Author's Note: In this fic's universe, Stacy has not yet appeared. All Cameron knows is that someone broke House's heart five years ago.

To be fated

To telling only lies

The corsage's petals were curling at the edges and starting to brown. It was in a plastic Tupperware container. She hadn't had time to press it and never liked arts and crafts anyway. Tonight she had gotten out another old corsage—from her prom—and laid it next to the plastic-caged one. She hated the dead flowers.

House had sent her to get Foreman when he had, like Chase, spent an extraordinarily long time in a patient's room when he was just retrieving a fellow doctor. She walked in and Foreman walked out, head down, shame in his shuffle. She smiled gently at the relatively young woman who lay on the bed. Cameron noticed she had her hands clasped together and looked calm.

"He likes you."

"What?"

"And you like him. It's sweet, to see you two go for each other's throat time and time again. My husband and I used to do that. He was twenty years older than I am, so…"

Cameron had watched as the girl twisted a large diamond engagement ring around her left ring finger. Cory hadn't finished the sentence, and thus, Cameron never found out if her husband really was dead or if they were simply divorced. But it didn't matter anymore, because Cory Lind had died on a few hours after Cameron had left the room—she was still an enigma when Cuddy had come to collect Cameron.

But now she stood in front of her kitchen counter staring at two corsages. She had been there for the better part of an hour she thought. Time, though, seemed superfluous when her heart felt like it was straining for something that could never be.

"My husband died when I was seventeen and he was eighteen. A drunk driver hit him two weeks after our wedding. And then I went to college and fell in love with my professor, twenty years my senior. I came back a few years after I graduated and we married. Too young the first time and too old the second. I was a prom queen, too, you know."

The prom queen reference made her realize that this must be more than a simple coincidence. She stood looking at her old prom corsage and then she reached out and gently touched it.

She had been too young to be a widow. She knew that and she knew that House thought she was stupid and naïve. She remembered her prom. It was a cheesy affair, like proms usually are, but she was prom queen. She was his wife. She wore a rhinestone tiara, which reflected the lights of the gym with startling brightness. At the hospital, she had worn white, which made her glow like an angel, her husband had told her. She had danced and enjoyed dancing. She had watched him die and she never liked dancing with her dying husband.

She reached for the Tupperware container and took off the lid. She touched the formerly silky petals and started to cry. The tears mixed with the brown of the flower and it started to crinkle with the impact of the tears.

"Do you cry alone and, when you do, does it kill you to know that he pretends he doesn't care?"

Cameron hadn't responded to Cory's remarkably accurate statement, but when she was here, all by herself in a kitchen that muffled her cries, it didn't matter that Cory knew her life story better than she did. Oh, yes, did she cry alone. All the time she cried, and over dead flowers that had not been alive in more than ten years.

And that was she now. She had been dead for more than ten years. Ten years since anyone had loved her. House had only endured the death from love for five years, half the time she had. She was resigned to the fact that she was dead until love returned and when love did rear its fascinating head, she attacked it with a passionate fervor. Maybe that's why she saw her chance with House.

She was nearing thirty and saw her life slipping away. Saving peoples' lives was the only thing that saved her. She had become a doctor for a sole reason—she needed something for which to live.

She pushed herself away from the corsages and with a trembling hand she reached for her glass of water. She missed it and it fell to the floor—shattering into many pieces. She gave a small yell when it fell and immediately went to the ground, collecting the pieces of the sharp, broken glass. One of the pieces was incredibly sharp and left a gash in her palm.

"There's a song. My personal favorite that contains the lyrics, you bleed just to know you're alive. I used to be so happy to get a paper cut. I could feel! When I got cancer, then, then I realized I was human. Painfully so."

"Even after your…"

"Even after my first husband died, I was immune to pain. Like you are. You absorb the damage of another wrecked man. Over and over again you do it because you feel like you must. It gives you a reason to live."

The clear blue eyes had drilled into Cameron's and she had been stuck to the floor in Cory's room. And now, as she bled she reached up to grab a towel, but instead came back down with both corsages. She had knocked them off her counter and now her blood fell on the dead flowers.

There was a knock at the door, and Cameron knew it was just one of the neighbors checking on her to make sure she was okay. Cameron didn't think she had screamed that loud, but she was glad they were concerned. The knocking, though, was persistent. And loud. And it sounded of wood on…

She crawled into a little ball behind the island that sat in her kitchen. If he wanted in bad enough he'd break down the damn door.

"Let him chase after you," were Cory's last words to her before Cuddy pulled Cameron out of the room.

Cameron looked at her prom corsage as she heard House sifting around outside her apartment for a spare key.

The old, brown flowers now contained color for the first time in a decade.