This isn't a sequel to SaintsAndSaviors... that will be coming in a little while. In the meantime, hopefully this will keep you amused.

Second Date.

Prologue

It was too damn hot for September. And that was just the bottom of his list of complaints. He shouldn't have worn a t-shirt, but he always wore one, and he was nothing without his habits. A shitty attitude, scruff, fifteen vicodin and a t-shirt every a day were but a few of those immutable facets of his life. That didn't stop him from cursing the black cotton already clinging stickily to his underarms as he worked up a sweat walking from car to entrance. A song from Tommy was stuck in his head. Another reason to hate the day. His cane pounded the ground in time to the music rattling between his ears.

The blast of cool, sterile air hit him as the sliding doors parted before him. Good. One thing to be thankful for. The a/c was still working. That small blessing was instantly trumped by the first sight that met his eyes as he walked through the clinic lobby. Stacy. Looking perfectly coifed, perfectly dressed, perfectly, annoyingly, infuriatingly composed as she stood by the nurse's station talking to Cuddy. Didn't she have an office? Why the hell wasn't she in it more often?

He purposely kept his gaze on the fascinating blue wall and away from her face. His jaw, already tight, locked down another notch. He'd grind his teeth to chalk by the time Matt/ Mike/fuckingMark, was well enough to be discharged. The elevator, slow at the best of times, was apparently pissed at him and taking a particularly long time to travel four floors. He could feel Stacy's eyes on him. Longing? Pitying? Pointless.

Finally, long after two holes had been bored into his back, the silver doors opened and he stepped inside. He didn't turn around until he heard the doors start to close.

On the walk to his department he could pretend that nothing had changed. That lasted until he stepped into his office and saw the mail piled on his desk and a dirty coffee mug on his side table. From the doorway, he had a slivered view of Cameron sitting at her desk. Just a slim piece of her visible through the glass, the rest blocked by the solid part of the wall. Even that narrow three inch profile showed him too much. Paler skin. Straighter spine. Hard eyes. More damaged now than she'd been when he hired her.

I thought you were too screwed up to love anybody.

The last personal words she'd spoken to him.

You just couldn't love me.

Hell, he didn't know what love was anymore.

He missed her coffee.

He missed the hopeful look on her face.

He missed feeling like her affections were his, to take or to leave.

He was a selfish bastard and he didn't know what the hell he wanted, but he sure as hell wanted more than what he had.

A file of x-rays and lab results was on his chair. He snatched it up and barged into the conference room just like every other morning. They had work to do.

The lab was always ten degrees colder than any other room in the hospital. Or at least it always felt that way. Maybe it was the lighting. It was too dim for working really, but it gave the room an interesting look, and in a hospital made of glass, that was vitally important. Had to give the donors the feeling that their money was being put to good use, after all, and they couldn't see the difference between ten and fifteen thousand dollar microscopes, but stylish lighting effects, they noticed.

He stood outside watching her for over ten minutes. She was facing away from him, and he'd stood that way before, more times than he would ever admit to Wilson. He had memorized her back. He had no idea what he was doing, but that had never stopped him before when it came to personal relationships. His cane hit the door a second before his hand, letting her know exactly who was checking up on her. She flinched but made no other sign of acknowledgement.

Tap against the floor. Tap against his sneaker. Heavy thud and he leaned his weight to the right, overdeveloped shoulder holding him upright. "So, Friday, seven o'clock. I'll pick you up."

"Excuse me?" Cameron looked up from her microscope, hand poised over the chart where she was making notes.

"Our second date," House said, as if the answer should be obvious.

"Second…" she shook her head quickly, looking like a cat caught with a particularly annoying bug on its nose. "Oh, you mean because our first date was such a big success." She paused and rested her free hand on her hip. "And six months ago."

A shift to the left foot and then back to the cane. "Right. Lots of first dates don't end well. There's probably a poll or a study in this month's Mademoiselle. Check it out." House was alternately staring at her and behind her, never letting his eyes rest on hers for more than a few seconds. Whose x-rays were those on the wall, and did Cuddy know that the missing tray of test tubes was thanks to Chase dropping them?

Cameron's gaze never left his face. She was studying him. Reading him. He was no longer a mystery to her. She wasn't stupid. She knew what this was about. This was about Stacy being back and taken, and House feeling his own mortality or jealousy or some crap like that. The question was whether or not she was willing to go along with him. What would the outcome be this time, with him using her to heal his ego instead of her bribing him to wheedle her way under his shell? Did relationships based purely on mutual attraction even exist anymore, or were they all plagued with some undercurrent of angst and need? The smart, sane thing to do would be to turn him down and start looking for another job again. She was very smart and relatively sane.

"Seven-thirty," she said, turning back to her microscope after watching him blink. "I'll be wearing jeans, so choose the place accordingly."

House nodded dumbly. His plan hadn't gone as far as her agreeing to the date.

"Don't bring me a corsage," she said as he walked out of the lab. "They just get my hopes up."

In her perfectly ordered, perfectly clean, starkly decorated apartment, Cameron sat nearly motionless on the sofa. Her knees were pulled to her chest, bare feet flat against the cushions, arms linked around her calves, chin resting lightly on her right knee, eyes focused on the sliver of moon she could see through the window.

She hadn't seen House again after his clumsy invitation, not that she'd wanted to. In fact she had stayed in the lab longer than necessary, checking her watch until it ticked past five thirty. They didn't have a patient so there was no way House would still be in his office at that time. Avoidance. Good way to approach a date. Foreman and Chase had been gone as well and she'd grabbed her pocketbook, draped her labcoat over her chair and hurried out without speaking to anyone else.

A second date. What the hell was she doing? When she'd arrived at her apartment she'd tossed her things onto a chair, poured a glass of cheap boxed wine and returned to the living room. She'd been there ever since. The wine was barely touched.

These were the times she really should have called up one of her girlfriends to talk some sense into her, but she only had three in the area. One was married with two kids, one worked the nightshift as an EMT at the hospital, and the last had only six… no, five… more months to live and probably wouldn't be particularly interested in hearing about the crisis in her love life.

Because it's me?

She'd walked right into that. Played into his hand as an overly emotional woman. But she'd meant every word. She'd been right about every word.

I hate you!

Except those. She'd meant them as they were coming from her mouth. They'd held more truth for her in that instant than anything else in her life. Her mind had cheered her for shouting them out. That complete and utter hatred had lasted for almost three seconds before changing into disappointment and resignation. Up until that point she'd merely repeated the words 'get over him' to herself. After that, she started to follow them.

So of course, it only made sense that he would choose to come to her with some pathetic olive-branch offering now that she could be in the same room with him without feeling the need to pummel him or herself. Stages of grief. Yeah, she'd hit a few of them along the way, starting with one lie about acceptance and ending with another.

I'm glad. I'm happy for you.

I've jumped on the bandwagon.

A week of seclusion in the lab after that first torturous little dramatic scene, and she'd toughened up enough to face him. Toughened up enough to go toe to toe with him. About everything. She said black, he said white. She said the sky was blue, he'd deny it. He'd always been that way. The difference was that now she fought back. She could tell he didn't like it. He probably hated it if he let himself feel that much through his vicodin induced haze. Oh yes, she knew he'd been taking more than usual, which was quite a feat considering he'd always taken more than the allowed dosage.

After one of their battles over the conference room table, Foreman had cornered her and told her it sounded like she and House were in the middle of a lover's spat. She had glared at him and refused to say anything non-medical to him for a week.

But all that had been pre-Death-Row-Guy (because that's how she always thought of him), pre-Cindy, with her innocence balanced in Cameron's hands. All that had been before Cameron had started to really follow her own advice. Get over him. The key to that turned out to be to stop caring what he thought or what he said. She still argued with him, but without any fire behind her eyes. Her eyes were flat now. Even she could look in the mirror and see that. Maybe that was what this was about. Maybe he missed the fights. They gave him something to do.

Like a five year old with a puzzle that was just too grown-up for him.

Apparently he wanted the puzzle back. This time she wasn't just going to hand it to him with the answer-key.

Uncurling herself from the sofa, she reached out and picked up her wineglass, tipping the contents into her mouth in three gulps. She carried the glass into the kitchen and started scavenging around for food. Not much appealed to her lately. She had some lasagna, left-over from her dinner with Cindy a week ago. Wilson was right. He was probably right more often than House, he just didn't demand a lot of fanfare about it. Making friends with the dying was only going to destroy her.

She brought her microwaved meal into her bedroom and turned on the television as she propped herself against the pillows. When she'd first moved to Princeton she hadn't owned a television. She'd actually been rather proud of that fact. Loneliness had tempered pride but she still couldn't give in all the way and put one in the living room. Instead she had a cheap fourteen-inch Samsung perched awkwardly on her dresser. A rerun of CSI was playing. Good. She could concentrate on someone else's fucked up interpersonal skills.

Between the first and second bodies, she considered the multitude of ways she could back out of the date. She could leave a snide note on his chair. An email would be pointless since he deleted most of them on sight. She could just not be home when he came to pick her up. That would be humiliating for him. It would be almost as humiliating as being belittled in front of a room full of co-workers. She turned up the volume to drown out her thoughts.

By the time the last body and the murderer had been discovered, Cameron had made up her mind to keep the date with House. She'd tried convincing herself that she was being a masochistic fool, but it hadn't worked. She would go out with him because it was what she wanted. She'd go out with him, but this time there would be no probing questions, no soulful glances. This time he could be the one making the effort and maybe if she was in a very good mood she'd throw him a bone.

Getting over him didn't seem to be going very well anyway. She could still look into his eyes and see something that called to her.