I had hoped to have this up a bit earlier in the week, but a nasty cold, in addition to work, kept me from the computer.

There were so many wonderful reviews for the last chapter. Thank you so much. It always brightens my day to read what you all specifically like about these chapters. I look forward to maybe getting more feedback with this one, too.

I hope that you enjoy this chapter.

~ Sarah

Chapter 10: Facing Facts

"What did you do to her?" Wilson demanded as he stormed into the glass-enclosed office. House caught the rebound of his tennis ball off the wall without looking at it.

"Is there a particular 'her' to which you are referring, or would any 'her' suffice? I don't particularly recommend doing the Cuddy 'her', she's far too hormonal since getting the parasite, and the Thirteen 'her' just isn't all that erotic since she decided to forsake women in favor of Dark Chocolate; though I hear tell that once you've gone black, you'll never –"

"Allison," Wilson clarified, pointing in the direction of his exam room where he had just finished removing said 'her's' stitches. "You somehow convinced her to let you take care of her. Hell, she told me that you even moved in with her – 'for the duration.' A week ago she was adamant that no one help her, yet in one night you manage to completely change her mind. So, I ask again, what did you do to her?"

"Why you do automatically assume it was something underhanded or conniving?" House was insulted.

Wilson snorted in disbelief. "Because it always is!"

"I suppose the fact that I just used my considerable natural charm and powers of persuasion to –"

"House, Egyptian asps have more natural charm than you do."

"Now that was just mean," House said with a pout.

"House!"

House was out of options, out of evasions, and he knew it. Wilson would hound him until he gave up the goods, or, worse, he would weasel the answer out of Cameron in such a way that Cameron wouldn't realize it had been weaseled out of her. House couldn't let that happen. Better it come from him. In his own way, Wilson was just as manipulative as he was. House dropped his eyes from Wilson's and toyed with the continuous seam on the tennis ball. Might as well get this over with.

"Blackmail," he mumbled. He had been right. It was an ugly word. He hated the way it tasted on his lips.

"What did you say? I'm … I'm sorry, I must have had a mini stroke or seizure. I thought I heard you say that you are blackmailing Allison Cameron so that she'll let you take care of her while she undergoes treatment for cancer."

"That pretty much sums it up."

Wilson stared at him for several long seconds. "Unbelievable!" He tossed his hands in the air and began to pace in front of the adjoining door to the conference room. "How do you do it? Just when I think you have sunk as low as you can get, you come up with something new. You've reached the point where even sewer rats wouldn't have anything to do with you."

"It's not as bad as all that," House said, still not meeting his friends eyes. In fact, it was worse.

"She's a cancer patient, for God's sake! You are blackmailing a cancer patient!"

"Hey!" House spun his chair forward to face his friend. "I seriously doubt she's the first cancer patient ever to be blackmailed for –"

"What could you possibly have on Allison that would cause her to let you do this?" Wilson sounded tired. "Would you tell me that, please?"

"Nothing."

Wilson's glare intensified.

"Really, I've got nothing. Well, more than she wishes I had, but not anything near what she fears I have."

"What does that even mean?"

"While she was on the narcotics, Cameron … might have mumbled a few titillating tidbits about a weekend in Cabo with Chase, and I might have added a few creative details of my own to fill in the blanks and flesh out the fantasy a bit. Then I might have threatened to post all the dirty details online …"

Wilson sat down heavily in the chair across from House's desk and shook his head.

"But that was all I got out of her. She clammed up after that. Friday night, she asked for proof, so I gave her the Cabo story, but –"

"You let her think there was a lot more to it than just that."

"Pretty much."

It had been a masterful plan – by far the best House had conceived in the last year, and it had been necessary. Cameron couldn't and shouldn't go through this alone. Unfortunately, she had just needed a little prodding to understand the truth of it all.

House had never before questioned whether or not the ends were justified by the means he employed to attain them. Of course they were.

Always.

Maybe.

Perhaps not where Cameron was concerned.

House squeezed the oversized tennis ball tightly in his hands. Oh, God. What if he had fucked up?

He knew he had hurt her with his exploitation of her drug-induced lapse. As he replayed the events of that evening over in his mind, House was unprepared for the twinge of guilt he felt at having manipulated her in the way he had.

For Pete's sake, when did you start giving a damn what other people think?

You don't give a damn what other people think, but you do give a damn what she thinks.

Oh, shut up!

Leaning over, Wilson braced his elbows on his knees and hid his face in his hands. "I can't believe this," he mumbled. "It's … It's too .. too …"

"Sordid? Base? Calculating?" House suddenly saw himself and what he had done through Wilson's eyes, and he wondered if the portrait of himself that hung in the closet had finally turned into a complete fiend.

"It's brilliant!" Wilson countered with a smile.

"What?" House was incredulous. This was not the reaction he had been expecting. Wilson looked almost proud of him.

"Oh, I'm not saying there won't be hell to pay when Cameron figures out how you manipulated her – and she will figure it out, so if I were you, I'd make sure my passport is current – but she would have continued to dig in her heels if you took the direct approach. It's perfect!"

House stared at his friend, his mouth hanging open in his surprise. "Okay," he drawled slowly. "What in the hell is going on. You actually like this idea, and I'm the one who's feeling guilty. Maybe I'm the one having the stroke 'cause this sure as shit isn't making a lick of sense."

Wilson sobered at House's statement. "You feel guilty? Wow. Why?"

House couldn't put into words the reasons for his guilt, so he didn't even try. "How is she?" he asked.

Wilson understood what his friend was doing, and allowed the topic to change. The fact that House could feel guilt over anything was a large step for the man. The fact that he could feel guilt over something he had done to Cameron – well, Wilson decided then and there to buy a lottery ticket on his way home from work.

"She's healing well. The incision – well, it isn't my best work considering I had to stitch it up twice – but MacPherson will take care of that when he does the reconstruction."

"Where do we go from here?"

Wilson picked up immediately on the 'we' in House's statement, but decided, too, to let that slide. He had sensed big changes in House over the last week and a half – changes he was sure were due in large part to Allison Cameron – yet Wilson knew his friend well enough that any comments on his part would severely curtail any progress he might make.

"We're going to use 'sandwich therapy'," Wilson said. Cameron had given him permission to share everything with House – yet another telling clue. "Three cycles of chemo –"

"Then five weeks of radiation, followed by another three cycles of chemotherapy," House finished for him. "What? I've been reading up." He shrugged his shoulders at Wilson's look of surprise. Sure, cancer was still boring, but this particular cancer a little bit less so. "When does she start?"

"Three weeks. Allison wants to get in to see her dentist and her gynecologist before we start tinkering with her immune system. She's down talking with the nurses now. Said she'd meet you here when she was done"

"Port-a-Cath or IV?"

"Port," Wilson said. By implanting a chemotherapy port directly in her upper chest wall, it would save Cameron considerable time and discomfort during her treatments.

House nodded thoughtfully. Good choices.

"She still hasn't looked at the scar." Wilson's voice was soft, worried.

"I know."

"She has to, House. It will only get harder with time."

House's jaw tightened and he rubbed absently at the large, rough scar that dominated his right thigh. "I know that, too."

"If you're going to be there for her, this is the first opportunity."

House pursed his lips, his eyes were grave, and spun his chair to face the windows. "I'll see what I can do."

**

"I'm going to go take a shower," Cameron told him as they entered her apartment four hours later. She draped her coat over the rack behind the door, set her purse on the dining room table, and made a bee-line for her bedroom. She'd been waiting for this for four days.

"If you need someone to lather you up, let me know," House called after her as he plopped down onto her sofa. He heard he laugh lightly at his lecherous suggestion and felt a small smile tug at the corner of his lips. She really did have nice laugh.

Grumbling at the turn his train of thought had taken, House grabbed the remote and flipped on the television. Scanning through the hundreds of stations available to him on her satellite system, he searched for something, anything to keep his mind off of Allison Cameron all wet and soapy in the shower.

Hmm. The Exorcist ought to do it.

While Regan levitated herself off the bed – still pretty cool taking into account that the film was nearly 40 years old – House considered the way in which his day began. The throbbing in his leg had woke him up early that morning as it usually did, but when House opened his eyes to search for his Vicodin bottle, he opened them to the sight of Cameron's sleeping face mere inches from his own. His first instinct had been to bolt from the bed, but given how badly his leg was throbbing he would probably have fallen flat on his face. Her skin smelled of apricots and House had found himself leaning closer to catch her scent. He inhaled deeply, letting that calming sweetness fill his senses. Dropping his eyes from her face, he noticed that in spite of the fact he was practically nose to nose with his former immunologist, their bodies were spread far apart from one another. She still mostly on her side of the bed, he still mostly on his – no, not his side of the bed, but on the other side of the bed that was not her side.

House flipped the channel again. Clearly, even split-pea soup vomit wasn't enough to distract his thoughts. Cujo! Yes! Rabid St. Bernards were just what he needed.

Their bodies did not touch save for one exception. House still held Cameron's hand clutched in his own, but at some point during the short night he had pressed it to his chest. Palm down, he had held it fast against his heart, only the thin cotton of his shirt separating her flesh from his.

Okay … maybe not Cujo. So much for 'man's best friend'. Idly, he flipped through the channels. Over a thousand stations and still not a damn thing to watch!

Running the tip of his finger along the edges of each of hers, House had been mesmerized by the elegance of each digit, the delicate curve of each unpolished fingernail. For some inexplicable reason, he had been about to press his lips to the pad of her thumb when Cameron stirred slightly next to him. The tip of her nose brushed against his cheek; her lips, ever so slightly parted in sleep, warmed his skin with her exhalations.

He studied her face a moment more, then resisting the urge to press his lips to her brow, House pulled his hand from hers and slipped from the bed. Grabbing his jacket and his cane from the hope chest at the end of the bed where he had left them, he had limped painfully to the living room, popped two Vicodin, and eventually fell back to sleep on the couch which is where Cameron found him two hours later.

House turned his attention back to the television and almost jumped at the voiced-over opening lines of the movie playing on the screen:

"What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me ..."

Gah! Love Story. Turn it off! Turn it off!

Giving up, House pulled himself to his feet and headed for the kitchen. Popping the cap off a beer he pulled from the fridge, he was started by the sudden grumble that emitted from his stomach. It was well past dinner, he realized. They should eat something.

The beer bottle hung motionless at his lips. When had 'he should eat' become 'they should eat'? Swallowing a mouthful of brew, he set the bottle on the counter.

It suddenly felt as though the walls of the apartment were closing in on him. When had he lost control of this situation? There was House, and there was Cameron – two separate and distinct people. There was no 'they'. There was no 'them'.

House.

Cameron.

House.

He was here only to take care of her. Maybe he shouldn't have moved in. That's it. He should just go back home and check in on her every so often. Maybe she had been right. The home nurse was the way to go. She didn't need him, after all. It could be anyone, so why not hire someone to do the job? Why should he get involved anyway? It's not like she meant anything to him. He'd tell her he was going home when she got out of the shower.

It was then that House noticed that the apartment was strangely silent. Cameron had gone in to take her shower nearly 20 minutes ago, but it had finally occurred to him that he had ever heard the water run. The pipes in her building were old and rattled in the walls like an old woman's bones on a winter day, but the clattering had never come.

Something was wrong.

He hobbled quickly to her bedroom. The door was ajar, and he could see her standing in front of the large pedestal mirror in the corner next to her bathroom.

"Cameron?" He pushed the door open and stepped inside. She did not turn when he entered, but she seemed to know he was there. Her eyes were fixated on her reflection in the mirror. She was still fully clothed, though the top two buttons of her shirt had been undone. Her hands were clenched at her sides, and he noted the dampness of her cheek in the glow from the lamp at her bedside.

"Cameron?" he asked again, stepping behind her; he resisted the urge to put his hand on her shoulder.

She dropped her chin to her chest. A deep sob issued from her throat as she struggled to speak without breaking down completely. Reaching out, her small hand sought out his larger one. She squeezed his fingers tightly.

Her eyes, full of tears, met his in the reflection of the mirror.

"Help me," she pleaded in a whisper that caused his heart to twist in his chest. She didn't need to clarify her request. He knew what she wanted him to do. He knew, too, that in that moment, Allison Cameron trusted him – the arrogant, self-centered, manipulative bastard – unconditionally. He was left shaken by that knowledge.

Swallowing hard, House clutched Cameron's hand one last time before hooking his cane on foot of her bed. He stepped in front of her, blocking her view of her own reflection. Reaching out, he brushed a tear from her cheek. Flexing his fingers, he grasped the fabric of her shirt above the third button. His eyes sought out hers again, and the look of affirmation he saw in those green depths moved him to action.

One by one House slipped the buttons from their holes until the shirt hung open. Lifting her left hand, House pressed it to the left side of her shirt so she could hold it in place. This wasn't a striptease, after all, and she was touched at his concern for her modesty.

He unbuttoned the cuff at her right wrist. His fingers trembled slightly as he took hold of the right flap of her shirt and pulled the fabric aside. Lifting her arm, House slid it from the sleeve, making sure not to jar the arm too much. Unsheathed, he lowered it again to her side and folded the shirt behind her back, out of the way.

Cameron's skin was bruised and battered. It looked more as if she had been in a car accident than had had surgery. Wilson had replaced the bulky dressing with a series of smaller adhesive backed pads designed to absorb the minimal amount of blood that would have seeped from her wounds after the stitches were removed.

House reached out and touched the edge of the first bandage. Cameron stiffened under his touch, and he looked quickly at her. Her eyes were full of fear. Not of him, but of what she was soon to see. Gently he pulled back the bandage, revealing the first bit of hidden flesh to the soft light of the room. His fingers sought out the next bandage, and then the next, repeating the process until the final dressing fell to wooden floor next to its fellows.

His eyes never left hers.

Desperately she reached out her right hand and grasped his tightly. She closed her eyes and bowed her head.

Cameron took a deep breath, calmed herself, and then opened her eyes.

House felt his heart twist again at the agonized cry that died in her throat.

Cameron's mind struggled to make sense of what she was looking at. Jerking the rest of her shirt from her body, Cameron pushed House to the side and stared at it full in the mirror. The bruised, bloody, and swollen flesh looked as though it belonged to someone else. She looked deformed, hideous like some misshapen creature from her childhood nightmares, but this time her father would not come into her room to chase away the demons, to keep her safe from the monsters.

This time, the monster was real.

"It can't be me." Her agonized whisper reached House's ears. Though he had stood with her at her side, House had kept his eyes averted out of respect for her privacy, but at her words, something inside him snapped.

"Shouldn't," he growled, "not can't be you. It shouldn't be you, but it is and you have to face that."

"You bastard," she said. Her eyes that met his in the mirror were filled with both anger and tears.

"We established that fact five years ago, wanna try for some new material?" he asked coldly.

"Why I thought you would be able to feel sorry for anyone –"

"No!" He spun her around to face him. Her shirt, still caught on her wrist at the cuff, swirled around their feet. He knew that she was reacting out of fear and doubt, but he was not about to let her go down the path that he once walked. "If it's pity you want, you're right, you won't get that from me. Might try Chase though. That boy's full of enough pity for anyone he can lay it on. When one's worst illness is an infected hangnail, how in the hell can you expect them to know what you're going through, to be able to support you?"

"Oh, and I can guess that you know what I need?"

"Empathy," he spat. "Understanding from someone who's been there, who knows what it's like to face death. Courage from someone who knows what it's like to lose a part of yourself and wonder if you'll ever be whole again. Strength from someone who can kick your ass and get you moving again when all you want to do is curl up in a ball and die from the pain."

"And that person is you, I suppose?" she asked haughtily.

"You're damned right it is," he snarled. Grabbing her roughly, House pulled her into his arms and pressed her body to his. She struggled against him, but his arms held firm at her shoulders. He would not let her go. "You deserve more than pity, Cameron. Pity will only make you weak. I can't let that happen."

Suddenly, something within her simply broke. The tears that she had managed to keep at bay for so long began to flow freely as the torrent of emotion within her broke free of its floodgates. House wrapped his arms about her body, shielding her nakedness from the light of the room, and held her as she cried. He felt the asymmetrical contours of her chest pressing into his and realized that for the first time in a very long while, he had a purpose – a purpose beyond that of his own curiosity or selfish needs and whims.

"You're strong, Cameron," he whispered against her hair. "You're the strongest person I know, but I'm not about to let you fall."

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