no less a devil for that
by Branwyn
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"
1.
At first, Cameron suspects House. It's the sort of thing he might consider funny, she thinks, and though her hands are shaking the voice in her head is calm. He would probably consider it some kind of lesson, a parable on the dangers of getting personally involved with patients. A horrible idea, but it's possible.
So she waits. She brings it with her to the staff meeting, folded so no one will read it accidentally, and waits for House to smirk and ask if she's had any interesting mail recently. They play a round of differential diagnosis and she is careful to participate, to act as normal as possible. If it is House, she doesn't want to help him make a fool of her, and if it's not House—then that's something else entirely, and she needs to think about it for awhile before she does anything at all.
It's not him. She makes up her mind before the meeting is over. He doesn't look at her any more than usual, and when he does there's nothing strange about it. Anonymous dirt isn't his style, she admits to herself finally; he has a twisted sense of humor, but he knows where the line is. And he's not actually a sociopath.
Although that might not prevent him from finding the situation laughable.
He stops her when the meeting's over, just as she's getting out of her chair. "Dr. Cameron," he says, and all three of them freeze. "You were unusually quiet this morning."
"I'm sorry," she begins to say.
"Late night delivering meals to shut-ins and the elderly?" he says, and Chase smirks. So does Foreman, but he tries to hide it. And Cameron realizes that she doesn't have to answer, because the joke was the point, so she just smiles.
The letter is in a manila folder full of her other papers, and she holds it tight against her chest as she leaves.
2.
She finds the second letter taped to her door when she comes home that evening. This one is in an envelope with her first name written across the front in large, anonymous block letters.
She opens the envelope and reads the letter over once. A door slams somewhere at the end of the hall. Her pulse leaps and she spins on her heel, but the corridor is empty.
That night, she finds the canister of pepper spray she carried on her key chain while she was at school. She puts it in the drawer of her night table and goes to bed. She doesn't sleep.
Cameron has been treating patients for six years. There have been hundreds, many of them unstable. Many of them probably only passing for sane.
And you felt the need to hug every single one of them says a voice at the back of her head. It sounds remarkably like House.
She curls around a pillow and watches the moonlight puddle on the floor. About a half-hour before her alarm goes off she manages to doze a little, and she has a waking dream about going to work and meeting her patients, all of whom have sinister, knowing grins on their faces.
3.
They're in the lab, giving their latest patient an MRI. Foreman asks if she's all right.
"Fine, yeah. Didn't sleep much."
He raises an eyebrow. "Stress?"
"No, just caffeine. Is the blood work back yet?"
After lunch, Cameron walks by House's office. It's empty; she thinks about it for a moment, then doubles back and lets herself in. The door is unlocked, and so is House's filing cabinet.
She sifts through the files of the cases they've handled in the last six months, her fingers tracing the names as she tries to recall faces, conversations, clues of any kind. It's hopeless, and she knows it after only a few minutes. It could be someone she treated at the clinic. It could be someone she met during her residency. It could be someone she's never treated at all.
Exhaustion hits her suddenly. She closes the filing cabinet and rests her head against the cool metal, trying not to think about anything.
The door opens behind her and she jerks to attention, looking up and around so fast that she hurts her neck. But it's just House, looking at her strangely.
A week ago, she might have interpreted that look as concern. She might even have been pleased. Lately, though, she has become suspicious of everyone's motives, and of her own ability to judge them.
"Looking for something?" he says.
"Yeah,"she says. "An old case."
He stands in front of the door, leaning on his cane, and he lifts his chin. "Find it?"
She hesitates, then shakes her head. "Not really," she says, and steps around him to get to the door.
4.
The third letter arrives at the end of the week, by mail. The post mark is Trenton, three days ago, but this tells her nothing.
By now it has crossed her mind that she should wear gloves while handling the letters, but the envelope will have the fingerprints of a dozen postal office employees on it already, so she puts it in her purse and takes it to work. The other two are in her locker there, to keep her from poring over them at night when she should be sleeping. She's hardly had any sleep this week as it is.
At noon she retreats to a secluded corner of the cafeteria and opens the envelope. There are lots of reasons why this is a bad idea—House and Wilson, standing at the register on the other side of the room, for instance—but the truth is she finds it easier to move past the ugliness of the thing when there are lots of people close by.
He could be anyone. He could be somewhere in the room right now, watching her push her salad away as the nausea creeps from her stomach to her throat. She hasn't overlooked this fact.
But she is committed to the principle that most people are basically decent. That's why she became a doctor, and that's why working with House is more often than not a pain in the neck. And that's why she feels safer here in the crowd than she does behind the locked doors of her apartment. Here, she is a majority.
It doesn't stop her from shuddering as she folds the letter up again and puts it back in the envelope.
Wilson waves to her as she carries her tray to the trash can, and she frees a hand to wave back. House only frowns, but this is his usual expression, and she hardly notices.
5.
The fourth letter disturbs her intensely.
Cameron can't quite put her finger on the difference, but there is a malevolent undercurrent to it, a rage, that makes the first three letters seem merely wistful by comparison.
This one had been pinned beneath the wiper of her car's windshield. She studies her car for a few minutes, and eventually decides that even if it had been tampered with, she'd never be able to tell just by looking at it.
She takes a few steps in the direction of the nearest bus stop, then considers the distance, the long stretches of deserted sidewalk before her, and takes out her cell phone. Foreman is surprised to hear from her, but yes, he'd be happy to pick her up.
She clears the snow from a bench outside her building and perches on the edge of the damp wooden seat. She wonders if she should have called in sick. She's certainly feeling like it.
Foreman pulls in to the parking lot ten minutes later, and before she can beat him to it he has stepped around and opened the door for her.
"I really appreciate this," she says, but he tells her not to worry about it.
"We're late anyway," he adds. "We should bring a peace offering. Bagels or donuts?"
She smiles and opts for the bagels, and Foreman turns the radio on. He's listening to the Brandenburg Concertos, and though the music is anything but sentimental Cameron is afraid that she is going to start crying at any moment.
She's overwhelmed suddenly, that's all. By contrasts, the way Foreman's quiet, self-effacing courtesy can almost make her forget that a piece of paper has made her afraid to drive her own car, or walk two blocks in her own neighborhood in broad daylight.
"Been sleeping any better?" he asks as he hands her a large coffee from the pick-up window.
She smiles. "Not really," she says, and takes a long drink.
6.
She doesn't want to go to the police.
Her reasoning is simple. There's almost nothing they can do; only in places like California, dense with movie stars and celebrities, do you find strict anti-stalking laws. Here, you have to wait for some overt physical threat before the courts can act, and even then it's difficult to take out a restraining order on someone you've never seen.
Not that restraining orders offered much more protection than a parasol in a hurricane. She'd volunteered at the free women's clinics in the city when she was a med student, and she'd heard enough stories to know.
She should talk to hospital security, at the least. It would be irresponsible not to. But she knows that if she tells anyone in the hospital, House will find out. And she's not ready for him to know yet.
She's not sure why.
7.
She has Sunday off. She visits her mother in Hartford, and when she comes back Monday morning she finds her apartment ransacked.
She stands in the doorway for a long moment, surveying the ruin. Her bookcase is overturned, and all her pictures ripped from the walls. Her sofa cushions have been shredded.
She walks down to the lobby and calls the police from her cell phone, then calls the hospital to let them know she'll be late. Then she sits on a stair step, crying quietly.
It's well after noon by the time she gets to work. An officer is coming by later to collect the letters; she opens her locker to gather them, but they aren't there.
At first, she suspects that she's losing her mind, but the far more reasonable explanation is that her locker has been broken into as well. She leans against the wall and takes a few breaths to collect herself. Then she goes to House's office, to explain that she has to leave again.
He is sitting at his desk, the back of his chair turned to the door. She walks in and lets the door close behind her and waits, but he doesn't say anything.
"House?" she says.
"What gets me," he says after a moment, "is the way he's confusing his archetypes. His imagery clearly indicates that he has you cast in the classic madonna/whore mode, but there's an element of vagina dentata in there as well, and even a hint of mother-destroyer." He spins slowly around to face her, and she sees that he is holding the sheaf of letters in one hand.
He arches his eyebrows. "You've studied Freud. What do make of it?"
She takes an automatic step forward. "How did you—?" is all she manages to say before her vision is suddenly blurry and her knees are weak. She gropes for a chair and sinks into it.
From across the room she hears House get to his feet. Then the faucet is running, and House is standing beside her, holding a glass of water. She realizes that her mouth is dry as paper, and she takes the glass, drinking half of it straight down.
"What's the differential diagnosis for a normally voluble immunologist who turns into a recalcitrant insomniac over a single weekend?" He stands over her for a moment then pulls out a chair across the table from her and sits down.
"She's scared shitless," she says, surprising herself, and surprising him as well, apparently, because he laughs. It's a short laugh, really more of a chuckle, but she can't recall ever having heard it before.
She lifts her head, and gestures to the papers still in his hands. "I'm supposed to give those to the police."
"Huh." He lets them drop to the table. "And there I went putting my fingerprints all over them. Guess you can't prove it wasn't me now."
She smiles weakly, and avoids looking at the surface of the table.
8.
It's late. She's on her way to the parking garage when Wilson rounds the corner suddenly and stops in front of her, effectively barring her path.
She looks up at him, and he looks back at her, and neither of them speak, although Wilson swallows a couple of times.
She starts to say, "Did you need something?" at the same Wilson says "I hear you're having car trouble."
She blinks at him. "Yeah, I'm having my car looked at."
"I'd like to drive you home," he says.
She flushes, a refusal on the tip of her tongue. But it's dark, and it's snowing, and the bus stop is a couple of blocks away.
Wilson makes light conversation during the drive. He's good at making people comfortable, she realizes, at making irregular situations feel normal.
When they are near her exit, she says, "Did House ask you to do this?"
"House? No, he didn't—well, not really. I mean," he meets her eyes briefly, "I iwanted to."
"Did he say anything else?" she says. She's not entirely certain she wants to know.
"What," Wilson says, "about your car trouble?"
9.
She sleeps badly again that night, and leaves for the hospital an hour earlier than usual. Her work has been suffering and getting caught up will distract her, she thinks.
Except that House arrives about ten minutes after she does, and stands in the doorway for a long moment, looking at her.
"Thank you," she says, before he can speak. "For getting Wilson to take me home. That was nice of you."
"Well," he says, stepping inside and crossing the room to his desk. "Can't have the boogeyman frightening away my own personal Jiminy Cricket."
She gazes down at her paperwork, not really seeing it. House sits down and after shuffling through a few papers, takes out his Gameboy.
The silence is too much for Cameron, and she starts to gather her papers together, intending to go to the cafeteria and work there. But House's voice stops her.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he says, his voice level, expressionless.
Cameron looks up and blinks a couple of times. This isn't what she was expecting at all.
"I—" She stops and swallows. "I didn't want anyone to worry."
"Yeah, that's pretty much the lame and pathetically earnest response I expected," he says. "It's not the whole truth, though."
"What are you talking about?"
"You didn't want to tell me that one of your former patients wants to drag you in little pieces to his love shack in the Great North Woods because it proves that your entire philosophy of patient care is dangerously misconceived." He hasn't looked up from his Gameboy. "And you decided you would rather take your chances with a lunatic than be wrong."
She lowers the papers, staring at him. "That's insane." Her voice, steady at first, slips at the end. And it's not as though House is the sort of person who wouldn't notice.
"Well, yeah," he says, and he tosses the Gameboy onto his desk, where it strikes a stack of paper with a dull thud.
He gets up and stumps past her out the office door, and Cameron sits back in her chair, stunned.
10.
She spends the rest of the day thinking about what House has said to her.
He's usually right. She accepts this, even when his diagnoses are harsh and strange. She also knows that he's used to being right, and has the habit of delivering his opinions as though they are not merely correct, but obvious and incontrovertible.
He's the only person she's ever known who can make her doubt herself.
That doesn't mean he's right this time.
There's no proof that the person writing to her was ever actually her patient. She assumed so, at first, but all she really knows for certain is that he knows she is a doctor. Which is hardly difficult to find out.
It's a stretch of the imagination to believe that a perfect stranger would do this to her. But the more Cameron considers this theory, the more she warms to it.
The alternative—that she met him, looked into his eyes, and still didn't know—is more disturbing to her than the letters themselves.
She doesn't let herself wonder what House would say about that.
11.
Her car comes back from the shop the next day with a clean bill of health. She drives to work feeling almost cheerful, and walks into House's office with a smile.
House raises an eyebrow at her, but he doesn't say anything.
They're still debating the origin of new symptoms in the latest case when the phone rings. House picks up the phone and listens for a moment, then turns his back on them.
After a few seconds he says, "Thanks, I'll be sure to tell her that," and hangs up.
"Who was that?" says Chase.
"Wrong number," says House, looking over Chase's head to meet Cameron's eyes.
Her stomach twists, and she pushes back from the table. The impact sloshes some of the coffee from Foreman's cup.
"Sorry," she mumbles, and heads for the door.
"Female trouble," she hears House say as the door closes behind her.
12.
She doesn't hear the door of the lounge open.
She's been sitting alone for about ten minutes, eyes tightly shut. There is another letter in her mailbox, but she hasn't read it yet. She hasn't even touched it.
She hears the door close; her head jerks up, and she draws a ragged breath, then scrubs her face with her hands.
House takes a few steps inside, then drags a hard plastic folding chair to a spot across from the couch where she's sitting. He sits on it backwards and folds his hands over the handle of his cane.
"I've never actually seen anyone cry that violently while remaining completely silent." He leans back and reaches into his coat pocket, drawing out a square of white linen. "And the fact that you would make an effort to be so quiet when you're in a room by yourself implies something sort of terrifying about how you were brought up." He smiles brightly and extends his hand. "Hankie?"
She takes it and stands, walking to the sink. She splashes water on her face and uses the handkerchief to dry her eyes.
"Foreman's in Radiology," House continues, while her back is turned.
She clears her throat. "I'll be right there."
She hears him push the chair back and get to his feet. By the time she turns to face him, he's standing at the door, looking back at her over his shoulder. Like he's waiting for something.
The words are out of her mouth before she realizes it. "There's another one," she says. "In my mailbox. I haven't opened it."
He looks from her, to the row of pigeon holes on the opposite wall, then back again. His eyes narrow, consideringly.
He steps back through the door and walks across the room to the mailboxes, where he stops, searching for her name. He finds it, and extracts the letter, holding it up to the light and squinting.
"You know why people usually blame the victim, in these cases?" he asks, looking at her sideways, his eyebrows arched. "Because most of the time, it's the victim's fault."
Blood rushes to her cheeks. She's angry, and she's biting down on the inside of her cheek to hold back tears.
Still holding the envelope between two fingers, House carries it to the lunch table in the middle of the room. Cameron watches, in growing confusion, as he feeds the envelope between the teeth of an out-of-place stapler and proceeds to staple the letter shut in five places.
He looks back at her over his shoulder as he takes the letter back to the mailbox. "Relax," he says, smirking as he slides the envelope back into its slot. "I didn't mean you."
13.
"Damn, Cameron," says Foreman from behind her. "What did you do?"
She straightens in her chair and turns away from the culture she's observing to see Cuddy heading toward the lab. She is flanked by two men from hospital security.
Cameron watches their approach with a curious sense of detachment, considering that she knows it can only mean something bad. She does her best to ignore the fact that Foreman is staring at her, waiting for her to explain.
Cuddy strides through the door, eyes wide and worried. "Cameron. I need to see you."
Silently, Cameron nods. She lets Foreman take her place with the cultures and follows Cuddy out of the lab and back into the corridor.
"Dr. House called the police after the phone call to his office this morning," Cuddy began without preamble. "They got the phone records back a few minutes ago."
There is a loud roaring in Cameron's ears. She can't quite bring herself to ask, so she waits for Cuddy to continue.
"The number—" Cuddy presses a hand to her forehead, resting the other on her hip. "The call was placed from a room in the oncology ward. He's Dr. Wilson's patient. He was admitted two days ago."
"He—what's his—" Cameron finds herself stuttering. To her vision, it seems as though all the lights in the hall have suddenly dimmed.
"A brain tumor," says Cuddy. "Probably inoperable, but Wilson has him down for a course of treatment."
That isn't what Cameron wants to know. "What's his name?"
Cuddy looks at her, hesitating. Then she takes the manila folder she's been clutching under her arm and passes it to Cameron, who opens it immediately, and stares down at the papers inside.
After a moment, Cuddy, touches her arm. "Do you know him?" she says. Her voice is gentle.
Cameron blinks at the folder, and closes it again. She hands it back to Cuddy, and feels suddenly light headed.
"No," she says. "I've never heard of him."
14.
She spends the rest of the afternoon in House's office with a policeman, completing her statement.
Towards five, House joins them, entering silently and crossing the room to his desk. The officer looks up, frowning, and opens his mouth.
Cameron shakes her head. "It's okay for him to be here."
They work together an half hour, and then they're done. The officer shakes her hand. "You've been very brave," he says.
When he is gone, Cameron sinks back down in her chair and stares blankly at her hands. She almost forgets that House is in the room until he speaks.
"Cuddy tells me that she was going to move him to Trenton General," he says. "And that you told her not to do it."
Cameron doesn't look up. "I talked to Wilson. He's really sick."
"Which is why she was going to move him to Trenton, and not to Bayside."
"He has cancer."
"I hear they treat that at Trenton too."
"Wilson's the best."
"Of course," says House. "And nothing less will do for your psychotic love bunny."
Cameron doesn't reply. She's too tired to fight him anymore. She gathers her papers together, grabs her purse, and leaves.
15.
She tries not to sigh audibly when she hears House approaching from the other end of the corridor. Maybe he's not following just to argue, she tells herself. Maybe he's just going home now.
She urges the elevator doors to open before he can get there.
But they don't, and then House is standing beside her, beating an irregular rhythm against the floor with his cane. At first, she doesn't think he's going to say anything.
Then he says, "Please tell me you're not going to see him."
She shuts her eyes. Every muscle in her body is tense with dread, but she can't lie to him. She can't ignore him either. "He's dying."
"Only if you're i very /i lucky."
The elevator opens then, and House follows her inside. She presses the button for the fourth floor, and looks up at him, waiting for him to tell her which floor to push. But he doesn't say anything.
He looks, Cameron, suddenly realizes, as though he too has been missing sleep lately.
"He is dying," The words are out of her mouth before she's stopped to consider them. "And he deserves—everyone deserves—whatever we can give them to help them through the end." She looks down, pulling her purse more tightly to the side of her body. "I'm not going to talk to him. I'm just going to be there. Just long enough for him to see me."
The elevator reaches the fourth floor and stops.
In the second before the door opens she wonders if she should bother saying goodbye. But then the doors are open, and House is walking through them, and she has no choice but to follow.
"What are you doing?" she says, wary.
"I'm security," he says. "In case you decide to propose to him, I get to hit you over the head with my cane."
It's an awful thing to say, and she should tell him to go hell.
But she doesn't, because he's coming with her. And for some reason, she's glad.
End