Hey you guys. First of all, for anyone who is even still interested in it, I'm going to finish Betrayal. Be looking for the next chapter. Secondly, this is not a spawn!fic. And yeah...that's it.
Enjoy the story!
You walk into his office, waiting for him to finish up so you can go to lunch. "Get a lumbar puncture," he tells his fellows, and they rise without a question or an argument. They talk about him behind his back, about how he's off his rocker and how he doesn't feel anything, but they rarely say it to his face, because they know that he knows what he's doing.
You look at him and try to remember exactly when he became such an arse. He had always had a certain flippant tone about him, but it used to hide behind his vague politeness, only coming out when someone said something absolutely retarded or when he bothered to disagree with someone. Now he seemed miserable all the time, was miserable to everyone (Except for patients-he was nicer to them than he had ever been.), and you decide that it has to with running diagnostics. It does, you think with a smile, seem to run the best with unhappy people in charge. Some would disagree, but he is really the best one for the job. He has all the requirements- he's a brilliant bastard.
Ironically, the more he withdraws, the more you seem to be around him. The nurses love to talk about how you're sleeping together. That's the only reason you can stand him. You love to think about how wrong they are. (You have slept together, and it ended horribly. It might have been different another time, but neither of you really wanted to try.) You like to think that you stay because he's your friend, but some voice in the back of your head keeps telling you never were there before. He pushed me out, the rational side argues back, but he still is trying to push you out. Maybe it's true, you really only want needy people. Or maybe it's because you both get something out of this relationship- he gets to be your confessor(that's one thing he's always been good at, no matter how he fights it.)and you make sure he's never completely alone.
You snap out of your reverie long enough to order lunch and follow him to a vacant table. You eat in silence until a third tray slides on the table and a voice inquires if "you care if I sit down?" He doesn't say anything, but he doesn't really need to. They act like they hate each other (and on some small level they probably do), but with you between them they've developed some weird sense of friendship over the years. You smile and say "I'm surprised you've got time, since your so busy running things." Your table becomes a party of three, and you think again how ironic this whole thing is. A doctor focuses his whole life on getting to the top, and once he gets there he misses all the things he gave up to get where he is. A wife, kids, even a dog at this point would do him good.
It occurs to you that this is how it used to be- you, Foreman, and Chase up against House and the world. You wish you could go back to that, before House disappeared and Chase shut down before anyone could leave him again. (You wonder vaguely if you left he would even notice.) Before Foreman transferred to neurology and became so obsessed with becoming the head of the department (Which he did. It was probably a domino effect of Chase somehow getting placed in charge of diagnostics. He couldn't be shown up by a pretty white boy.) that he forgot about everything else. Before you became known as Dr. Allison Cameron, "she thinks she's so great, getting into Dr. Chase's pants." Or, the slightly better version- "Isn't she sweet? Her husband died, that horrible Dr. House left her (He had great eyes though), and she still takes care of Dr. Chase. Now there's another story. . ." You wish you could go back to before things got so bad, but you know you can't. And as you notice Chase and Foreman actually joking with each other, you decide maybe everything is not so different after all.
Fin
Concrit is always welcome, although I have to ask if anyone finds this MST-worthy (and hopefully it's not. But I'm the author, so I'm biased.) you would refrain from doing so.
That said, I know a lot of people (It's actually been mentioned in cannon, so I know I'm the crazy one here.) think Foreman is more like House, but I just don't see it that way. He's talked about wanting to run a department(also cannon) which is, to me, more like Cuddy. So...yeah.