House Fic: when we could not stand to see your grace (1/4)
note: i’m going to go head and blame this completely on surreallis. this idea originally spawned from her asking me what kind of music do i listen to while writing house/cameron. and while the list is always growing, this story kind of came about as a result. i promise to post accompanying music when it’s over. :) enjoy!
when we could not stand to see your grace
inevitably, she was going to end up here even under the span of a couple more days. there is no manual for this one. house md. cameron. eventual house/cameron. wilson’s heart. 5,346 words, pg.
-
and in the big, big, big cities
i gave all I got
and I shared a secret with a stranger
cocoon - vultures
They haven’t said a word to each other since the car, stumbling over you’re working tomorrow? and maybe, a day off is in order.
It’s really been Foreman talking to Chase and Chase talking to Foreman, Cameron sort of stationed in a reflective kind of anxiety. Her shoulders are heavy with news, since yesterday and the day before, her eyes drying with a misplaced sense of longing.
“I gotta take this.”
Chase is standing before either of them have a chance to say something to him, his hand over his phone as he glances briefly at her and then at Foreman.
“Sure,” she murmurs.
She tries to lie through a shrug, her hands swaying over the corner of the table. She presses her palms into the wood and watches as her boyfriend slides into the crowd to go outside and take whatever call is over his hip.
It’s been worse, even with the last couple days, as the two of them head towards some inevitable fold. They don’t talk much anymore and lying about it, relaying some sort of stress-oriented excuse doesn’t fit anymore. They’re simply growing apart again and this time, it seems be expressed over the frankness of necessary decision.
She’s pregnant.
She’s known for a couple days now, reassuring the fact over a drugstore-bought test and blood work before she told him. She’s pretty sure that he hasn’t completely reacted to the news - there hasn’t been any time, really. With Wilson and Amber and House’s sudden indulgence of self-righteousness and self-destruction, they’ve sort of drifted back, behind all of this, to a really low-key lurch into something neither of them are ready for.
And she’s terrified. Truth be told, she’s never had any kind of expectation relaying the idea family and the decision to put herself forward into family. Sure, she’s had all sorts of ideas of how she’d like to do this and when she’d like it to have it happen even with the remaining scars of her past. That’s the thing too - if she was really honest with herself, if she could take all those steps back, she would be twenty-one again and almost hopeful. It would be the right way, the certain way.
But the card’s been dealt.
Her hand drops to her stomach in some strange display of affection, quiet until she realizes that Foreman is, in fact, watching her curiously. He’s been the first one to know about her and Chase, and always the last to sort of understand where the two of them have been fumbling around in frankness. He looks exhausted as she studies him and she finds herself looking away then, her fingers spreading underneath her jacket.
“What’s going on?” He says it finally, his curiosity cautious and obvious. His hand wrings around his glass of scotch and he leans back into the booth, almost expectant of her answer.
She sighs. She feels almost shy, always reluctant to really say something to him about this. It’s their business, not his, and she’s literally grasping at wits ends around the idea that she is, in fact, pregnant. The memories of the night she found out are spaced and away from over-dramatic, but she still seems to carry around the tightness in her throat.
She hasn’t reached the prospect of losing her mind, but she feels nearly there and that, with all her objective desire to keep control, scares the hell out of her. She can’t do it without something.
“We’re tired - he’s been on a long shift for the past couple weeks,” she tries slowly, “He’s annoyed because there was -”
But she stops. The lie can be there. It’s easy, warranted because half the time, it speaks the truth straight on its own. She looks up at Foreman though, studying the reflection of his face and then his glass. She didn’t know Amber, not much, but the last couple days have hit all of them, all in a strange, heavy kind of way.
There’s a strange sense of envy over his face too and she grows uncomfortable, glancing down at her water. She listens to him sigh, picking at a level of annoyance.
“Are you fighting again?”
She shakes her head. “Not exactly.”
“Cameron.”
You don’t know half of it, she almost says. She’s sure that she and Chase have garnered some ideas about their relationship and still, every once in awhile, she finds herself cautiously optimistic about having someone in her life. But she’s not going to lie and she’s not going to make it more than it really is - there was always, even at the beginning, no sense of something more. She still hasn’t been ready to go beyond the scars yet.
People make her wear their accusations of trust issues and compulsive inability, but the truth is that she’s still trying to fight through letting it go still and really, even though she cares about him immensely, it’s still not convincing to her. It’s still not what she wants. It makes her feel ridiculously selfish, angry even at times, but she wanted to do it at her pace, with a choice - he knew too. He’s always known that for her to open up, for her to start giving things back to him, it would have to be slow.
But now, there’s not even an opportunity of choice.
So she looks back up at Foreman, serious and tired. She honestly doesn’t know what to say, but the urge seems to be working against her. This is a child, this is a child that neither of them are ready for, and she’s not even sure where to begin - how to begin at all.
“I’m pregnant.”
He coughs. “What?”
It just stumbled out with no remorse, her eyes keeping tight to the table, as the silence seems to thicken between them. The words are an odd sensation over the tip of her tongue, the swallow of breaths that she seems to be inclined in taking are drawn over spurts. She brushes her hair out of her eyes and looks back up at him tiredly.
“I’m pregnant,” she says again, correcting herself. “Chase and I - we’re having a baby. I’m not far along yet, but -”
“Does he know?” - it’s such a weird question to ask her and her eyes widen as she glances up, unnerved that he would think that she wouldn’t say anything to Chase, anything at all. They’re in a tight place, yes, and she’s sure it’s more than obvious to the people close to them, but god.
She wouldn’t not tell him.
Her yeah follows sharply as she shifts in her seat. She glances back out to the crowd, watching as the people in the bar start to thicken. It’s too much for her, at times, the noise and the murmuring of people that she really never allowed herself to be; married too young, working too hard to get through it, to still get through it, and now, personally, she’s drifting back and forth as she fumbles over something this huge.
Foreman calms though, holding to his surprise, “Are you guys okay?”
She’s quiet, shaking her head. It’s an odd thing to ask too especially, when, he’s the one that knows them the best like this. “Not exactly,” she murmurs, choosing her words carefully. “But I guess we’re going to have to be.”
“Right.”
She feels ridiculously impulsive. She hasn’t even told the proper people yet - her parents, the rest of her family, and Chase, well, he hasn’t exactly gotten through the news. She feels like time is suddenly working against them and god, she needed to tell someone. She needed to tell someone and it’s incredibly selfish, but she had to.
She had to, she thinks.
“We - I haven’t told anyone else yet,” she mumbles, “I just -”
“Oh,” he cuts her off quickly. It becomes uncomfortable, between the two of them, and she wonders if Chase should’ve been the one to tell him first, if it was something for him to tell Foreman and not her.
She’s always been quietly jealous of their friendship, but it comes more as a distinction here and now. It’s odd because she’s active outside her professional life. She has friends. Chase has friends. There’s a steady flow of people in their life together, whether individualized or together. But it’s an odd sense of distinction - for a while too, this was personal and professional and they were equally dependent on each other.
Now, she’s lost some footing.
“I’m sorry - guess I needed to tell someone else.”
He softens, watching her. “Do you want me to talk to him? I can, I don’t know, just see where he’s at?”
She shakes her head. It’s bad enough that she’s said something to him. Her heart clenches and she feels her nerves start to race, her fingers skipping back and forth against the table for something to do. She doesn’t know what’s wrong with her, if there’s something more that she can skip around to make this a little better.
“We’re not in a good place,” she clarifies tiredly. “We haven’t been for awhile. I don’t know what’s going on right now, especially since - well, you know now.”
Foreman nods. Sometimes, as much as she hates it, these things aren’t secrets. But there’s something about the way that he looks at her, wrenching between pity and objectivity that makes her hand drop and still protectively over her stomach. She bites her lip, shaking her head.
It was a mistake telling him, but Foreman does surprise her and reaches forward. His hand rests gently over the crook of her arm and she looks up at him, her eyes burning a little.
“Do you want this baby?”
“Yeah,” there’s no hesitation on her part, “Yeah, I do.”
She’s merely a little sad, a little scared, and a little too stuck in the string of fights that she and Chase have been having. Or so she keeps trying to reassure herself. It’s intimidating, the fact that the two of them are going to be connected like this. When she wasn’t ready. They’re not ready for this.
And yet the idea of a child, here, still seems to stir something strange inside of her. Still terrifying, she does see herself with a family. She’s always been more than partial to the idea. Her mind is reeling, however, and she doesn’t understand how to completely grasp it.
Even now, with everything that’s suddenly happened, they seem to be having the opposite reaction to each other. Shouldn’t they be closer? Shouldn’t she and Chase be warm to the idea of having this kind of chance? Shouldn’t they be having quiet moments and talking about how lucky they are?
Because she knows she’s lucky. But then, she understands the weight of this kind of loss too - to lose someone, to lose someone where you’re just on the brink of discovering each other. To lose anticipation and moments of exciting expectation - it breaks you. It broke her.
But it even now, they seem to have a selfish fix on their problems.
“Does he?”
Foreman’s question drops and she snaps up, looking up at him sharply. Her eyes narrow briefly. “He -”
It’s just a reminder that she doesn’t know, that he continues to have some sort of evasive hold over her and in this relationship. It can be scary, in the strangest sense, but now, it just churns all the bad things about them being together to the surface.
She looks down again.
Foreman takes pity on her. “His parents?”
“Yeah.”
But they stop talking.
It doesn’t matter who sees him first, but Cameron spots Chase walking back into the restaurant. His jaw is locked into a frown and her hand drops away from her stomach to her seat, her fingers curling around the cushion. Her throat burns a little more and she breathes when he meets her gaze, forcing herself to look away.
“Maybe, he’ll come around.”
It’s the last thing Foreman says to her as the anxiety rises again, in silence. She watches as someone at the bar nearly cuts her boyfriend - she hates the word, what means, what it should me - off in passing.
“I don’t know,” she swallows. “I don’t know.”
-
Saturdays are supermarket days and it’s been good to get out of the house, the two of them, for just a little bit. Oddly enough, they seem to be better at grasping things around each other outside of the structure of work and the hospital. It’s the one thing that followed them, after working with House, is that they have that, working with House, over their heads.
Dinner, last week, still lives in her head.
It’s affected them both in different ways. Chase likes to be more inclined to say that hers has been much more obvious than his, but it’s more of the reverse. She carries a lot with her still, in between the I don’t miss you and the bizarre ease she’s had in being back in Princeton for the year. She’s much more comfortable here, around the ideas of people that she does know and that selfish grasp of familiarity.
She will never pretend to completely understand her relationship with House, with what she still craves from time to time, but these are things that belong to her.
She’s exhausted today as they step into line, their grocery cart filled with fruits and vegetables, pastas because one of them does cook during the week. She leans heavily against the rail of the cart as they wait for a woman and her massive quantities of things to finish putting them up on the small, moving belt. She’s exhausted, more and more, and cannot hold onto the hours as an excuse. She likes working in the emergency room, the comfort of predictable stress and order more of a selfish constant than anything else.
But it’s what she has.
Rubbing her eyes, she glances off to the side and searches for a magazine to read in the car. Her fingers slide over the faces of Clooney and his latest conquest, her mouth set into a grasp of amusement. When she pulls at the copy of People, it slips out and sputters with another, smaller book. She snorts and leans forward to pick it up, her gaze softening.
Baby names.
She hesitates as she grabs it, tucking it over her magazine. She lets her fingers drift over names like abigal and dylan, charmed even by the colors and the idea that she’s going to have to do this soon. She catches herself too, smiling a little when she remembers talking about them with -
It doesn’t matter. But she turns up to look at Chase, nudging him briefly. He looks down at her, peering over her shoulder as she shows him the small book. The magazine slips to the cart and she takes the first couple pages, opening it to see the names that are inside.
“Look,” she murmurs, “Aidan, Addy -”
But he’s frank, looking away. “I saw.”
She feels him step back and her shoulders sag briefly, her eyes closing as she tosses the book into the cart anyway, as if to spite him. He’s going to have to have to talk to her, he has to, because she can’t hold this up by herself. She can’t do this alone.
“I’m trying,” she says quietly.
His mouth tightens as he starts to drop things on the belt, their groceries spreading out in front of them. “Ironic.”
She doesn’t say anything. She moves to the front, ignoring him and starting a conversation with the cashier. She’s pleasant, her fingers curled tightly as she fights off the urge to start screaming at Chase. At this point, she just wants him to talk to her so that they can figure things out however impulsive or illogical.
She can’t read him - it scares her more than a little bit too. He seems to carry this ability to pick her apart and with the weight of everything that’s starting to happen now, she desperately needs someone to talk to. She wants him to be apart of this, she wants to be able to say that she’s absolutely terrified about having a baby and not being anywhere near ready. But they seem unable to connect, moving farther and farther away from each other with him refusing to talk to her and her trying to force some line of conversation in all her desperation.
“Have a good day, sweetie!”
The cashier winks at her and she smiles, a little, nodding as she starts to pass with Chase. Quiet, they start for the car. He pushes the cart and she takes the keys, swinging them around her fingers. It’s not a busy Saturday, the summer reaping the losses of the student population as it restructures with those who either stayed behind or those who really make the area up. But it’s too much for her and she’s desperate, if anything, for something else.
When they get to the car, she stops and presses her hand over the trunk. She glances up at him, her eyes dark and her mouth tight.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m - I need time, Allison,” he shrugs, “and you haven’t exactly been giving me time asking me -”
“What the hell have I been asking you?”
She’s staring at him wide-eyed and angry, her hands clutching into fists as they drop at her sides. It’s not a good feeling, the sense of confusion and disappointment and oddly enough, she has House’s disbelief written straight in her head as she remembers how clearly her relationship with Chase was written off in the beginning.
“Really,” she snaps, tired and upset. “Have at it now - what the hell have I been asking you? All I said was that I’m pregnant and here I am, trying to make the best of a situation that makes me just as scared and as worried and as uncomfortable as you.”
It’s the first time, then, that he really looks at her. He’s weary and briefly, too, she meets his own sense of apprehension and anxiety. It almost softens her, almost makes her step back and apologize. But she’s too angry, too scared, and really, since she’s told him - in between and before all things that have happened - she’s been left alone to deal with this. It’s why, she thinks, letting people in is such a damning idea. On the one hand, you have someone to talk to, to relay everything and anything no matter the level.
Then there’s this.
He’s quiet. “We should go home.”
“Of course.”
Her voice is heavy, thick, and sags as she steps away. She leaves him to the bags, disappointed and even lonelier than before. A part of her thinks that she did this to him, that she opened them to all these outside memories by wanting to return to Princeton and taking Cuddy’s job offer. But they were supposed to cope. They were supposed to cope and she was doing okay, doing better in separating herself away from old habits.
“I’m sorry.”
She stops at the door, her fingers curled at the handle. “Are you sure?”
He’s genuinely offended, his eyes narrowing as he practically rips open the trunk of his car. Their car, she reminds herself. But he keeps watching her, shaking his head as he sighs.
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” her eyes flash. “What’s not fair is that you won’t even talk to me - I have no idea how you feel like about this.”
“I’m not ready to talk about it.” There’s a whole line of meaning here and she doesn’t want to hear it. Still though, it’s the frankest he’s been with her since she told him that they were going to have a baby.
“Bullshit,” she mutters.
She opens the door of the driver’s seat, pocketing the keys and turning back to go and help him with the groceries. They’re quiet and her hands ache from squeezing too hard and all the tension she wraps herself around.
This is supposed to be something happy, no matter what the circumstances are, and yet, neither of them seem to be able to move forward in any of this. It hurts, mostly, but she feels like she should’ve expected something of this degree with him.
“You told Foreman,” he says softly.
Her mouth sighs into a frown, unapologetic. “I needed a friend.”
“You’re okay with this -”
Her mouth opens. He holds up a hand, cutting her off before she even manipulates something to say back to him. “That’s thing,” he tells her, “you’re okay with this. You might not like the idea. You might not be ready for it. But you’re okay. You cope. You move on. You make the situation bearable for you.”
“That’s not fair.”
It’s somewhat of the truth - she’s always been geared towards some sense of survival. This is the way she knows, that she understands she’s going to have move forward. She doesn’t know how else to explain it to him, if there’s a way they can connect over this.
But he’s quiet, when he starts again, almost reaching for her but never quite getting there. “I’m not ready.”
Her eyes darken. “And you think I am?”
He shakes his head and the heaviness seems to hide for them, giving them a sense of space. But this time, he stops them and he holds his hand over her arm. His fingers are loose and she’s desperate to have some idea of where this is going to go.
“You’re looking at baby names, Allison.” His hand drops and it’s as if he’s never even touched her before.
She stays quiet. Instead she moves away, the tightness in her shoulders steadier than ever.
-
Inevitably, she was going to end up here even under the span of a couple more days.
She’s standing in the frame of the door, her jaw locked into silence as she looks into the room. It’s quiet, too quiet, and the window in the far corner bugging her for whatever reason - he was on the other side of the hospital, she remembers, the last time and his room overlooked the front of the hospital instead of the back. There were trees and movements, the sound of traffic both outside and in the hospital, forcing him not to be alone. She doesn’t want to know what he can see now and that, oddly enough, seems to grate on her too.
But she pries herself away from the strange sense of memory, pulling at the end of her shirt and watching the bed as House sort of stirs in bed. There’s a dull hum from the side, the monitors wearily relating the expenses that he’s garnered this time around. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, in between the reassurances that she doesn’t have and the looks that she’s getting from Chase and now, even Foreman. But what else was she supposed to do? Or say? It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t have or call for the evasiveness of silence and for once, for once she just wants someone to shove her in the right direction.
She’s not going to get it here. Or so, she tells herself.
There’s a moan from the bed, lurching over a growl and a sigh. She steps forward and into the room, standing awkwardly behind a chair by his bed. She watches as his eyes start to open, slowly, and they plaster over the lights and the wiring of the ceiling.
She tries to think of something to say to him - she’s visited once, almost out of obligation, for a flurry of seconds to see him. She found Cuddy by his side and hid behind a grim nod, letting the other woman wrap some sort of reassurance back to her in a proverbial bow. It was too tense of a moment for her and, oddly enough, the old, odd sense of dismay had been ready to spill over. It was too much too.
Her lips press quietly and she decides to sit down, watching him for a moment and then looking away. She picks up a magazine from his bedside, recognizing the People she bought from the supermarket on Saturday. She hasn’t read it, hasn’t had the time to, and has been stumbling around the emergency room because they’re short-staffed again and she needs the distraction.
“Angelina’s having twins,” she mumbles finally, flipping through the first couple pages of the magazine, “and Jen Aniston is running around with John Mayor -”
He grunts. “Lame.”
“I know.”
Her mouth tightens. She keeps the magazine to her lap.
The thing about their relationship now is that it’s neither forward nor stilted, lingering around indecision from time to time. It’s as if they’ve both misplaced themselves, hiding in a bizarre show of uniformity in order to avoid a necessary acknowledgment. She could go back too, say all the things that she said to him and mean them in different ways - mostly, she misses him and mostly, she doesn’t. It should be nothing more than a stain of passing time and she told him, she told him that she was moving forward, that she was fine, that she had all the things that he never seemed to believe her ambition for. It’s funny too, even now, how she keeps herself from saying you were right so that she can covet that sense of mystery. But there’s still that awareness between them that croons and sticks them together even if there was the illusion of choice.
“Ugh.”
His speech is still slow, his movement stuck on the line of impossible, but he does turn to look at her. His eyes are dark, the circles around them sighing into exhaustion. It’s remarkable, really, that the levels of stupidity that he’s reached are this tragic, are this self-destructive, but then again, she shouldn’t be surprised.
“Your shift is late.”
He coughs and she reaches for a cup on the table next to her, pouring a little water into it. The paper smears against her fingers as she tightens them, leaning forward to help him. She feels his lips dry over the bridge of her finger and then suck the water that he can drink.
She keeps her voice lazy as he finishes. “I like visiting in the middle the night - to fulfill, you know, all those romantic inclinations that you accuse me of having.”
But he says nothing, sighing tiredly instead. She imagines there would be some sort of indirect dialogue unfolding now, but he’s weary, his eyes darting all over the place - over her shoulder, to the bed, to the ceiling as if he could rewrite expectation.
Still, though, he offers some kind of conversation. It’s kind of selfish to hope too, but there’s that undertone driving her motivations for being here, the ones that she will admit to having.
“Where’s your better half?”
She snorts. “You were almost funny.”
“Should try harder,” he mutters, rolling a hand over his eyes. She watches as his fingers press into his forehead, the skin paling briefly. “He was here earlier - less annoying too. Bet I’m a better bowler still.”
“Mmhm.”
She kind of grins though, against her judgment, the picture of the two of them amusing as hell. It’s the first time too that she cracks a reasonable sort of smile, shaking her head and letting her hand drop to the bed. She lets it drift over the sheets, the stiff cotton scraping against the pads of her fingers. But his hand moves too, right over hers, his fingers pressing into her knuckles as if he were trying to stop her instead.
“It’s stupid,” she starts quietly.
His fingers are too warm against her skin, too odd, and she feels her nerves starting to rise in tangles; there’s the inexplicable urge to just tell him, to just say this is what’s happening and stumble straight over the fact that she’s pregnant. She doesn’t know how he’d take and imagines all kinds of ridiculous responses.
He would be honest. He would be honest with her.
House coughs again. “What?”
“Nothing.”
But she loses all thoughts of courage, almost letting her hand drop to her stomach in a thin edge of defiance. You see, she almost wants to say, you see - this is the kind of life she’s bringing someone else into. There’s so much uncertainty and such a lack of a probably sensibility. She’s terrified that she’s going to be lousy, too hard, and seeking reassurances her is something that she needs to give up.
It’s not that thought, she fights with herself. She wants the honesty, she needs the honesty, and it’s the wrong time go after something like this.
Her hand sort of folds underneath his, her palm turning absently into his fingers as her gaze rises to his. She licks her lips and his gaze charms into a stiff exhaustion. It’s hard, the tension that suddenly comes with this. She wants to have that level with him and why, really, becomes more of a panic for her. Why is she seeking him out?
“Have you -” He breaks the mess of her thoughts, the sigh of her mouth churning under his question.
She shakes her head.
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
But she does. At some point, he’s fallen to an odd stretch of predictability. She doesn’t understand it, but suddenly, she’s back to reading the faces that he has and how easy they seem to frequent opportunity.
“Nobody’s talked to him,” she lies, completely sure that she’s not the only one that’s seen Wilson.
He doesn’t believe her, but doesn’t press. This shouldn’t come from her, she knows, and suddenly, she’s stuck in the memory of conversation that she did have with Wilson. There are words that she remembers, that she could relate, but it’s almost too much for her to suddenly face with the leveling of her own experiences.
But House isn’t looking for the answers from her. She’s pretty sure that she could still be someone else, in this chair, and listening to the lack of will behind his sense of reaching. She still can’t help the sudden grasp of feelings that she’s faced with her, her mouth tightening as she lets her fingers start to brush against his. She’s lazier than he is, uncertain, and lingers far too longer over the lines of his hand. There’s a brief brush of intimacy, something that belongs to the two of them, and it lingers for just little bit longer, disappearing to hide. She’s still touching him though, touching him carefully but openly for the first time.
There’s a twist then, in the pit of her stomach, and she’s face briefly with spurt of names. She drops her gaze and watches as his hand returns to covering hers, his fingers stretching over her skin.
“Twins for Angelina, huh?” His voice is low, laced with fractures of uncertainty and curiosity. The sound is almost too breathless, slowed with the amount of effort that he still has to put into function.
And for a moment, she suddenly thinks that he knows. Even with just a glance. Her throat dries and something sinks deep in her stomach, swirling faster with shaky confidence. But then he looks away, his hands deep over the sheets of his bed as the wires strung around his arms start to moan after his movement.
He wouldn’t though, she thinks, and now, it’s beyond the point of really having something to notice. Still, though, it unnerves her that he’s back to watching her, that his eyes are darker than the memories that she has, and however spaced it is, his hand is covering hers.
“Yeah,” she mumbles, “Twins.”
The magazine slips from her lap.
#| 2
when we could not stand to see your grace
inevitably, she was going to end up here even under the span of a couple more days. there is no manual for this one. house md. cameron. eventual house/cameron. wilson’s heart. 5,346 words, pg.
-
and in the big, big, big cities
i gave all I got
and I shared a secret with a stranger
cocoon - vultures
They haven’t said a word to each other since the car, stumbling over you’re working tomorrow? and maybe, a day off is in order.
It’s really been Foreman talking to Chase and Chase talking to Foreman, Cameron sort of stationed in a reflective kind of anxiety. Her shoulders are heavy with news, since yesterday and the day before, her eyes drying with a misplaced sense of longing.
“I gotta take this.”
Chase is standing before either of them have a chance to say something to him, his hand over his phone as he glances briefly at her and then at Foreman.
“Sure,” she murmurs.
She tries to lie through a shrug, her hands swaying over the corner of the table. She presses her palms into the wood and watches as her boyfriend slides into the crowd to go outside and take whatever call is over his hip.
It’s been worse, even with the last couple days, as the two of them head towards some inevitable fold. They don’t talk much anymore and lying about it, relaying some sort of stress-oriented excuse doesn’t fit anymore. They’re simply growing apart again and this time, it seems be expressed over the frankness of necessary decision.
She’s pregnant.
She’s known for a couple days now, reassuring the fact over a drugstore-bought test and blood work before she told him. She’s pretty sure that he hasn’t completely reacted to the news - there hasn’t been any time, really. With Wilson and Amber and House’s sudden indulgence of self-righteousness and self-destruction, they’ve sort of drifted back, behind all of this, to a really low-key lurch into something neither of them are ready for.
And she’s terrified. Truth be told, she’s never had any kind of expectation relaying the idea family and the decision to put herself forward into family. Sure, she’s had all sorts of ideas of how she’d like to do this and when she’d like it to have it happen even with the remaining scars of her past. That’s the thing too - if she was really honest with herself, if she could take all those steps back, she would be twenty-one again and almost hopeful. It would be the right way, the certain way.
But the card’s been dealt.
Her hand drops to her stomach in some strange display of affection, quiet until she realizes that Foreman is, in fact, watching her curiously. He’s been the first one to know about her and Chase, and always the last to sort of understand where the two of them have been fumbling around in frankness. He looks exhausted as she studies him and she finds herself looking away then, her fingers spreading underneath her jacket.
“What’s going on?” He says it finally, his curiosity cautious and obvious. His hand wrings around his glass of scotch and he leans back into the booth, almost expectant of her answer.
She sighs. She feels almost shy, always reluctant to really say something to him about this. It’s their business, not his, and she’s literally grasping at wits ends around the idea that she is, in fact, pregnant. The memories of the night she found out are spaced and away from over-dramatic, but she still seems to carry around the tightness in her throat.
She hasn’t reached the prospect of losing her mind, but she feels nearly there and that, with all her objective desire to keep control, scares the hell out of her. She can’t do it without something.
“We’re tired - he’s been on a long shift for the past couple weeks,” she tries slowly, “He’s annoyed because there was -”
But she stops. The lie can be there. It’s easy, warranted because half the time, it speaks the truth straight on its own. She looks up at Foreman though, studying the reflection of his face and then his glass. She didn’t know Amber, not much, but the last couple days have hit all of them, all in a strange, heavy kind of way.
There’s a strange sense of envy over his face too and she grows uncomfortable, glancing down at her water. She listens to him sigh, picking at a level of annoyance.
“Are you fighting again?”
She shakes her head. “Not exactly.”
“Cameron.”
You don’t know half of it, she almost says. She’s sure that she and Chase have garnered some ideas about their relationship and still, every once in awhile, she finds herself cautiously optimistic about having someone in her life. But she’s not going to lie and she’s not going to make it more than it really is - there was always, even at the beginning, no sense of something more. She still hasn’t been ready to go beyond the scars yet.
People make her wear their accusations of trust issues and compulsive inability, but the truth is that she’s still trying to fight through letting it go still and really, even though she cares about him immensely, it’s still not convincing to her. It’s still not what she wants. It makes her feel ridiculously selfish, angry even at times, but she wanted to do it at her pace, with a choice - he knew too. He’s always known that for her to open up, for her to start giving things back to him, it would have to be slow.
But now, there’s not even an opportunity of choice.
So she looks back up at Foreman, serious and tired. She honestly doesn’t know what to say, but the urge seems to be working against her. This is a child, this is a child that neither of them are ready for, and she’s not even sure where to begin - how to begin at all.
“I’m pregnant.”
He coughs. “What?”
It just stumbled out with no remorse, her eyes keeping tight to the table, as the silence seems to thicken between them. The words are an odd sensation over the tip of her tongue, the swallow of breaths that she seems to be inclined in taking are drawn over spurts. She brushes her hair out of her eyes and looks back up at him tiredly.
“I’m pregnant,” she says again, correcting herself. “Chase and I - we’re having a baby. I’m not far along yet, but -”
“Does he know?” - it’s such a weird question to ask her and her eyes widen as she glances up, unnerved that he would think that she wouldn’t say anything to Chase, anything at all. They’re in a tight place, yes, and she’s sure it’s more than obvious to the people close to them, but god.
She wouldn’t not tell him.
Her yeah follows sharply as she shifts in her seat. She glances back out to the crowd, watching as the people in the bar start to thicken. It’s too much for her, at times, the noise and the murmuring of people that she really never allowed herself to be; married too young, working too hard to get through it, to still get through it, and now, personally, she’s drifting back and forth as she fumbles over something this huge.
Foreman calms though, holding to his surprise, “Are you guys okay?”
She’s quiet, shaking her head. It’s an odd thing to ask too especially, when, he’s the one that knows them the best like this. “Not exactly,” she murmurs, choosing her words carefully. “But I guess we’re going to have to be.”
“Right.”
She feels ridiculously impulsive. She hasn’t even told the proper people yet - her parents, the rest of her family, and Chase, well, he hasn’t exactly gotten through the news. She feels like time is suddenly working against them and god, she needed to tell someone. She needed to tell someone and it’s incredibly selfish, but she had to.
She had to, she thinks.
“We - I haven’t told anyone else yet,” she mumbles, “I just -”
“Oh,” he cuts her off quickly. It becomes uncomfortable, between the two of them, and she wonders if Chase should’ve been the one to tell him first, if it was something for him to tell Foreman and not her.
She’s always been quietly jealous of their friendship, but it comes more as a distinction here and now. It’s odd because she’s active outside her professional life. She has friends. Chase has friends. There’s a steady flow of people in their life together, whether individualized or together. But it’s an odd sense of distinction - for a while too, this was personal and professional and they were equally dependent on each other.
Now, she’s lost some footing.
“I’m sorry - guess I needed to tell someone else.”
He softens, watching her. “Do you want me to talk to him? I can, I don’t know, just see where he’s at?”
She shakes her head. It’s bad enough that she’s said something to him. Her heart clenches and she feels her nerves start to race, her fingers skipping back and forth against the table for something to do. She doesn’t know what’s wrong with her, if there’s something more that she can skip around to make this a little better.
“We’re not in a good place,” she clarifies tiredly. “We haven’t been for awhile. I don’t know what’s going on right now, especially since - well, you know now.”
Foreman nods. Sometimes, as much as she hates it, these things aren’t secrets. But there’s something about the way that he looks at her, wrenching between pity and objectivity that makes her hand drop and still protectively over her stomach. She bites her lip, shaking her head.
It was a mistake telling him, but Foreman does surprise her and reaches forward. His hand rests gently over the crook of her arm and she looks up at him, her eyes burning a little.
“Do you want this baby?”
“Yeah,” there’s no hesitation on her part, “Yeah, I do.”
She’s merely a little sad, a little scared, and a little too stuck in the string of fights that she and Chase have been having. Or so she keeps trying to reassure herself. It’s intimidating, the fact that the two of them are going to be connected like this. When she wasn’t ready. They’re not ready for this.
And yet the idea of a child, here, still seems to stir something strange inside of her. Still terrifying, she does see herself with a family. She’s always been more than partial to the idea. Her mind is reeling, however, and she doesn’t understand how to completely grasp it.
Even now, with everything that’s suddenly happened, they seem to be having the opposite reaction to each other. Shouldn’t they be closer? Shouldn’t she and Chase be warm to the idea of having this kind of chance? Shouldn’t they be having quiet moments and talking about how lucky they are?
Because she knows she’s lucky. But then, she understands the weight of this kind of loss too - to lose someone, to lose someone where you’re just on the brink of discovering each other. To lose anticipation and moments of exciting expectation - it breaks you. It broke her.
But it even now, they seem to have a selfish fix on their problems.
“Does he?”
Foreman’s question drops and she snaps up, looking up at him sharply. Her eyes narrow briefly. “He -”
It’s just a reminder that she doesn’t know, that he continues to have some sort of evasive hold over her and in this relationship. It can be scary, in the strangest sense, but now, it just churns all the bad things about them being together to the surface.
She looks down again.
Foreman takes pity on her. “His parents?”
“Yeah.”
But they stop talking.
It doesn’t matter who sees him first, but Cameron spots Chase walking back into the restaurant. His jaw is locked into a frown and her hand drops away from her stomach to her seat, her fingers curling around the cushion. Her throat burns a little more and she breathes when he meets her gaze, forcing herself to look away.
“Maybe, he’ll come around.”
It’s the last thing Foreman says to her as the anxiety rises again, in silence. She watches as someone at the bar nearly cuts her boyfriend - she hates the word, what means, what it should me - off in passing.
“I don’t know,” she swallows. “I don’t know.”
-
Saturdays are supermarket days and it’s been good to get out of the house, the two of them, for just a little bit. Oddly enough, they seem to be better at grasping things around each other outside of the structure of work and the hospital. It’s the one thing that followed them, after working with House, is that they have that, working with House, over their heads.
Dinner, last week, still lives in her head.
It’s affected them both in different ways. Chase likes to be more inclined to say that hers has been much more obvious than his, but it’s more of the reverse. She carries a lot with her still, in between the I don’t miss you and the bizarre ease she’s had in being back in Princeton for the year. She’s much more comfortable here, around the ideas of people that she does know and that selfish grasp of familiarity.
She will never pretend to completely understand her relationship with House, with what she still craves from time to time, but these are things that belong to her.
She’s exhausted today as they step into line, their grocery cart filled with fruits and vegetables, pastas because one of them does cook during the week. She leans heavily against the rail of the cart as they wait for a woman and her massive quantities of things to finish putting them up on the small, moving belt. She’s exhausted, more and more, and cannot hold onto the hours as an excuse. She likes working in the emergency room, the comfort of predictable stress and order more of a selfish constant than anything else.
But it’s what she has.
Rubbing her eyes, she glances off to the side and searches for a magazine to read in the car. Her fingers slide over the faces of Clooney and his latest conquest, her mouth set into a grasp of amusement. When she pulls at the copy of People, it slips out and sputters with another, smaller book. She snorts and leans forward to pick it up, her gaze softening.
Baby names.
She hesitates as she grabs it, tucking it over her magazine. She lets her fingers drift over names like abigal and dylan, charmed even by the colors and the idea that she’s going to have to do this soon. She catches herself too, smiling a little when she remembers talking about them with -
It doesn’t matter. But she turns up to look at Chase, nudging him briefly. He looks down at her, peering over her shoulder as she shows him the small book. The magazine slips to the cart and she takes the first couple pages, opening it to see the names that are inside.
“Look,” she murmurs, “Aidan, Addy -”
But he’s frank, looking away. “I saw.”
She feels him step back and her shoulders sag briefly, her eyes closing as she tosses the book into the cart anyway, as if to spite him. He’s going to have to have to talk to her, he has to, because she can’t hold this up by herself. She can’t do this alone.
“I’m trying,” she says quietly.
His mouth tightens as he starts to drop things on the belt, their groceries spreading out in front of them. “Ironic.”
She doesn’t say anything. She moves to the front, ignoring him and starting a conversation with the cashier. She’s pleasant, her fingers curled tightly as she fights off the urge to start screaming at Chase. At this point, she just wants him to talk to her so that they can figure things out however impulsive or illogical.
She can’t read him - it scares her more than a little bit too. He seems to carry this ability to pick her apart and with the weight of everything that’s starting to happen now, she desperately needs someone to talk to. She wants him to be apart of this, she wants to be able to say that she’s absolutely terrified about having a baby and not being anywhere near ready. But they seem unable to connect, moving farther and farther away from each other with him refusing to talk to her and her trying to force some line of conversation in all her desperation.
“Have a good day, sweetie!”
The cashier winks at her and she smiles, a little, nodding as she starts to pass with Chase. Quiet, they start for the car. He pushes the cart and she takes the keys, swinging them around her fingers. It’s not a busy Saturday, the summer reaping the losses of the student population as it restructures with those who either stayed behind or those who really make the area up. But it’s too much for her and she’s desperate, if anything, for something else.
When they get to the car, she stops and presses her hand over the trunk. She glances up at him, her eyes dark and her mouth tight.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m - I need time, Allison,” he shrugs, “and you haven’t exactly been giving me time asking me -”
“What the hell have I been asking you?”
She’s staring at him wide-eyed and angry, her hands clutching into fists as they drop at her sides. It’s not a good feeling, the sense of confusion and disappointment and oddly enough, she has House’s disbelief written straight in her head as she remembers how clearly her relationship with Chase was written off in the beginning.
“Really,” she snaps, tired and upset. “Have at it now - what the hell have I been asking you? All I said was that I’m pregnant and here I am, trying to make the best of a situation that makes me just as scared and as worried and as uncomfortable as you.”
It’s the first time, then, that he really looks at her. He’s weary and briefly, too, she meets his own sense of apprehension and anxiety. It almost softens her, almost makes her step back and apologize. But she’s too angry, too scared, and really, since she’s told him - in between and before all things that have happened - she’s been left alone to deal with this. It’s why, she thinks, letting people in is such a damning idea. On the one hand, you have someone to talk to, to relay everything and anything no matter the level.
Then there’s this.
He’s quiet. “We should go home.”
“Of course.”
Her voice is heavy, thick, and sags as she steps away. She leaves him to the bags, disappointed and even lonelier than before. A part of her thinks that she did this to him, that she opened them to all these outside memories by wanting to return to Princeton and taking Cuddy’s job offer. But they were supposed to cope. They were supposed to cope and she was doing okay, doing better in separating herself away from old habits.
“I’m sorry.”
She stops at the door, her fingers curled at the handle. “Are you sure?”
He’s genuinely offended, his eyes narrowing as he practically rips open the trunk of his car. Their car, she reminds herself. But he keeps watching her, shaking his head as he sighs.
“That’s not fair.”
“No,” her eyes flash. “What’s not fair is that you won’t even talk to me - I have no idea how you feel like about this.”
“I’m not ready to talk about it.” There’s a whole line of meaning here and she doesn’t want to hear it. Still though, it’s the frankest he’s been with her since she told him that they were going to have a baby.
“Bullshit,” she mutters.
She opens the door of the driver’s seat, pocketing the keys and turning back to go and help him with the groceries. They’re quiet and her hands ache from squeezing too hard and all the tension she wraps herself around.
This is supposed to be something happy, no matter what the circumstances are, and yet, neither of them seem to be able to move forward in any of this. It hurts, mostly, but she feels like she should’ve expected something of this degree with him.
“You told Foreman,” he says softly.
Her mouth sighs into a frown, unapologetic. “I needed a friend.”
“You’re okay with this -”
Her mouth opens. He holds up a hand, cutting her off before she even manipulates something to say back to him. “That’s thing,” he tells her, “you’re okay with this. You might not like the idea. You might not be ready for it. But you’re okay. You cope. You move on. You make the situation bearable for you.”
“That’s not fair.”
It’s somewhat of the truth - she’s always been geared towards some sense of survival. This is the way she knows, that she understands she’s going to have move forward. She doesn’t know how else to explain it to him, if there’s a way they can connect over this.
But he’s quiet, when he starts again, almost reaching for her but never quite getting there. “I’m not ready.”
Her eyes darken. “And you think I am?”
He shakes his head and the heaviness seems to hide for them, giving them a sense of space. But this time, he stops them and he holds his hand over her arm. His fingers are loose and she’s desperate to have some idea of where this is going to go.
“You’re looking at baby names, Allison.” His hand drops and it’s as if he’s never even touched her before.
She stays quiet. Instead she moves away, the tightness in her shoulders steadier than ever.
-
Inevitably, she was going to end up here even under the span of a couple more days.
She’s standing in the frame of the door, her jaw locked into silence as she looks into the room. It’s quiet, too quiet, and the window in the far corner bugging her for whatever reason - he was on the other side of the hospital, she remembers, the last time and his room overlooked the front of the hospital instead of the back. There were trees and movements, the sound of traffic both outside and in the hospital, forcing him not to be alone. She doesn’t want to know what he can see now and that, oddly enough, seems to grate on her too.
But she pries herself away from the strange sense of memory, pulling at the end of her shirt and watching the bed as House sort of stirs in bed. There’s a dull hum from the side, the monitors wearily relating the expenses that he’s garnered this time around. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, in between the reassurances that she doesn’t have and the looks that she’s getting from Chase and now, even Foreman. But what else was she supposed to do? Or say? It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t have or call for the evasiveness of silence and for once, for once she just wants someone to shove her in the right direction.
She’s not going to get it here. Or so, she tells herself.
There’s a moan from the bed, lurching over a growl and a sigh. She steps forward and into the room, standing awkwardly behind a chair by his bed. She watches as his eyes start to open, slowly, and they plaster over the lights and the wiring of the ceiling.
She tries to think of something to say to him - she’s visited once, almost out of obligation, for a flurry of seconds to see him. She found Cuddy by his side and hid behind a grim nod, letting the other woman wrap some sort of reassurance back to her in a proverbial bow. It was too tense of a moment for her and, oddly enough, the old, odd sense of dismay had been ready to spill over. It was too much too.
Her lips press quietly and she decides to sit down, watching him for a moment and then looking away. She picks up a magazine from his bedside, recognizing the People she bought from the supermarket on Saturday. She hasn’t read it, hasn’t had the time to, and has been stumbling around the emergency room because they’re short-staffed again and she needs the distraction.
“Angelina’s having twins,” she mumbles finally, flipping through the first couple pages of the magazine, “and Jen Aniston is running around with John Mayor -”
He grunts. “Lame.”
“I know.”
Her mouth tightens. She keeps the magazine to her lap.
The thing about their relationship now is that it’s neither forward nor stilted, lingering around indecision from time to time. It’s as if they’ve both misplaced themselves, hiding in a bizarre show of uniformity in order to avoid a necessary acknowledgment. She could go back too, say all the things that she said to him and mean them in different ways - mostly, she misses him and mostly, she doesn’t. It should be nothing more than a stain of passing time and she told him, she told him that she was moving forward, that she was fine, that she had all the things that he never seemed to believe her ambition for. It’s funny too, even now, how she keeps herself from saying you were right so that she can covet that sense of mystery. But there’s still that awareness between them that croons and sticks them together even if there was the illusion of choice.
“Ugh.”
His speech is still slow, his movement stuck on the line of impossible, but he does turn to look at her. His eyes are dark, the circles around them sighing into exhaustion. It’s remarkable, really, that the levels of stupidity that he’s reached are this tragic, are this self-destructive, but then again, she shouldn’t be surprised.
“Your shift is late.”
He coughs and she reaches for a cup on the table next to her, pouring a little water into it. The paper smears against her fingers as she tightens them, leaning forward to help him. She feels his lips dry over the bridge of her finger and then suck the water that he can drink.
She keeps her voice lazy as he finishes. “I like visiting in the middle the night - to fulfill, you know, all those romantic inclinations that you accuse me of having.”
But he says nothing, sighing tiredly instead. She imagines there would be some sort of indirect dialogue unfolding now, but he’s weary, his eyes darting all over the place - over her shoulder, to the bed, to the ceiling as if he could rewrite expectation.
Still, though, he offers some kind of conversation. It’s kind of selfish to hope too, but there’s that undertone driving her motivations for being here, the ones that she will admit to having.
“Where’s your better half?”
She snorts. “You were almost funny.”
“Should try harder,” he mutters, rolling a hand over his eyes. She watches as his fingers press into his forehead, the skin paling briefly. “He was here earlier - less annoying too. Bet I’m a better bowler still.”
“Mmhm.”
She kind of grins though, against her judgment, the picture of the two of them amusing as hell. It’s the first time too that she cracks a reasonable sort of smile, shaking her head and letting her hand drop to the bed. She lets it drift over the sheets, the stiff cotton scraping against the pads of her fingers. But his hand moves too, right over hers, his fingers pressing into her knuckles as if he were trying to stop her instead.
“It’s stupid,” she starts quietly.
His fingers are too warm against her skin, too odd, and she feels her nerves starting to rise in tangles; there’s the inexplicable urge to just tell him, to just say this is what’s happening and stumble straight over the fact that she’s pregnant. She doesn’t know how he’d take and imagines all kinds of ridiculous responses.
He would be honest. He would be honest with her.
House coughs again. “What?”
“Nothing.”
But she loses all thoughts of courage, almost letting her hand drop to her stomach in a thin edge of defiance. You see, she almost wants to say, you see - this is the kind of life she’s bringing someone else into. There’s so much uncertainty and such a lack of a probably sensibility. She’s terrified that she’s going to be lousy, too hard, and seeking reassurances her is something that she needs to give up.
It’s not that thought, she fights with herself. She wants the honesty, she needs the honesty, and it’s the wrong time go after something like this.
Her hand sort of folds underneath his, her palm turning absently into his fingers as her gaze rises to his. She licks her lips and his gaze charms into a stiff exhaustion. It’s hard, the tension that suddenly comes with this. She wants to have that level with him and why, really, becomes more of a panic for her. Why is she seeking him out?
“Have you -” He breaks the mess of her thoughts, the sigh of her mouth churning under his question.
She shakes her head.
“You don’t know what I was going to say.”
But she does. At some point, he’s fallen to an odd stretch of predictability. She doesn’t understand it, but suddenly, she’s back to reading the faces that he has and how easy they seem to frequent opportunity.
“Nobody’s talked to him,” she lies, completely sure that she’s not the only one that’s seen Wilson.
He doesn’t believe her, but doesn’t press. This shouldn’t come from her, she knows, and suddenly, she’s stuck in the memory of conversation that she did have with Wilson. There are words that she remembers, that she could relate, but it’s almost too much for her to suddenly face with the leveling of her own experiences.
But House isn’t looking for the answers from her. She’s pretty sure that she could still be someone else, in this chair, and listening to the lack of will behind his sense of reaching. She still can’t help the sudden grasp of feelings that she’s faced with her, her mouth tightening as she lets her fingers start to brush against his. She’s lazier than he is, uncertain, and lingers far too longer over the lines of his hand. There’s a brief brush of intimacy, something that belongs to the two of them, and it lingers for just little bit longer, disappearing to hide. She’s still touching him though, touching him carefully but openly for the first time.
There’s a twist then, in the pit of her stomach, and she’s face briefly with spurt of names. She drops her gaze and watches as his hand returns to covering hers, his fingers stretching over her skin.
“Twins for Angelina, huh?” His voice is low, laced with fractures of uncertainty and curiosity. The sound is almost too breathless, slowed with the amount of effort that he still has to put into function.
And for a moment, she suddenly thinks that he knows. Even with just a glance. Her throat dries and something sinks deep in her stomach, swirling faster with shaky confidence. But then he looks away, his hands deep over the sheets of his bed as the wires strung around his arms start to moan after his movement.
He wouldn’t though, she thinks, and now, it’s beyond the point of really having something to notice. Still, though, it unnerves her that he’s back to watching her, that his eyes are darker than the memories that she has, and however spaced it is, his hand is covering hers.
“Yeah,” she mumbles, “Twins.”
The magazine slips from her lap.
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