Title: Swimming In The River Lethe

Author: PinkFreud

Rating: T

Summary: Dr. Cameron is feeling haunted, and she has trouble sleeping. House/Cameron.

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

When Alison Cameron was a little girl, she liked to read. She was one of those. One of those girls who always look slight and small; a little like a doll. A doll with eyes that seem old. You see them in the library, these little girls, clutching a book like a lifeline. These little girls are lonely. They see more and feel more than most people. They observe and absorb more.

Every Halloween, from the time she was 12 to the time she was 15, Alison dressed like a famous character from literature. At 14, she decided to be Hester Prynne, from ''The Scarlet Letter'' by Nathanial Hawthorne. It was an ambitious undertaking. She had a fabulous costume, though, with full Puritan garb in all its starched and holier than thou glory. She made a red ''A'' for ''adulteress'' out of felt, and glued it to the front of the dress. The dress was a shapeless black thing that her grandmother wore to funerals. Alison had a little white cap, made of a dishtowl that she wrapped around her head. She carried a plastic baby doll with her, wrapped in a blanket, and she bribed her next door neighbor and chem lab partner Norman to dress up and go trick or treating with her, as the Reverand Arthur Dimmsdale. Norman had a face like a slice of bologna. His hair was like wet straw. She paid him 20 dollars, which was her hard-earned babysitting money. By the end of the night, it had started to rain. The red felt ''A'' had fallen off of her costume, and the bastard child baby doll was missing. Her bag had broken, and there was candy all over the sidewalk. The Good Reverand Dimmsdale had left her for a girl dressed in a Wonderwoman costume. Alison realized then that she was different.

The next year, she didn't go out. She stayed in and watched TV, but she still wore a costume, and she was still a famous character from literature. She wore a red hunting hat, with earflaps on the sides that covered her ears. She was Holden Caulfield, from ''The Catcher in the Rye.'' She wasn't so different, then. Everyone was Holden Caulfield at 15, whether they wore a costume or not.

Alison was sitting in the kitchen, in Gregory House's apartment. It was Sunday, and Halloween. The weather was crisp and attractively moody. There were clouds in the sky and there was a bite to the air. She looked around.

The kitchen was nice. Kitchens were always nice. It had something to do with the comfort of food, Alison supposed. There was nothing better than drinking something warm in a brightly lit kitchen, while the outside of the world was mean and dark and cold. There was an element of safety to it. It felt like being in a cozy bubble.

She was thumbing through a book on Arthurian legends that she found on the shelf. It seemed to stick out, because it wasn't the sort of thing she would figure House liked to read. She looked at the inside of the cover, and saw a stamp mark. It was a library book. In between some of the pages were notes for what looked like a high school student's report on King Arthur. She recognized the handwriting. The paper that the notes were written on was yellow and pressed incredibly flat. It had been there for a very long time. She looked at the date scrawled in the upper righthand corner. November 18th, 1975. There were initials, too. G. H.

Alison looked at the due date, stamped clearly in bright blue on a card in the back of the book. October 31, 1975. It was from a library in Danbury, Connecticut. It had never been returned. It was stuck on a shelf, gathering dust and waiting for her to find it. Thirtysomething years later to the day it was supposed to go back. This made her smile. It made her feel, for whatever reason, that she was where she was supposed to be.

House was still asleep. He would probably sleep all day if she let him, and she probably would. He looked remarkably innocent when he was sleeping, but there was a something almost like desperatness to his expression. Like he was fighting waking up, fighting morning, fighting dreams, fighting everything. Like the man in the Bible who restled with God in his sleep. Yeah, that guy. Alison figured that if she could have watched that man's face while he slept and battled god, it would very much resemble Gregory House's face while he slept and fought everything. But there was also that undercurrent of delicate softness to his expression, while his eyes were closed in dreaming. And the mix of innocence and despair made it almost impossible to look away; almost impossible to watch him and not think that in those moments he really was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

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Alison loved the candle stores, the kind that were in malls. She called them the candle stores because they mostly sold candles, but they also sold other things, depending on the season. There were little knicknacks and odd and ends, things you buy as presents for people that you don't really know very well, and aren't very close too. Little wreaths, and candle holders, and ceramic animals, and wooden things that were painted and smelled like balsam. The air in those stores was always very fragrant, and comforting. Smell is the sense most closely tied to memory. Alison remembered being young and in one of those stores. She went around and picked up all the scented candles, which came in big glass votive jars with labels on them. She smelled all of them. Her favorites were the one that smelled like lilac, because it was like a heavy summer night; the one that smelled like pine trees, because it was like walking downstairs on Christmas morning; and the one that smelled rich and spicy, spooky and ancient, because it was like a perfect autumn day.

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She was reclining on the couch, feet propped up on a pillow, reading a book. That's how Gregory House saw Alison Cameron when he first woke up that day, finally. He limped out of the bedroom, clad in sweatpants and a wrinkled, gray t-shirt. His hair was sticking out from his head, messy from sleep. His leg felt like it wanted to fall off. It always felt like that when he woke up, that was when it hurt the most. That was when the pain was the most biting and aching and gnawing and restless and vicious and constant. That was why he fought in his sleep. He fought to stay there and not wake up and face another day of this.

She was wearing reading glasses. Her hair was pulled back loosely in a ponytail. Her skin was still pale, but it was a clean sort of paleness, the just-washed-my-face kind of pale that's rather becoming on a woman. Her feet were in socks, resting on a pillow. Her socks had sunflowers on them. She had sweatpants on, and a baggy green sweater. She looked perfect. He looked away. He needed Vicodin.

Alison put the book down. House recognized it. He checked it out of a library in Connecticut about thirty years ago and never returned it. He just carried it around with him; wherever he moved to after that, the book followed, at the bottom of a box, or in a closet, or tucked way back on a shelf gathering dust. She had unearthed it. It was some crap King Arthur thing, and why she found it, or why it found her, he didn't know.

''Good morning'', she said, plain and pleasant.

''Hey'', he said. House had found the bottle of Vicodin. He opened the cap, and shook out two pills. They were white and pretty against the palm of his hand.

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''Do you know that King Arthur and Guinevere are supposedly buried at Glastonbury, in England?'' Alison asked him. She appeared interested by the subject, and it appeared that she felt he should be, as well.

''No'', he said, ''they aren't.'' He was looking for sugar. He could never remember where he put it, even in his own damn kitchen.

''How do you know?'' She demanded. She was leaning against the countertop, and her face had that pouty, indignant expression that made her look about five years old.

''Has anybody''--House slammed a drawer rather violently--''ever actually gone''--he yanked open a cabinet--''out there and dug them up and said yes, this is definately''--and searched through it with equal violence--''King Arthur and Guinevere, who may or may not have existed at all''--spoons went flying and clattered to the floor.

Alison reached up, opened a cupboard, and pulled out a canister of sugar. She handed it to him with lips pursed very thinly. ''No.''

''No'', he said, accepting it. ''People want to believe that they are buried out there, because it sounds nice and romantic.''

''But doesn't it, though?'' She asked this with genuine curiosity.

''Not to me''. House poured sugar into black coffee. The spoon clanked against the sides of the mug as he stirred it.

''Why are you so upset?''

''I don't know.''

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It was Halloween night. Somewhere, out where people had lives, those people were dressing their kids up in costumes, and painting their little faces. They were handing out candy and going to parties. They were cuddling on couches, watching scary movies. They were eating too much candy, and not thinking about death at all. They carved out pumpkins, and stuck candles inside, because that was just what you did. Never mind that it was originally intended to be a lantern, to light the way for the souls of the dead who were passing by. Leave death and old folklore and pagan superstition out of holidays. Forget what they all really meant. Festivals of nature, of the seasons, of the sun and the moon, of life, and of death. That's what it all came back around to. But hell, nobody wants to think about life and death. Lets have candy, and all will be well.

Alison and Greg had seen real death. They had seen real tragedy. They were haunted, and wanted to bury the dead and forget. However, they couldn't block out the honesty of a holiday all about death, paradoxically, because they had seen so much of it.

They sat together, side by side on the couch. This was a habit. They never really touched directly unless they had to. They were always side by side and together but never touching. This was what it was.

A moon rose. It was full and bright and orange.Alison didn't say anything. She was thinking about poor Jack Harper. The miracle pot was in the kitchen now, in a cabinet. Holy relic or not, Alison couldn't bring herself to keep it where she could see it.

Gregory House was thinking about a thousand things. Images that swirled and moved in and out of focus. He kept them at a distance though, where they couldn't really become clear. It was like watching a gray curtain moving in the breeze.

A/N Please review...