Authors Note:
This story will follow our two favorite doctors from Season 4 through some alternative time line that will make up Season 7+ if I can keep focused on writing it. I will be the first to note that this story is a bit strange. Both central characters will seem as though they have some sort of split personality disorder so when a name is different (Cameron instead of Allison, Thirteen instead of Remy) it is for a reason. The story starts in Season 4 told from Allison's/Cameron's point of view and despite how it seems to go in the first couple chapters I do intend to make this into a Camteen fic I promise. Aside from that I just want to throw myself on the mercy of the crowd and plead my case that this is my first fanfiction piece and I am without a beta so please provide any helpful notes if you have any.
I will also note that I do not own any of the characters, locations, furniture, titles or names featured in this story nor do I intend to make any sort of financial gain off this. If I did have control over the television show House I would have hired many of the fine Camteen fic writers on here to work on the show and things would have gone a lot differently in Season 6, not to mention I really doubt I would have had the time to write this.
William Shakespeare once wrote a comedy that included the line I had rather have a fool make me merry, than experience make me sad and for Allison Cameron that summarized her life neatly. Everyday Allison Cameron faced this duality of life and everyday she knew that given the choice she would take the fool, not that she had much of a choice. Love and happiness were not just choices they were her choice of addictions and everyday she was at Plainsboro was everyday she needed both that much more. Allison craved that happy feeling of knowing she had done well for herself by anyone's standards and Cameron could not live without that warm fuzzy feeling that came from seeing a look on a patient's face when she tells them everything will be all right. The problem with addiction though is that by the time you want to stop you know it is too late to do so without the pain.
The ER was a daily mess that doubled as the favorite hangout for the addicts, homeless, dying and dead that were close enough to the hospital for friends, family, or ambulance to bring them in for help from a person that probably did not want to be in the ER any more than they did. For most doctors it was where they ended up during days when bus crashes and freak blizzards. They showed up only when such events overwhelmed the usual group of those suffering through their residency. Other than that, most days the staff was underpaid nurses and the three doctors that for some reason had found they were actually employed as staff members of an emergency room instead of a more intelligent hospital department or in a private practice.
For Allison Cameron she had done the intelligent thing of working for a hospital department. Actually, she had worked for the premiere department of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, diagnostics, for three years and found herself as the head of its ER after realizing that she needed more in her life than a puzzle. The noble gesture of healing those that other doctors did not even want to be around was right up the alley of the woman with the bleeding heart.
The ER was the red headed step child of the Plainsboro teaching hospital, though it was still perhaps a more fondly looked upon member of the family than the crazy uncle who lived upstairs, and it never got the attention it needed unless it was a special occasion where mom insisted everyone get together to act like they cared. This was the perfect environment for the ambitious Allison and the addict Cameron to both get what they needed. Allison could demonstrate she was truly a capable doctor by healing the sick, making sure a key part of a hospital kept its records in order and doing both why managing a personal life. For Cameron she got a daily fix from patients that she could comfort for a while before the next ones arrived needing to hear those kind words from the woman in pink scrubs almost as much as she needed to say them.
Both found they never truly got tired of the waves of wounded victims and injured fools that would come pouring in. For Allison it was the challenge of keeping up with it all as bones found ever new ways of needing to be mended and charts found ever new ways of getting more complicated. Cameron on the other hand could offer each of the masses that extra touch of care from the former duckling as she put her bleeding heart to work. By the end of a twelve, or eighteen, hour shift, when she was all done with strangers, Cameron could find her future husband to fuss over for a few more hours before they went to bed and Allison could find a new medical journal to read for a bit.
That routine worked for both women for a while and Allison thought she had finally gotten a hold on her bleeding heart well enough that Cameron would be satisfied. When her former boss finally realized she was still in the same state, let alone the same hospital, as he was Allison thought nothing more of it than a sign that the two had finished with each other. As it would turn out though having a former boss that taking dozens of doctors on as fellows only to weed those he did not actually want on his team out after a period can create some issues in a hospital that find their way to the ER department.
When dozens of people were not flooding through the doors following House, as if he was some sort of prophet they were crowding labs trying to be the first to discover the answer to his latest mystery case and thus keep them in the running. Despite Cuddy swearing to shut it down after she heard House filled an entire lecture hall with possible candidates Cameron found the game continued until the point she was getting more involved in it than she should have been. At first this was simply passing along cases that were avoiding the obvious solutions the ER was able to treat them with but then it was watching them all from a distance as they scrabbled about, which Allison tried to ration away as an outsiders fascination with a process she herself was once part of.
Facilitation became interest as House formed a more manageable group of minions and a betting pool formed on who would be the next to be removed from the doctors that were being asked to commit any number of felonies in hopes of securing one of the team positions. Though as Cameron began to linger around diagnostics after presenting a case, even if a few times it turned out they were simple enough that House solved them right after looking at the file and pursued something he had discovered instead, she noticed how he reacted to certain candidates. Why she had no intention of placing a wager with her boyfriend an interesting side bet did form with the cane wielding egomaniac regarding how far he could push one of the doctors without challenging him in return. When she heard the news that House did end up taking a full on punch to the face, which in turn actually cost him some of his precious money, Allison's day went by with an ease she had not felt in a while.
When House had finally selected his new team, with Foreman being put in a weird sort of deputy position where he wouldn't technically have any more authority than the other three, the association between the ER and Diagnostics department became fairly stable. The team would hunt for cases, or Cuddy would have them working around the ER because there were no interesting cases, and House would do is best to make sure none of them did anything that could be considered helpful.
With the death of a former coworker, who incidentally turned out not to just be impersonating House as the department head thought but actually shared such similar qualities that she became Wilson's girlfriend, everything at the hospital changed. House would never admit it but he cared for his ducklings, even former ones that went on to date his best friend, and watching as one of them died because they were trying to save him from himself nearly killed him. Seeing a man she was still not over slip ever further down a path of self-destruction and straight towards death put cracks in whatever walls contained that bleeding heart.