Author's Note: The song is "Be Yourself" by Audioslave and this is how I got inspired to write this fanfic. Also, the ending of Bel Canto helped me to get around certain aspects of this fic.
Someone gets excited
In a chapel yard
Catches a bouquet
Another lays a dozen
White roses on a grave
Cameron remembered the old myth—she had remembered reading it in a book about Jackie Kennedy's marriage to Aristotle Onassis. The Greeks, she knew, thought rain on a wedding day brought good luck. It was in a biography of Jackie O. because she and Ari hadn't had much luck in their life as a married couple.
Crazy Greeks, she shook her head and moved a curled strand of brown hair out of face. She sighed as she gazed in the mirror.
Marrying for the second time and she insisted on wearing white. She was a hypocrite, a sinner, and a lonely person. She had asked all her bumbling bridesmaids to leave the room—she needed to be alone. She could stand being lonely when she was by herself; it killed her to be alone in the midst of so many people.
She twirled around in the middle of the room. Her bell skirt fanned out around her and folded in on itself when she stopped spinning. She frowned gently at her reflection. It was not fair that her dress should be so easily fixed.
Her eyes strayed to the facsimile in the mirror of the diamond necklace she wore on her neck. It had been a gift from her fiancée—beautiful, but ostentatious. She could pretend she loved gaudy pieces, but in reality, simplicity suited her (and her beauty) much more.
Cameron turned away from her reflection and grabbed the dozen pink roses that lay on the table. It was her wedding bouquet. She had picked pink because pink was pretty. White was too innocent, red was too vivid, but pink was perfect. Honestly, it wasn't her favorite color, but it would do for appearance's sake.
Weddings she mused as she stood by a window, were supposed to be happy occasions. Weddings celebrated love. Weddings were intrinsically linked with beautiful, pink-fluffy-bunny thoughts.
"Not this one," she murmured.
The window overlooked the cemetery. House had died of an overdose; no one was there to save him from himself as he sat in his apartment taking one pill after another. She imagined him sitting on the edge of his bed, faithful cane next to him. She envisioned him dumping the bottle's content on the black bedspread (the bedspread was always black). She could see him debating briefly whether to leave the morbid modern art exhibit on his bed or take the damn pills and accept death. Stubborn bastard (how overused) he was, he took the pills. Wilson found him after the usually punctual House never appeared for work.
She pushed open the window, wanting to feel the rain, but stopped when she saw a tuxedo-clad man appear in front of a grave that she knew was House's. The man bent down and wiped his hand over the engraved tombstone. She watched the talented oncologist's fingers trace the letters of each and every word. Her hands were frozen to the window.
Wilson and she had spent several months on motel beds, unoccupied gurneys, and cluttered desks. It was empty, cold comfort. Wilson had lost his best friend and she had lost another would-be lover.
And that was the funny thing, she thought for the thousandth time as she shut the slightly open window. She shouldn't be mourning House so terribly; it had been three years now, and she still missed him. They had never slept together, they had never had a decent date, and they had never exchanged vows of "I love you." She had loved an idea—not a man.
She watched behind the glass as Wilson stood up and turned around to face her window. He looked at her with a blank stare that made her stop breathing for a moment. He mouthed some words to her, but she didn't know what they were. Lip reading was not her specialty (especially considering the amount of rain that was falling.)
She fled from the window and the room. Her long train objected, but she hitched up her skirts with her left hand and grabbed the bouquet of flowers with her right. She dashed down the stairs. She ran past gaping bridesmaids, gasping matronly women, and her shocked fiancée. She ran to the back door of the church and opened the door. She stood on the threshold between being trapped and being freed. She ran out the door.
"Allison, it's raining," Wilson told her when she exited through the door. His hair was matted in wet tendrils to his face and he opened his arms and palms as to say I'm a foolish man stating the obvious.
She grinned at him and let her skirt and train fall into the muddy ground. It was nice to see the pure white be stained so dirty.
"We both miss something that never belonged to us."
"He never belonged to anybody."
Wilson put his hands in his pocket and looked at the ground. Allison Cameron looked too much like an angel for him to stomach.
"We're terrible people."
"Understatement of the year."
"We are."
"Are you getting married today?"
"I should be."
"Don't do anything stupid, Allison."
"James, I've been doing stupid stuff for ages. Too late for me to stop now. Recklessness has become second nature to me."
"Are you staying out here?"
"I guess so."
She shrugged her shoulders and watched as Wilson walked back to the grave. He stood in front of it. She followed, secretly rejoicing that, with each step, her wedding dress got muddier.
They both stood in front of the granite piece of rock. She kneeled (more mud! And grass!), gently laying the pink roses on the grass in front of the grave. Wilson offered her a hand to help her to stand up again. She took it and he helped her stand.
"You're not getting married, then?"
"I don't know yet."
"Indecisive to the last."
She smiled and he pushed a strand of wet, curly hair out of her face.
"Would you like to dance, at least?" Wilson offered.
She smiled and took his proffered hands. Waltzing in the rain in a ruined weeding dress never felt so terrific.
"He'd laugh, don't you think?" Cameron asked.
"He'd laugh in private after telling us we were missing important pieces of the puzzle."
"And what would those missing pieces be?"
"That we see him in each other."
Cameron smiled sadly and placed her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes.
"Maybe the Greeks were right about this rain thing," she muttered as they danced through the falling water.