In two weeks, she'd be seventeen. Two short weeks, and she'd be one short year away from the new beginning of her life. She'd graduate from high school, go to college, get her life together . . . She'd be a dancer, or a writer; go on tour, and tell the story of how she'd grown up in the ghetto. And one day, she'd come back to visit; she'd watch a game of street ball on this very court and have far-away memories of the time she'd almost died. She would remember this very moment, right here and now, with Dr. Gregory House leaning on the fence, x-ray in hand, a light mist powdering the darkened pavement from a darkened, heavy sky.
A week, it resounded again . . . and for some reason, just as real. But it wasn't. Because even fate isn't that insufferable. Rachel wasn't meant to die at sixteen. Even seventeen would be better than sixteen. Two weeks away; just two weeks.
A week . . .
She had a week to live.
House never took his eyes off the teenager. He was afraid that if he did, this reality, for even a second, would seem only a dream - and what a horrible dream to be haunted by. A month from now, his subconscious would try to burry this, and it would only rot as bad dream in the very back of his brain. The last thing he needed was to burry something else back there. For his own selfish reasons, he had to stand there and stare. It was the only way he could deal with it.
He could always turn his back, being the detached, inhumane jerk that he was. He actually thought about it. He was cold and this was depressing him. House crossed his arms tighter over his chest and watched as the dampened basketball rolled for a distance along the edge of the fence. Of all places for it to roll, it had to roll toward him. A plea.
He hooked his cane onto the fence and bent over to pick up the ball. With one free hand, he inched the ball up the side of his leg until it lay lonely and out-of-place in his palm. He looked at it, studied it. Minutes before, such life and magic had sparked from every spinning inch of its being. Now it was dead and insignificant - so oddly lopsided as it lay soiled and saddened in his hand.
"A week." Rachel's voice was low and deep. It lacked emotion. Lacked so much emotion that should be spilling over from her broken heart and street-tortured soul, or from her eyes at the very least.
And then House was caught off-guard. Never in his career had he delivered a death sentence to a patient who then returned it with a smile - but Rachel's mouth turned up ever so slightly in a smile. It was obviously forced, and void of hope - completely void of brightness - but she was being brave. She didn't know what else to do.
"That's actually longer than I had expected." It was so quiet, it was almost a whisper; Rachel's voice was getting farther away.
The light mist had turned into a light sprinkle. The dim, yellow flood from the streetlight painted a thin sheet of broken reflections across the court. A police siren began to wail in the distance, getting closer, and then farther away. It was just the two of them here, and the world was unaware. House let the x-ray fall from his grasp and float to the wet pavement below, then held onto the basketball with both hands.
Rachel's sobered voice, a paradox to the drugs in her system, broke into the relative silence once again. "Was it the heroin?"
"No," House managed to keep the edge out of his tone. "But it might as well have been." Rachel finally looked over at him from the hole she'd been staring into the ground. "You were a dead duck that first time you stuck yourself." It came out sounding a whole lot worse than he'd meant it to. After all, she was dying; a little sensitivity on his part couldn't hurt.
Again, a nod. Nothing more. There was silence. She looked back to her hole in the ground, her lips thinning into another plastered smile. "And I haven't even changed the world yet."
All of a sudden, Rachel's head darted up from the ground and her eyes opened wide with awareness. It was a few more seconds before House heard it too - a violent rustling off to the side of the court. They simultaneously caught sight of a bulky shadow on the road, involved in some sort of struggle, hiding just beyond the rays of the streetlight.
A wave of panic washed over House as it dawned on him: my car. The shadow was standing over his car. Without even thinking first, House stood up off the fence and gripped his cane. "Hey!" he shouted in a lapse of judgement, "Get your own!" He didn't care who it was, and he didn't care if the person had a gun. He knew who he was, and that was all that mattered - he was Gregory House: he had a cane, and he knew how to use it.
But the rustling didn't stop or slow down; it had actually increased upon the sound of his voice. He then realized there were two shadows, locked in a fierce struggle against one another. Two short, muffled screams echoed forbiddingly into the night, as one shadow pulled the other off the road and fought its way across the short distance of grass, straight toward the court. Straight toward Rachel and House.
Slowly, Rachel's hand slipped its way into a pocket of her baggy camouflage jeans, and the tiny glint of a silver blade was revealed when she pulled it back out. Aside from his thumb dialing 911 on his cell phone, House didn't move a muscle, somehow with the instinct that it wouldn't do any good if he did. But all instinct fled his mind when the shadows were revealed by the light.
A tall black man and a distraught, young brunette. Cameron.
