A/N. My second challenge for 78-tarot, for the card 'The Magician'. To understand what the tarot cards stand for, do a search for 'The Magician' at Wikipedia. For this fic, I focused more on the negation. Sometimes it's about the negative, what isn't, and denial. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: 'You Can Close Your Eyes' is the property of James Taylor, House, MD is the property of Fox Network.
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Close Your Eyes
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Allison Cameron, he decided, was almost the perfect doctor.
She was young and driven, energetic and confident. There was a great sense of creativity and constant movement in her. She kept going even when he gave up, kept pushing, trying to bend the puzzle in another direction that he had yet to see. She was precise, determined, and focused. She made goals, and she followed through on them. In time, he had even found that she could be manipulative. He liked to think she learned it from him, but perhaps she had had the capacity for it all along.
Almost perfect. But not quite.
There was only one thing she lacked, and that was objectivity. It was why Cameron would never be a great doctor, but merely a very good one.
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She was curled up in one of the on-call rooms when House found her. How he knew to look for her there she would never know. Room 13 had always been her sanctuary from Diagnostics, from the entire hospital. The nurses, surgeons and interns avoided it on the grounds that the number was unlucky.
Cameron, on the other hand, thought of the number thirteen and felt safe and warm in the arms of the long summer days of her young adolescence. The wind whipped her stringy brown hair – then cut into a mop of curls – into her eyes, the sun beat down on her, and sand crunched beneath her feet like fine, golden sugar as the waves pounded against the coast. In the desolation of the shores of her youth, she had been free.
She had been fourteen when her parents died. Her thirteenth year was the last innocence she'd had.
Her parents had died like all the others. Cold and alone in a strange place, the machines charting the fleeting seconds of their lives, documenting every hint of vitality. Cameron had not known then the emptiness that she would feel when the ceaseless beeps finally lapsed into a double tone of constancy that signaled the end.
All things change, although you don't expect them to.
Losing the patient today had been particularly hard on Cameron. She has my mother's eyes, Cameron had thought with a quick stab of pain to her chest as they slipped closed in her final sleep. She had seen her mother in every woman for years: the soft tangle of auburn curls that belonged to the girl at the coffee shop down the street, or the freckles that dusted the nose of the pharmacist's assistant, or the dimples of the lawyer who lived in the apartment next to hers.
He hadn't even knocked, and she couldn't say she was surprised by his intrusion. He was always bursting in. Uninvited, but there nonetheless. Hadn't she learned her lesson by now? It seemed she had forgotten whatever it was.
It wasn't the first time he had walked in on her with tears streaked across her cheeks, and it wouldn't be the last. She looked up at him and tried to wipe the moisture from her skin as nonchalantly as she could. Her voice was raspy and unsteady as she asked, "What?"
He looked at her for a long moment. He must know the effect that has on people, she decided. Otherwise he wouldn't do it so often. Nevertheless, she couldn't take his scrutiny. Shamefully, she ducked her head and swiped at her cheeks. "Come to mock me?"
"Yes." But he sat at the foot of the bunk and stared at the wall for a long time, and Allison had to wonder what he was thinking.
The silence had become uncomfortable to her, and so she asked, "Then why don't you?"
He looked at her balefully, then his lips twisted as his eyes flittered over her. "It's politically incorrect to make fun of cripples."
She sensed where he was going with the statement, but couldn't resist contradicting him. "I'm fine."
She felt his eyes on her tear-stained cheeks and puffy features. "Liar." He took a breath, preparing his diatribe, she knew. Allison Cameron, emotional cripple. "You're so-"
She cut him off. "Don't." He looked as if he would disregard her request, so she added, "Please." It was the sincerity and weakness in her eyes that stopped him… funnily enough, the same traits he had been about to attack. "Please," she said again, and his eyes were drawn to her hands, her long, graceful fingers all knotted together in hurt. "Not today."
He sneered at her, but she felt a falseness in it. Just a façade to keep up appearances. The illusion slipped from him… as much defeat as House would ever admit. He's stubborn, she mused. Just like me.
Allison had always thought that the most fragile thing in the world was an exhaled breath. Quiet, soft, and tiny. It wasn't even a blip on the world's consciousness – nor even the breather's – but it was an infinitesimal sight, minuscule surrender. The last sound that ever escapes our lips, the one that everyone remembers us by. Cameron exhaled, and in the heartbeat of rest before she took more air from the atmosphere, the man she had finally come to peace with looked at her with those ice-clear eyes.
"Are you okay?" And for the first time in what seemed years, she felt connected to him, she felt like they finally knew who they were.
She wanted to turn from him and hide her eyes. She didn't. "It hurts."
He sighed, and one rough palm rested on her shoulder. "It's life." Somehow that explained it all.
"I miss her." House knew that Cameron meant her mother, and that the woman had died in a car crash when Allison was very young. He had snooped in her family's medical history when he hired her… it seemed like a lifetime ago. He scrutinized her eyes. They held less hope, less optimism than they had the autumn he had hired her. The leaves were turning, he remembered. She had seemed brittle as any of the flame-colored leaves, all full of fire and eagerness and sanguinity. He would have taken pleasure in extinguishing those flames then. Now he felt an odd surge of sadness and a need to protect her, this delicate creature struggling to make her way in a world full of stones and bullets and steel.
Two fingers traced a circle on her shoulder blade in an attempt at comfort. "I know."
Her eyes fluttered closed, and a few shining tears clung to her eyelashes. Without opening her eyes, she murmured, "Thank you." There was both innocence and an exhausted worldliness in her voice, and House was once again reminded that he could never predict her. She hated needing this from him, he knew, but she was far too polite not to express gratitude, and so there was shame in her voice mixed with the appreciation.
"Any time." He stood and coughed suddenly, scowling down at her. "Your shift starts in ten minutes. Don't be late."
She nodded wordlessly. He looked down at her, curled up on the sterile bed with its cold, stiff plastic-like sheets, nearly swimming in the scrubs that were far too large for her. The clinical blue reflected in her eyes, and for a moment she looked so numb and lost that he couldn't help himself. He leaned down and brushed a light kiss atop the crown of her head, and then with a last glance over his shoulder he was gone.
Cameron stared after him, her fingers still tangled together. Slowly, she uncurled them. One by one, she cracked her knuckles. A bad habit, but one of the few she allowed herself. Thumb, pointer, middle, ring, pinkie. Thumb, pointer, middle…
She paused when she got to her left ring finger. Her gaze fell. That small defeated sigh again. Inhale. Exhale. She slipped the ring off of her finger, and looked at it for a long moment, lying in the soft palm of her hand. It glinted at her demurely. She felt a pain in her heart as she read the well-known inscription.
JW ♥ AC - 5/20/2006She looked to the door again, and in the interminable silence between the time the latch clicked and the time she pulled herself to her feet to begin work, Allison released a tiny whisper. It hung in the silence of the still room for a moment before it seeped into the walls and curled like a corpse in a tomb, all dried and old and hopeless. Forgotten but still in the mind of the perpetrator, a horrible constant guilt, a sordid secret that would trail behind her like a ghost for years to come...
"I still love you."