House: Parts of a declaration 3/3
Part III:
This is what happens next:
He
shows up at the very casual restaurant, or diner, he thinks it’s more of a diner. He scans
the red booths and finds her at the far corner. Her hair is not blonde and it’s not dark like
when she had to mean something, but it’s amber with red like when she could feel her life
slipping past her and she’d fucked Chase for an anchor. She’s bent over slightly and he
wonders if it’s a menu she’s staring at or her hands. Limping forward, he thinks of the first
words to say, as if he hasn’t been thinking about it for the past two weeks. He ends up
s a y i n g
nothing as he stands at the end of the table and waits for her look up at him.
“Sit down,” she says quietly without looking up from not her menu or her hands, but a
sudoku puzzle.
Everything about her is much quieter. There’s a tinge of burn around her that smells
incredibly like snow and he doesn’t know where it came from.
“Order something to eat.” She marks on her puzzle. “I’m paying.”
It feels nothing like the last time they met and he sighs mentally in relief. He’d thought…
well, he hadn’t thought this.
“Are you eating?” he asks.
“Already did.”
“Oh.”
This is uncharacteristically like him. And he doesn’t know why the hell it’s like this.
Well, he does. He busted her, badly, and it’s safe to say he wants to forget it.
“Cameron….”
“Hhhhmmm?”
It’s unnerving that she hasn’t looked at him and the beast in him emerges. He reaches
over the table and holds her hand down against the cheap book. It takes more force than
he remembers and her strength surprises him. So does the hiss. Her face lifts, light shines
onto it and he’s nearly taken aback. She’s gorgeous and he can’t find air. He asks without
thinking, “What the hell happened to you?”
And she smiles brightly, because she knows he’s talking about the scar over her lip and
the vertical one in her eyebrow where the hair refused to grow back. Her nose is crooked
now, too, it bends to the left. “Not so beautiful now, am I?”
She frees her hand and he finds himself standing, rapidly becoming hard.
“Let’s get out of here?”
It’s a question because he is himself just like she is nothing of herself so they
have to work on new footing and pray something holds. Yes, he’s praying.
How it changes, is like this:
His tongue cleans her, holy water, and it seems fitting that only he could wash
away the blaze lapping at her flesh. She fights it at first, twisting in his hold and then
bringing his head up to hers and keeping his hands secured in her grip so they can’t
memorize the troughs and crests of her pot marks. But there’s that curiosity within
him that won’t be tamed by any mere mortal and it eventually wins out because for a
weakened second it feels nice to have someone else pick at her scars for a change.
And he picks, hell, he peels off her skin and hunts out the snow in her cells that
melts
of steel toed boots and iron belts. He wants to ask her so many questions, they tick at his
stairs, but he catches her moaning softly and he knows if he stops now she’ll never be rid
of Chicago’s winter. So he doesn’t. This isn’t the
reason she
came. No, it’s not, and somewhere in her brain a voice keeps shouting at her to stop because
this is their damage and it’s fixing too quickly, so,
so, quickly. She’s going to burn the night away. She’s going
to burn her essence down until she’s new and whole again. And he, oh, he is going to be
the flame. There is no being careful. To hell with careful. She gropes his leg and he pulls
at her hair. Her teeth nip his skin and his nails make her bleed. He bruises her shoulder
and she knocks his knee in their slight clumsiness. It’s awful. It’s pained. It’s stunning.
He fills inside of her and holy hell, fucking has never felt like this. She’s all raw and hard
edges, digging into his psyche and clawing at his borders. He digs into her, god, all of her,
needing to stop her shivering and bring her home. Her name hovers around his lips. Her
hands knead into his hips. Breaking, finally, he’s being broken down and it’s so much
better than what they said was being whole and healed.
Damn. She comes with blood on her tongue. He kisses her and the copper
taste moves through them both. This time the bleeding is cathartic. His taking bends
him back and straightens her spine. God help her.
Then they’re here:
Absently, very absently, he traces her body with a free hand and every now and then
his fingers pause in her punctual telling. That explains her snow, the way it lingers still
around them. It doesn’t give him a reason, he says so. And then she is silent, her head
turning away with her breathing so steady. This, she hadn’t wanted. Her eyes shift closed
and the soldering of herself is getting dangerously close to complete. The last thing she’d
wanted to become was someone she recognized and remembered. He had done it, though.
He’d laid his hands on her, healed her, like a
prophet
or whatever the church called it. And now the ghost is gone and she is left by
herself. “I was dying,” she says calmly with her head back toward him.
And suddenly none of this is right. He is too old and she too young and they are supposed
to be reversed with her fixing him and he stating vague honesties.
“You look old when you do that,” she whispers and his face immediately slackens into
something she is comfortable with. What she thinks may be worry softens into interest.
“Do you believe in possession, House?”
“Linda Blair vomit possession?”
“Or the real kind.”
“No.”
She smiles at him loosely and turns on her side carefully. Her hip still bothers her
sometimes and it doesn’t want to have to cry now. She tells him then about the paralyzed
girl and her terrified parents. A demon had entered their daughter weeks before and the
thing lying in that bed wanted to steal their souls. She remembers them signing the DNR
papers
and wanting to pull the child off the ventilator. Cameron had watched them abandon
their own flesh and blood, and it gnawed at her ankles. “So I called a priest.” Not because
she’d believed the story, but because she’d looked down at the girl and where the parents
had seen a monster, she’d seen a beautiful creation. The Father
wal
ked in with a cane of all things, and she’d stared at the three legged man
like a faithful woman at the Western Wall. So the praying started, simple verses and a
touch here and there on her pale face. The holy water smelled sour and the cross was
oddly dark, but when it was over, absolutely over, there was a calm. When the father
walked out with the girl’s lost spirit, Cameron had fallen to a chair, placed her head in
her hands and cried. Cried. The tears fell out
and
fuck.
She was screwed up. She was a wreck and she’d been happy with it since the day she
left Princeton and House and all that shit behind. Her morals were skewed and her
heart was filled with shadows and glass. She wasn’t a person anymore and what the
hell did that mean? What the hell did that make her?
This is how it actually ends:
He pulls at the buttons of her jacket, this time to actually button them and not
to rip them off. Her hands run through her hair to clear them of tangles and then
they are just there, her between his legs and he sitting on the edge of the warm
bed. She hasn’t told him everything. Not about the countless men she fucked
to keep the ghost inside of her or the way her conscience was bound and gagged
and is just now being freed by his hands. She hasn’t told him she killed the fucker
who pushed the dark so deep inside her she still tastes it on the back of her teeth
and will probably always have to watch to make sure the snow doesn’t build too high.
“Cameron….”
Whatever he thinks about saying stops in his throat and he feels his hands fall onto
his thighs. His eyes search hers and if Cuddy had once been his heart he is sure that
Cameron is his heartbeat. It scares him the fuck to pieces because this is new and
he was never supposed to feel like this with her. They are of different breeds, him
and her, made to do different things. Her hands lift his cheeks and her thumbs
brush
the skin under his eyes softly and god it feels like an angel has kissed his face
and given him absolution or granted him a fucking blessing to piss on the Bible. She
kisses him softly and he doesn’t realize this is her gratitude in motion. This is her
paying pittance because he’s pieced her back together.
It feels like she’s stepped into her old skin and the past few years are someone
else’s memory trapped in her mind. She can move without fracturing another piece
of her and this time, she doesn’t want to break. She wants to remain complete
and whole and healed because this is who she is. Good is good and this is what she
needs to be. She owes him the rest of her life, doesn’t she? He won’t take it, she
knows it from the contours of his skull under her fingers. Her hands rub the shortness
of his hair and she smiles. “What?”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. I think…I’m going to go someplace hot.” She doesn’t need to explain
further and he nods his head.
“How long?”
“Why?”
“So I can have Wilson fill out your application for my department. You
belong here.”
And he doesn’t mean with him. Honestly, he doesn’t
know it would be best for either
of them, but he doesn’t think about that now because he is back to he is meant to
be and that means she needs to be herself to complete his scripture.
“Maybe.” It’s too irresistible. To fall back into something too comforting and full of past.
And really, she’s almost afraid not to. Because it would be nice to be sitting at the glass
table with a red mug in one hand and file in the other. She can feel the glasses on her nose
and smell the pungent odor of arthritis on the white board. She doesn’t know if leaving
will make it easier to fall apart or if staying close to the healer will keep her together.
She’s had one taste of his powers and it’s tempting to stay and keep him like a reserve. It’s
not love, not nearly, and it’s fine. It’s okay, because she is not ready for that and he doesn’t
know what it would mean with her. Yet.
Y e t.
“Keep a spot waiting for me when I get back.”
She leaves with a pat on her ass and he slips a few vicodin into his mouth.
.end.
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