NOTES: Please see the timeline so far. Otherwise you may find yourself very lost. A long-ish chapter for the first week of hiatus. Also, if you're reading this, please let me know what you think? It's very different from anything I've ever written, and I want to make sure I'm not going off the deep end.
Chapter Four: Ghosts
She feels like House, sneaking into an empty exam room at the end of the day and closing the door. Six years ago this would have made her sick with guilt, appalled at the very idea of trading time with the living for homage to the dead. Now she tells herself through the twinge of what she thinks used to be conscience that she can't do this sitting in her office; it's the end of a busy Tuesday, and she'd inevitably be interrupted there.
Cameron pulls the stool up to the side of the counter and takes the thick file of news clippings from her bag; she's had to bind it up with rubber bands since taking it from House's empty apartment. The cardboard's so old it's lost any ability to bend, falling to dust in her fingers if she presses it too hard. Keeping these things at the office feels oddly appropriate —there's something sordid about them, something that's prevented her from taking them home. She hasn't admitted to Chase that she's stolen the file, and that's maybe worst of all, but she's the one who's been here all along and she needs to do this alone. She tells herself that Chase doesn't need the emotional stress of revisiting these things anyway, though the human part of her still knows that's not true.
Cameron re-reads House's spidery commentary—she already knows it by heart, but there's something organic in seeing it in his hand—searching for a clue. She should have seen his death coming, she thinks, and yet she didn't until it was more than too late. The file's grown since she last saw it on House's desk; it now extends into their past as well as their present. Stumbling onto a copy of her husband's obituary, Cameron snatches her fingers away as though they've been burned. Finding this clipping is oddly appropriate, she thinks. She might as well be twenty-one again, and utterly clueless.
Marriage had been like playing at being adults, romantic and so very unreal. Every day she'd thought naively that he was going to get better. Because he had to. Because he'd changed her, and a little of her identity had been lost, sudden purposelessness in the absence of someone to care for, someone to save.
He'd always hated the tests, but they'd been her salvation. They'd sapped his spirit and taken away his color like arterial leeches. And yet she'd greeted them as though she already had his remission in hand, a reprieve the childish side of her had thought must come. When the monitors had been unplugged and the body she'd been watching over was cold and motionless, she'd known that it had been her mistake. Her husband had grown to hate her before the end, she'd realized, mocked and betrayed by her unrepentant idealism. She'd wondered whether she'd been blind or just looking at the world through a mask. She'd vowed, silently, never to let it happen again.
And yet. Cameron turns the pages in House's file over and over in her hands, stopping at the very end, where she's added pages of her own. A press release about House's funeral, and all the people he'd helped. Nearly twenty years later, and it's this same fall again. She wonders whether it's a mistake she's doomed to make repeatedly and all her life.
The screeching of a pager brings Chase to his senses with a jolt. He sways on his feet for a moment, shockwaves tingling up and down his legs from lack of circulation and too hard impact with the ground. He has nowhere to go, no direction yet, only the adrenaline of shattered reverie. For a moment he stands simply listening to the shrill beeping and feeling sick with panic before placing the fact that it's his own pager making the noise. His hand shakes as he tries to take it from its belt holster, and the minute it snaps loose it flies out of his fingers, landing on the carpet in the middle of the faded bloodstain. Chase stumbles after it, snatching it into his palm without touching the floor. A single room number flashes in the message window: 221.
It's already been several minutes and he can only imagine what's waiting for him in the patient's room. Chase sprints down the hallway feeling lost, out of his element, the carefully practiced and instinctive crisis response he's developed over the years seeming remote and inaccessible. The hallway feels too long, his feet like rubber; he isn't surprised one bit to find more alarms blaring when he arrives.
He hasn't met the patient before, he realizes, as he wordlessly takes in the flat lines on her EKG. She's small, pale, and blonde, the bones in the wrist exposed by the top of the sheet reminding him of a bird's wing. The team is nowhere to be found, and Chase feels a rush of panic reminiscent of his first days as an intern at the prospect of being left alone with this woman's life in his hands.
"Call a code," he orders, sensing movement behind him. He starts to step toward the woman's bed and nearly pitches forward over the cane that's been suddenly thrust into his path.
"You're an idiot," says House. He meets Chase's surprised gaze with the familiar expression that's something between a smirk and a sneer.
"Get out of my way," snaps Chase, with what he hopes is something resembling authority. It's coming back to him now. He needs to get to this woman, check for a pulse, start trying to resuscitate her.
"Sorry," says House, his voice colored by something that might be genuine regret. He keeps the cane where it is, and somehow Chase can't seem to step past it.
Chase forces himself to sigh; he'll forget to breathe if he doesn't think about it, and lack of oxygen does not promote clear thought. "All right. Why am I an idiot?"
House shakes his head. "You see so much when it comes to other people. How can you be so ridiculously blind when it's your own life that's in question?"
"Right now it's this patient's life," says Chase, annoyed. "Are you gonna let her die while you play games with me?"
"That's up to you," says House. "It's always been up to you."
The beeping of the monitor seems to get louder, and Chase fights the urge to put his hands over his ears. It sounds like a siren, his head pulsing painfully with the noise. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
"You have a choice," says House. "You just haven't made the right one yet."
"I'm making it now." Chase lunges over the cane and toward the bed, only to find House impossibly in his path again, as though the whole room's shifted back.
"Wrong again." House smiles, and there's something nasty behind the blue of his eyes. Chase realizes that he's forgotten what House's face should look like, and maybe this isn't quite it. "She's dead now. Too bad." The monitors spontaneously go dark.
Chase wakes with a shock that leaves his eyes tearing and his hands like ice. It's getting exhausting, dreaming of waking and waking from dreaming. It's the doorbell that's startled him, he realizes, and it's still Tuesday night, though the sun has long since set. Running a hand through his hair, he moves as fast as he can to answer the door for Cameron, wondering at what point he can appropriately give her a key to his apartment.
"Are you okay?" she asks by way of greeting, and he thinks that he must look even worse than he feels.
"Yeah," he lies, not wanting to talk about it. "I just fell asleep." He doesn't hug her as she steps past him into the apartment, because he thinks if he does he won't be able to let go.
It's dark outside and raining, the streetlights catching drops on the kitchen windowpanes and turning them to rivulets of silver. It's the kind of night where everything seems saturated with quiet, peaceful but with a charge sizzling through just beneath the surface. Chase pulls an afghan from the back of his couch and wraps it around his shoulders, slumping back so that his head is against the cushions. He's almost painful to look at, Cameron thinks, completely drained. She wonders whether she ought to simply leave and let him go back to sleep, but she's too concerned over the outcome of the day not to stay at least a little while.
"Have you eaten?" she asks gently. She has the sense that she's interrupted something, but it would be a terrible mistake to ask exactly what. She has to resist the urge to ask straight out what happened with the team.
Chase shakes his head, not looking up. He's still dressed for work, dress shirt rumpled, tie hanging loose around his neck.
"Are you hungry?" Cameron tries again. Chase shrugs, but she goes into his kitchen anyway. The refrigerator is nearly empty, and his cupboards are filled with the kind of never-perishable foods that he's probably brought back with him from Arizona.
Cameron sighs, forcing herself not to comment. The idea, after all, is to convince him that he's ready to get his own life back on track. Encouraging dependence isn't going to do that, no matter how strongly her instincts tell her to just take charge. She settles on a bag of popcorn and puts it in the microwave. The silence stretches between them, broken only by the patter of the rain outside and the popping of the kernels. As she takes the finished bag from the microwave, Cameron wonders if he's fallen asleep again.
"I think I'm starting to understand House," says Chase darkly.
Cameron jumps, opening the top of the bag a little too far and hissing in surprise as hot steam brushes the underside of her wrist. She tells herself she's paranoid for thinking that he's somehow found out that she has the file, and why should there be shame in it anyway?
"How so?" she asks, pouring the popcorn into a bowl. It clinks against the sides, grating on her nerves. She feels like a rubber band stretched too far, waiting to snap.
Chase pulls the afghan tighter across his shoulders. He looks soft in the dim light, fragile. She wonders if he's always looked like this and again how blind she's been to miss it all this time.
"If you're an ass to everyone, you don't ever have to worry that they'll want to figure you out." He sounds unquestionably bitter now and Cameron wonders what might have happened already.
"Right," she says, handing him the bowl and sitting beside him. "Because we never tried to figure him out." Chase's fingers brush hers as he takes the popcorn, and she thinks about kissing him. How easy it would be to go back to four days ago and that hallway outside the cafeteria, but it's too soon and she's taken a big enough risk already.
"Did anyone else, though?" counters Chase. He studies the popcorn for a moment, then takes a single butter-drenched piece between two fingers and rolls it delicately. "Besides Wilson, I mean."
It strikes her that she doesn't know, because she's never taken the time to notice. She's been so caught up in her own attempts at figuring House out that she can't honestly say who else he might have had in his life.
"How did it go today?" asks Cameron, simultaneously deflecting and addressing her biggest concern. She takes a handful of popcorn from the bowl and puts a piece in her mouth, sucking the salt off of it.
"Nothing happened," says Chase absently. He tightens his fingers around the piece of popcorn, dusting it back into the bowl. Cameron gives him a look and he smiles a bit sheepishly. "Sorry. I guess I don't know how to share very well anymore."
"So that's good, then?" prompts Cameron, taking another handful. "Nothing bad happened?"
Chase shakes his head. "No, I meant nothing happened. At least, nothing that I saw. They went to do tests and get a history. Came back at the end of the day with nothing done. I have no idea what they were doing that whole time."
Cameron almost laughs in incredulity. "You left them alone with the patient?"
Chase looks annoyed. "Well, yeah. They're supposed to be competent doctors. House never followed us around, even in the beginning."
Now she does laugh, nearly choking on popcorn. "I don't think we were ever this bad."
Chase palms several pieces of popcorn, then throws them one at a time back into the bowl. He looks angry, she thinks, and she feels a little guilty for upsetting him.
"What did House do, hire anyone recently graduated from med school?" he asks.
Cameron sighs, rubbing oil from the popcorn between her fingers. "Pretty much, yes. He couldn't keep a team. Cuddy kept finding him resumes; he kept anyone who wanted to stay and didn't take issue with the lack of work going on."
"So he didn't do anything with them at all?" Chase laughs bitterly. "That explains a lot." He plunges his hand back into the bowl and actually eats a few pieces, grimacing as he swallows. "What's with Hartley? Is she actually crazy?"
For a moment Cameron is taken aback by the realization that she doesn't actually know. She's had enough interaction with these people to have found things out about them, but in reality she barely even remembers their names and specialties.
"House...wasn't in the best condition before he died," she says quietly, thinking about snow and the diner. "I can only imagine how he must have treated them."
Chase turns sharply to look at her, and she's struck by the intensity of his gaze. "You're saying you think House made them like this?"
Cameron shrugs, honestly not sure. "I'm saying that I don't think you should write them off this fast. Give them time. " She doesn't tell him she's made the same mistake already. "Give yourself time."
Chase nods silently, and powders another piece of popcorn between his fingers. For a moment they just sit, listening to the rain. Cameron watches him and shakes her head, struck by his awkwardness in accommodating other people in his life now. It's both endearing and heartbreaking, and she can't help but smile a little.
"What?" he asks suspiciously.
Cameron takes a piece of popcorn from the side of the bowl closest to her and flings it at his head. It bounces off his nose before landing in his lap. Chase raises an eyebrow at her, mirroring her ghost of a smile. This time she does kiss him, promising herself it'll be the last until they've all had more time to heal.
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