Title: Blank Check

Disclaimer: I don't own anything. At all.

A/N: What can I say, the season premier inspired me. Although, to be truthful, it had been rattling around in the old bean for quite a while. I hope you enjoy!

Cameron had been offered the Wizard's Oath when she was eleven. It was young, but there was no choice. There was a problem to which she was the answer.

She had a lot of power, those early days (young wizards usually do), but she didn't have quite enough for what she needed to do. (Rewriting all the laws of physics, even for a short time, was no easy task.

But she'd set out to do it, and she wasn't a quitter (at least, not yet). She had to get the power from somewhere, so she used a blank check wizardry— as much power as she needed for an unnamed price in the future. That was her first mistake.

Much later, when the time came for the debt to be repaid, she couldn't (wouldn't) pay it. The price (her happiness, or that's what it seemed like to her) was too much. She was still young. That was her second mistake.

She refused to pay— and doing so, refused the power. And the power does not live in an unwilling heart. The wizardry left her.

The price still had to be paid, of course, there's no free lunch, even in wizardry. Someone else had to pay it (though she didn't know it then, and wouldn't know it ever after that).

That was the second part of the price. When the wizardry left her, it took her memories of it with her. The Powers That Be did their best to replace the missing memories, but nothing's as good as what you experience first hand. Loosing memories like that can really mess you up. And the desire to help never really goes away. It was probably why she'd become a doctor.