This chapter was a little tougher to write. Getting House's "voice" right is such a challenge. I hope that I got it somewhere in the ball park.
Thanks again for all the feedback. The more the better, so if you like the story, but haven't posted so yet, I am eager to read what you think.
Thanks!
~ Sarah
Chapter Three: A Little Illumination, Please
Looking at the list of symptoms on the white board, Taub had no choice but to sigh. "I hate to even mention the possibility … but it could be Lupus."
Thirteen groaned in response. Kutner and Foreman rolled their eyes at the suggestion. House merely glared, his 'You have got to be kidding me!' implied in his piercing gaze.
"The symptoms fit!" Taub insisted, pointing at the offending chart.
House turned back to the board, dry erase marker in hand, unwilling to entertain such an asinine diagno – he looked at the symptoms again and raised a brow at what he saw. I'll be damned, he thought. It actually could be Lupus.
Turning to order his team to check the patient's "sed rate" and run an AMA test, House's attention was captured by the seeming convoy of doctors in the hallway about to enter his lair. Cuddy and Wilson with Cameron and Chase in tow, he noted. Oooh! Fun time!
"Well, if it isn't the Wicked Witch of the West, Scarecrow, Dorothy, and oh, her little wombat, too," he groused as the quartet entered. "The Emerald City is closed to interlopers."
"You didn't show up for our meeting this morning, so I brought the meeting to you," Cuddy said, choosing to ignore the Oz references.
"Sorry, had to talk to a man about a balloon ride. Returning to Kansas, ya know."
"We're here to discuss a patient," Wilson said, interrupting what was sure to be a continuation of L. Frank Baum allusions. He held up the medical file in his hand.
"Have a patient," House indicated the incomplete differential behind him, "so scurry along back to the evil castle." He shooed them away with his hands.
"House, Cuddy's brought along an oncologist, an ER doctor, and a surgeon. Shouldn't you at least look at the file," Foreman urged patiently.
"Oh, all right!" House quickly skimmed Cuddy's tight-fitting skirt with a critical eye. "Kinda hard to mount your broom in that get-up, isn't it?" he asked with a lurid grin as he snatched the folder out of Wilson's hand and began to scan through the contents.
As usual, he hadn't bothered to look at the name on the file, Cameron noticed. Patients weren't interesting or important to House. It was their symptoms that fascinated him. While he read what she knew he would find to be a "dull" case to be sure, she scanned the now crowded conference room. Chase had taken the seat farthest from the door against which she leaned. He was as much in the dark as to the meaning of Cuddy's summons as the rest of the group, but the way in which he had patently ignored her on their journey to House's domain told Cameron that he was still very bitter about the way their relationship had ended. Forced into a meeting held in the office of the man whose echo had plagued that relationship on one level or another for two years couldn't have been easy for Chase, and Cameron felt sorry for him. Nevertheless, he would have to be told about her condition, and this was a conversation she only wanted to have once.
"Give me a break!" House's drawl brought her attention back to the man at the front of the room. He glared at Cuddy and Wilson before tossing the folder on the table in front of the ducklings and grabbing his cane from where it hung on the white board. Thirteen picked up the file and began to read. "Why are you wasting my time with breast cancer?" House demanded. "Invasive Ductile Carcinoma, stage two. Big deal. Nothing unique or interesting."
"There's got to be more to it than that. Who's the patient?" Kutner asked, looking at the file from over Thirteen's shoulder.
"I am," Cameron said, stepping forward. Her voice echoed in the suddenly silent room.
"Allison …" Chase's voice died away. He just didn't know what to say. Neither did any of the others. Taub's mouth hung open a little; Foreman and Kutner were simply stunned. Thirteen's expression quickly shifted from shock to empathy; she knew what it was like to live with a potentially deadly disease.
Cameron then looked at House.
He said nothing. His expression was unreadable, but there was something in his eyes as he stared at her that held her attention, so she stared back, unflinchingly, as she tried to figure out just what it was.
"Wha … what's the course of treatment?" Foreman asked when he finally found his voice. House dropped his gaze from Cameron's, almost as if he was grateful for an excuse, and reached again for the file that Thirteen had abandoned on the glass table. Wilson began to outline the plan that Cameron had agreed he could share with the others.
"Mastectomy," House interrupted before Wilson could begin his recitation. He held the specifics in his hand, but he didn't need to reference them. He knew the drill.
"Yes," Cameron confirmed, her eyes fixed on his.
"When?"
"Tomorrow." It was if they were suddenly the only two people in the room.
"Chemotherapy and probably Radiotherapy will follow," Wilson continued, though House had turned from the group to face the windows, Cameron's medical file all but forgotten in his hand. She alone noticed that he now leaned heavily on his cane. Something he only did when in serious pain.
"Dr. Cameron has requested that she continue to work during her treatment," Cuddy said at long last, "but the Emergency Department won't be an option for long."
"Too physically demanding with the chemotherapy treatments," Chase muttered. He was now in "doctor" mode, but he realized that Cameron had asked him here out of courtesy for their former relationship.
"Which is why we're here talking to you," Cuddy said. She wrapped her hands over the back of an empty chair. Her voice took on her administrator's 'Let's work on this together' tone. "We'd like to work out an exchange program of sorts with the Diagnostic Department, so that when Dr. Cameron is no longer to treat patients in the ER, she will move back here, and you three," she indicated the ducklings, "will rotate weekly in and out of Emergency."
"Seems reasonable." Taub was the first to respond.
"That way you can keep experienced physicians in the ER, yet nothing is lost long-term from diagnostics," Kutner added. He liked the idea.
"It's not like Cameron isn't familiar with how things work around here." Thirteen's voice was neutral, but everyone knew that the 'things' she means was really just one thing – House.
"When will we start?" Kutner asked.
"When her looks start to scare the patients." House's voice was harsh yet hollow. At the same time he managed to convey to his team that he approved of Cuddy's suggestion. While the administrator might be his boss, his team still answered to him. They wouldn't move without his approval.
The crowd of doctors started in surprise at the insensitive comment, though they all should have seen something like it coming. Cameron, however, chuckled. How typically House.
"When I lose my hair," she clarified, indicating the long, blonde locks that fell about her shoulders. "Hard to have faith in your doctor's ability to cure you when she can't even manage to cure herself." She smiled ruefully. "I thank you all for your willingness to help. The next few months are going to be awful, I'm sure, but it's good to know that I have your support." She stuffed her hands in the pockets of her lab coat and shrugged. "Anyway … I'm due for some more paperwork and lab tests before tomorrow morning, so …" Cameron opened the door and strode purposefully past the glass windows of the Conference Room to the elevator. She didn't look back, so she didn't see House limp silently past Cuddy and Wilson to his office door.
Leaning hard with his free hand against the glass as well as against the usual support of his cane, House cocked his head to the side, but did not turn to face his team. "Run the tests for Lupus," he said quietly, and then closed the office door behind him and pulled the blinds shut to ward off the gazes of the others. It was a signal to all present that the meeting was officially over.
**
Other than periodic consults with his team over the increasingly erratic condition of their current patient – turned out that, once again, it was not Lupus – House spoke to no one for the rest of the day. He sat in his desk chair, facing the window, ear buds snugly in place, and thought. He sat long enough that the sky outside his office eventually darkened, and the hallways behind him gradually emptied.
He thought about everything … and nothing.
House thought about Stacey and that dweeb of a husband that he had pushed her back to. It was for the best. Maybe. Definitely.
He thought about Amber, the cut-throated bitch. She didn't have to die. It should have been him. That wasn't guilt talking, just reality.
Is next Tuesday the release for Jamie Gallagher's Monster Truck Mania Bash for the PSP? House was getting tired of waiting for it to come out, and so were the tech-geeks he kept harassing at Best Buy. He tried to figure out just when dispensing free medical advice became so offensive. In this economy they should have been grateful that he had saved them the price of a consult with a dermatologist. Really, a little Retin-A would do the trick. His last pizza had had a better complexion.
He thought about Wilson and their friendship, and how Amber's death had nearly driven a permanent wedge between them.
Variable pricing for iTunes was highway robbery, pure and simple. Time for a boycott! He wouldn't pay them a single penny more! Shit. Forgot to download the latest album from The Fray. Well, who says a boycott has to start right now.
House thought about his mother, always loving, always patient, always suffering in her efforts to bring back together her son and the man who was her husband.
He thought about the funeral of the man he had once called "Dad", and how his death should have liberated House from what once was, but, save for his reconciliation with Wilson, had served to only chain him more firmly to his past.
He worried that General Hospital would go the way of the Dodo like Guiding Light had. What would he do with his afternoons? He supposed that Young and the Restless wasn't too bad, but he wouldn't waste his time with Days of Our Lives. The character of John Black was just too nauseatingly perfect. Who looks like that, anyway?
He thought about Cuddy. He never should have gone to her house that night. He had known that even as he had knocked on her door. Their kiss had been a mistake, too.
Passionate? Yes.
Arousing? Mildly so.
However, spending hour or two in her bed again would have only been a distraction, and House was tired, so damn tired of mere distractions. He craved something tangible, something … someone substantial.
And so he had left Cuddy alone in her entryway leaving little more than a "good night" in his wake.
Mostly, however, House thought about her.
He had always prided himself on the power of his mind. It was how he was able to excel in his profession. It was how he had earned his reputation, his name.
Clarity of mind, that is.
Even in the Vicodin-induced miasma which had been both his prison and his salvation all these long years, his ability to use his mind, to deduce, to deconstruct, to analyze, to visualize in picture-perfect details all that had been said and done or not said and done had never wavered – except where Allison Cameron was concerned.
She had stood in his conference room only a few hours ago – ever lovely, ever-untouchable – but he now struggled to picture that loveliness in his mind's eye. All of their conversations, their interactions, their flirtations over the last five years had always come to him not as detailed images but rather as quick, elusive flashes as though every word, every glance, every touch was some separate clip from some agonizing television show that had been strung together like one of those ridiculous music videos that the clinic nurses were always watching on YouTube.
Now she was sick. Not with a puerile, nose-dripping cold, but seriously ill with a disease as mysterious and potentially deadly as those she had help him diagnose as his Fellow.
Still he couldn't picture her face clearly.
If the image was already hazy, what would happen to it if he could no longer refresh that likeness with the sight of the original?
"Damn it!" House slammed his hand on the arm of his chair. Unable to contain his anger and frustration any longer he grabbed the first thing his hand came in contact with and threw it against the thick window.
He was showered with the shattered remains of his PSP.
"Fuck." House slumped back into his chair. The explosion of his anger left him deflated, and idly he bushed at the pieces of plastic and glass that covered his pants.
So much for Monster Truck Mania Bash.
He fished his Vicodin bottle out of his jacket pocket, snapped the lid off with his thumb, and popped one of the white pills into his mouth. Rather than swallow it reflexively as he typically did, House allowed it to roll around in his mouth. As it slowly dissolved, the bitterness coated his tongue. His jaw clenched at the taste, but he permitted it to linger a moment longer before letting it slide down his throat.
This bitter pill he could swallow.
A soft rattle from the drawn vertical blinds behind him signaled the arrival. In all actuality, House was surprised that his friend had held off as long as he had.
Wilson lingered a moment at the door. House's silhouette was barely visible against the equally dark night beyond the windows. An occasional glow from House's iPod was really the only visible clue that the office wasn't empty. When his eyes had finally adjusted to the darkness, Wilson settled himself in the chair opposite his friend and propped his feet up on the desk.
"Comfortable?" House asked with a sincere lack of courtesy. He didn't turn from the windows.
"Not overly. You?"
House's silence was his answer.
"Allison's been officially admitted to the Oncology Ward. Surgery's in the morning."
"So it's Allison now, is it?" A slight curve pulled at the corner of Wilson's lip. House clearly didn't hear the jealousy that tinged his words. Good.
"It's been Allison for a few years now," Wilson admitted. He carefully kept his tone as neutral as possible. Pushing House too far, too quickly could be just as disastrous as not pushing him far enough.
"I'd imagine that her room is just crawling with Camerons right now. All falling over each other to be the first to get poor, sick, little Allie some fresh ice chips or another cup of Jello."
Yep. Definitely jealous.
"Cameron was her husband's name, actually." Wilson had to completely suppress his grin when his friend looked over his shoulder in surprise. "Didn't know that, did you? Wow! The famous Gregory House, diagnostician, actually missed a clue. Granted, it's just a name, but given your tendency to know everybody's business all of the time, it's rather shocking. I mean, she's been here five years, after all."
House growled in response and turned back to the window.
"Anyway, to answer your question, no. The room isn't crawling with her family; Simpson, by name, if you must know."
"Probably arriving on the Red-Eye so that they can be the first thing she sees after having had her breast lopped off by an oncologist with an over-developed sense of empathy. How touching." House was sorely tempted to pop another Vicodin into his mouth, but for some reason he didn't.
"She hasn't told them she's sick." Wilson said, unwilling to allow his friend to wallow any further. "She's alone, House."
"Oh please," House said, swinging around in his chair, face full of disbelief and irritation. "Cameron's never alone. Miss Mary Sunshine? Miss Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor? She's got the Wombat, and I'll bet at least half this staff has already offered to hold her hand when she starts puking up her guts from the chemotherapy. You even offered to 'be there for her', didn't you? If you're not careful, Jimmy, you'll end up with Soon-to-Be Ex-Wife Number Four."
"I did ask her," Wilson readily admitted. "She turned me down flat. She's turned down everyone's offer. With the exception of Taub and Kutner offering to cover her shifts while she recuperates from the surgery, she's refused all help at home. She's hired a home nurse."
"You sure the cancer hasn't spread to her brain?"
"Positive. Why?"
"Because she's acting like a moron!" House was amazed that Cameron would choose to isolate herself so completely. "Why isn't her family here? Where's Chase for Pete's sake?" he demanded.
"You really need to stop hiding in the dark." Wilson ignored House's questions.
"The light was hurting my eyes."
"No. The light forces you to see what you'd rather not look at. There's a difference." Wilson got up from the chair and headed to the door. "As to her family, you'd have to ask Allison that. She's in room 313. As far as Chase is concerned, she broke up with him a few weeks ago. So when I say she's alone, House. I mean she's alone." Wilson disappeared through the door.
"She's an idiot," House muttered to no one.
Damn it. What in the hell was going through that prostitute-blonde head of hers. Clearly the hair dye had started to affect her ability to think rationally. He'd warned her it would come to this.
For all his mental protestations, however, the more House thought about the whole situation, the more unsettled he became. Grabbing his cane, he stood up from his chair and groaned in pain. When would he ever learn that sitting for over 12 hours without moving was really not a good idea?
Now who's the idiot, he wondered.
He quickly popped the second Vicodin and tried to massage some feeling back into his damaged leg. "Prop the damn thing up next time, moron," he chided himself.
When the pain had lessened enough for him to walk, House pulled his backpack over his shoulder. Stepping out of his office, he blinked a few times to adjust his eyes to the light of the hallway.
Leaning heavily on his cane, House looked first one way down the hall and then the other.
He hated the cliché of metaphorical crossroads, but this was one even he couldn't ignore. To his right lay the elevator and home. To his left, room 313 and Allison Cameron.
House paused, considered, and then with a deep breath, made his decision.
He chose to ignore it.
House turned to his right.
Just a few personal notes: I love the tech guys at Best Buy; I will still pay for downloads off of iTunes; and I personally adore those YouTube music videos. I just wish I knew how to make them.