You're in My Veins
*One Shot. Set after the series finale. House and all of its characters are the property of Fox.*
Of course it had been her.
Sitting in the small café overlooking a beach in Mexico, watching the hippy blonde show the tiny little boy standing next to her how to listen to a conch shell, House couldn't help but think-of course it had been her. Who else would it be? Kutner and Amber had his regrets, Stacy had his might have been, but Cameron…
Cameron was always his could be. She was the one, the only one, that had ever made him want to change. Ever made him want to be more than he was. In his subconscious, the others had condemned him. He'd needed them to. But Cameron…
Cameron had understood him. She'd told him she still loved him. Not out of her own free will, unless she'd added voodoo to her list of skills. He knew full well she'd been a figment of his imagination. She'd done what she did, said what she said, because he'd needed her to. Because even when he was certain he was going to die, he couldn't stand the thought of the world-his world-even for a moment-being a place where Cameron didn't love him anymore.
The little boy grinned, holding up another shell, and his mother obligingly picked it up and spun it through her fingers. House remembered, viciously, the sharp stab of longing he'd felt when Stacy had held up his child.
Had he done things differently, that might have been his reality. Not with Stacy-that chance had passed long ago. Not with Cuddy-the two of them were terrible together. The poor kid would have been in therapy for years. But Stacy had said that they weren't the only women who could ever love him, and while even his subconscious had jerked away from the idea he'd known in his heart that if he hadn't thrown away chance after chance, he could have had all that and more with Allison Cameron.
She smoothed over his rough edges, made him softer. Kinder. He would have been a terrible father, but for her, he would have tried. Maybe not all those years ago, when she'd kissed him in his office and then walked away. Not even two years ago, when he'd faked his death and ridden away from Princeton Plainsboro and everything it stood for. He'd been too wrapped up in himself for that.
But the man he was now, the man he'd become since Wilson had died and he'd moved south of the border, the world-class diagnostician that loved practicing medicine under the table at a tiny clinic in the middle of the desert that didn't care that he had no credentials as long as he knew what he was doing, that man could have done it. That man understood love, and loss. That man would have loved to see his own eyes staring back at him from a miniature version of Allison Cameron's soft, lovely face.
Too late now. He sat and watched the pair for a little longer, then paid his tab and stood, slowly working his way through the crowd of people and back into the streets. Cameron had always been his could be, and it looked like time hadn't changed that. Of course it was her. She was in his veins, under his skin, the voice of conscience in his head whether he wanted it there or not. Loving her, wanting her, and letting her go was the only pure, unselfish thing he'd ever done in the whole of his life, and he wished her the best. He truly did.
He was only sorry it couldn't be with him.