Disclaimer: i don't own house md, and if i did we'd all have to deal with the horsemen and the end of days.
Reviews are greeted with a giddiness that is really more befitting of a four-year-old, riding in rainbow colored pony, eating cotton candy, at disneyworld.
She'd texted him that night, while they were all three sitting at the restaurant, managing to tolerate one another's company. They should have been ebullient. They'd just proven someone wasn't going to die, possibly saved his life. The problem was, the person who was going to live wasn't their boss, and they didn't know anymore why they'd thought it was. They sat around the table, stealing food of each other's plates and bitterly complaining about House's manipulation. They'd been bitching to each other for almost an hour, when Chase's cell phone started vibrating in his pocket. Not wanting to interrupt Foreman's rant about the fact that he'd actually said he liked House, the Aussie discretely pulled the phone out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. Tonight, was all it said. It didn't need clarification. He glanced over at Cameron, however, just to be sure. The impish look in her eyes was confirmation enough. She took a sip of her drink, and pushed her hair behind her ear, nodding along with Foreman's fuming.
Chase didn't understand how she could be thinking of sex at a time like this, but shoved the thought away: House wasn't dying, Patrick wasn't dying, "Luke N. Laura" wasn't even dying. A bit of fun couldn't hurt anyone. So he nodded, so slightly that he doubted Cameron had even noticed, until she smiled, just a little bit.
They left the bar half an hour later, during which Chase hadn't said a word beyond "yeah. You're right. Uh-huh" He found himself suddenly unable to craft an opinion on the matter. But anyway, before he knew it, Foreman had bid them goodbye, leaving cash on the table for his food and then Chase and Cameron had left, too. They ended up at his apartment, for the first time, and he flipped on the lights and invited her in; subdued, uncomfortable. She took in the meager furnishings, admired a poster on the wall, while he made some small talk. Eventually, though, she had grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and smashed their faces together, hungrily. She held him close and ran her mouth over his jaw line, warmer than anything he could ever remember feeling. He pulled away as her hands ventured to remove his coat, his shirt, his pants. The look she shot him was a little confused, mostly annoyed.
"What?" she asked him.
"I—I just…" he stammered, "How can you think of sex, now?" she just raised an eyebrow. "I mean, we thought House was dying less than twenty-four hours ago. Now you want to go back to business as usual?" you want to continue something that exists purely to have no meaning when mortality, our time limit, has just finished staring us in the face? How can you—?
"Well…" she said, "for one thing he isn't dying. And for another, I don't see how that affects us." You.
"His death would've been insignificant to you?" He asked, incredulous, voice walking the line between its normal pitch and an octave higher.
Cameron looked at the ground, pushed her hair behind her ear. She didn't answer him. She didn't notice the fact that his vision was blurring with tears.
He blinked rapidly, in an attempt to remedy that, just as she removed her gaze from the floor. She shrugged with seeming nonchalance, but her nose was a little bit red, her eyes a little frantic. Suddenly one of the tears he'd been trying to press back by blinking rebelled, falling down his cheek. Chase immediately wiped it away, rubbing its path off his face with his sleeve.
"Why are you so upset?" Cameron asked, "House has never been anything but an ass to you."
"That's not true." he insisted, but more tears were following the first in its up-rise, sliding down his face faster than he could wipe them away. But before he can sniffle, Cameron is there, again, kissing him, gently this time, and wiping the tears off his face. She went cautiously, as if there was some meaning somewhere in the universe, and she was pulling off his jacket and shirt and pants, just as slowly, as he reciprocated. And all of a sudden, what they were doing took over and the emotions weren't important. It wasn't so hungry or lusty as before, but practically soothing. She was trying to fix him by screwing him, his brain screamed as its last rational thought before everything gave over to the sensations.
A while later, god knew the exact length of time, they lay in his bed, unclothed and vulnerable. She was staring at the ceiling holding a sheet up over her chest and he was trying to map out where in his apartment various clothes had been flung. It was all he could do not to get up and put them away. But then he looked over at Cameron, and she stared at the ceiling fan without seeing it.
"He wasn't going to tell us." Chase said, by way of explanation…apology.
. "It was fake. Why does it matter if he tells us he has fake cancer?"
"What makes you think he would have told us if it were real?" Chase got out of the bed and picked up every item of clothing that lay forgotten on the couch, on the floor and underneath his bedside table, putting on the boxers that had been sitting just beyond his bedroom door. She got up and followed him, grabbing a dress shirt and pulling it on as she did so.
"It kills you." She said, quietly, "Doesn't it?"
"what?" he asked, compulsively folding up his jeans.
"that he didn't care enough to let you know."
"about his fake cancer?" he put the jeans into his dresser drawer.
"no, about his real cancer." Chase's eyes shot up, confusion floating in the leftover tears. "I mean your dad." He swallowed, hard, Adam's apple bobbing like a buoy in a hurricane.
"How did you know about that?"
"I saw the obit in International Immunology. And Foreman told me why the committee let you off for Kayla. You only would've screwed up that bad if it came as a surprise"
"it isn't your business" his throat said before his mind had told it to, reflexively.
"you brought it up. I don't know why, but House's pseudo-near death experience hit you harder than anything else." And the tears started welling up again, much to his mind's chagrin. She sat down next to him, his pants drawer still open in front of them and Cameron put her arm around his shoulder.
"I'm here." She said, as though she thought that would make a difference.
"I know." he replied, almost gratefully, so quietly that he wasn't sure if he said it at all.