emotionally as well. For once in his life he’s actually fearing pain. He’s not ready to face the consequences of his actions, whatever they might be. He usually doesn’t deal with them, so he has no idea at all how to handle them.
He finally cracks, finally makes himself vulnerable and confesses. “I don’t want to be in pain. I don’t want to be miserable.” He has trouble getting out the next words. “And I don’t want them to hate me.” As he says them he realizes that they are true. They hit him like a ton of pricks, like punches to the stomach and make him want to catch his breath.
She’s Cutthroat Bitch right to the end. “Well…you can’t always get what you want.” That sentence is so neat, it could have been something he said. Maybe he did even say it once upon a time. He looks at her questioningly. Is she really that cruel? She is. She’s not going to cuddle him. That’s not part of her personality. She’s all bluntness and brutal honesty. Just like him. Just what he deserves. Measure for measure.
She even has the audacity to smile a little at him. So what else is he supposed to do but get up and walk away before this gets anymore pathetic?
And then he’s back. He knows immediately because the pain has returned as well. He wakes up to Wilson standing in the doorway and Cameron sleeping cuddled up on the chair next to his bed. It should be consoling that they’re there, but it’s not. It immediately puts him under a considerable amount of pressure to fix this deadlock. He wants to say something to Wilson, but there are no words to mend this. Since nobody has come up yet with a patented excuse that would nicely paraphrase the rather crude words ‘Sorry, I killed your girlfriend’ and guarantee instant forgiveness, he is doomed to stay silent and just endure Wilson’s accusing looks. Then he turns and slowly walks away and makes House wish he had stayed on that bus. Or maybe this is exactly what he deserves, just like Amber said.
tbc