A/N. This story very much involves House/Cameron, but it's not specifically about House/Cameron... this one is Allison's. This is... different. I'm not sure how I feel about it yet. It's not very charitable towards the pairing. I suppose I can accept that (although truly, I do love them), but only because Cameron comes into her own. 'Daniel' is Cameron's late husband. I don't think he has a canon name.
The following artists inspired, to different degrees, certain points of the work. Brownie points if you can pick them out: John Mayer, Death Cab for Cutie, and Maria Mena. There's a little nod to the X-Files in there, too, a la Milagro.
--
But the history of desire is such that just one word -
Just one touch can send it reeling
She wanted to be a different person
Jonatha Brooke, 'The Angel In The House'
--
They meet in corners and alleyways and behind dumpsters, under AC units and in broiler rooms. She tries to tell herself that it isn't because she's ashamed.
She knows she's lying.
She's better than this, better than him. She should've been the girl who married young, put a downpayment on a nice little flat in Greenwich and settled down to have kids and live a charming, simple life - thick quilts and snowmen in the winter and window boxes of geraniums in the spring. Instead, she's found herself with her long fingers tangled in his hair and her lips locked against his in the south-west corner of the parking lot.
It's a kind of tawdry romance, a sort of demented fairytale. Robert is the golden prince, and she is the fair maiden with porcelain skin, blonde curls and a rosy flush, and it is right that they are together. But if Robert is right, then why is she still unable to keep herself from being drawn to someone as angry and vengeful and selfish as House?
It isn't right. But it's life, and she can't help herself.
She drowns herself in him. The Victorian vocabulary she learned in school resurfaces, laced with irony. Words that had once described symptoms now shaped her own desire. Prick. Pang. Ache. And now, with his hand up her shirt and her back icy from the wall he's pressing her into, she can finally, finally say that she feels like she's alive.
Robert is good, and Robert is sweet, but she does not love him. He is the choice she knew she would have to make at some point in her life. He'll love her, and take care of her, and he would never dream of hurting her. But when she looks into his eyes, so earnest and willing, she does not feel desire or the raw, trembling connection that she has come to understand as need.
She is carefully careless, deliberately uninhibited. She lets her breath hitch in the frigid air. She lolls her head back; her eyes flutter closed. His lips run along her jaw, her neck, her collarbone, and she gives into him. He has always been wrong, but he has always been right in a way that Robert never was.
Sometimes, she thinks that it should scare her that her will isn't as strong as it used to be.
She was a good woman once. She had cared about people and never lied and tried not to hurt feelings, and when her conscience nudged at her, she obeyed. But it left her empty, and even under the covers, safe in the arms of a man who loved her, she had lain awake while his breath slowed and assumed the easy rhythms of sleep and known, just known that she needed something other than that.
She bites his lip and licks the blood from his mouth, revelling in the low grunt of pain that he can't keep back. She knows that while he is drawn to her in a way she still can't explain, he has certain prejudices that he will not relinquish for pride. He would not allow himself to love the soft, delicate woman that she was four years ago, who kissed like a child, soft pink lips and eyes closed in a girlish shyness. Now she is fierce, all canines and fingernails. She leaves bruises, and she kisses with her eyes open, audacious and unafraid.
What would Daniel think of her?
She leaves him there in the dark with a last quick nip to his neck. As always, he will assess his wounds and wonder when little miss Cameron turned into such a ferocious minx. It is so much more than that, but she won't tell him that. This is her penance, this is her redemption, this is her release. She does not understand how words from her childhood (the Sisters bearing down on a row of girls and telling them that fear was the heart of love - that day Allison vowed never to go back) can come flooding back to her all these years later, and how words like 'compunction' and 'ordination' can have any context to... whatever this is. But somehow they do. This is not, at its heart, an act of wanton passion. That is merely a result. Cameron does not quite know why she does the things she does. Perhaps she is just trying to exorcise some demons.
It's been eight year since she last prayed. God didn't answer, and so she buried a husband who was barely old enough to buy a case of beer. She hopes God doesn't exist, because it would mean that all her stubborn denial has been in vain.
She argued with Robert about where they would be married. He wanted St. Margaret's; she wanted a courthouse. It felt blasphemous to go through with a big church wedding when she had decisively turned from God all those years ago. He wanted gold rings; she wanted silver. Gold was all youth and exuberance, but there was an ever-prescent reminder of mortality in it. Silver, though ancient, was eternal. It was a concept that he didn't understand, and one that she understood all too well.
--
On her wedding day, he corners her in the hospital laundry room.
His voice is different today. "Don't do this."
"Why not?" She knows the answer, but she allows him his overture.
"I want you. You're mine. Cameron," his eyes alternately plead and threaten. He manages to force out, "Please."
She laughs at him. The irony is exquisite, and she tells him so. Somehow, he still can't bring himself to admit that what he feels for her is far beyond desire and possession. She almost pities him.
"You had your chance. You walked away. You don't get to change your mind after four years. I'm a different person now, but I remember what you did to the girl I used to be."
"If I had known-"
"What? That I can kiss harder than any of your leggy, witty brunnettes?" She tilts her head mockingly, the corners of her mouth pulled into a smirk. He is completely baffled by her. "Really, now. Do you honestly think I'm that blind? You don't want me for who I am. You want me for what you get out of me."
"What happened to you?" he asks, amazed and enthralled, and only just realizing that this... this person, is a completely different woman than the one he knew for four years, the one he thought he understood.
"Love," she says as she walks out of the room and leaves him standing amid pyramids of soiled scrubs and sheets and towels. Her voice floats back to him from the hallway. "Or the lack thereof."
It is ten minutes later when he can finally force some words out of his mouth. The only ones he can find are woefully inadequate, and he is glad that no one is around to hear them.
"Well, shit."
--
She leaves Robert standing at the altar in St. Margaret's. The train reaches Ontario by nightfall.
It's not running away, she tells herself. It's running towards something bigger. Something truer.
She goes to the mountains, and she never sees New Jersey again.
They'll whisper her name in churches and behind his back, but Robert won't stop loving her.
Somewhere in Princeton, an aging cripple jacks off to the remembered taste of her skin.
And under a blanket of stars - far beyond the places where neon lights vie for glory, like a conglomerate of ten million lesser gods - out where the midnight sky is lit only by distant suns, dying, travelling memories of another earth, another place like this one, Cameron breathes the smell of the grass and pines and lake, and needs no one.