Thank you all for the kind reviews of the prologue for this story (and my other stories as well). Please feel free to post any criticism you may have... feedback definitely helps me hone my writing skills and make each part better than the last.

Please note that this does contain spoilers for current episodes

Chapter 1

Surprisingly enough, House was actually working when Wilson knocked on his door at five past noon. Cuddy had warned him that he needed to publish something before the end of the year so he was tapping at his keyboard with the same sort of manic speed he usually reserved for his gameboy.

Wilson's knock was very distinctive. A strong first rap that then petered out to three softer taps as he pushed the door open. He never bothered waiting to be invited in. House didn't even look up when he entered. That was the kind of friendship House wanted. That was the kind of relationship he needed. That was why he and Cameron couldn't possibly work. He waited for people to come to him, and expended the least amount of effort possible once they were there. That's what he had convinced himself worked for him. Cameron would get sick of pushing the door open eventually, but he'd tell himself he'd tried and it was her own damn fault, as he slid back into self-loathing.

"Lunch?" Wilson said, by way of invitation, rubbing idly at the back of his neck where his barber had almost nicked him.

House grunted in reply and Wilson took a few steps closer and angled his body to see what was on the screen. He expected a mocked up photo of some hapless hospital employee who'd managed to piss him off, or a website devoted music, curmudgeons or hookers, not necessarily in that order.

"Hm. Work."

"Yes, that's what we're supposed to do around here, or so I've been told," House snidely replied as he turned the monitor off and swiveled to face the other man. The somewhat tired look on his face took some of the bite out of his words.

"Something for NEJM?"

House looked at him with an expression not dissimilar to one that he might use on a particularly stupid patient. "Well I doubt I'll be making the cover of Newsweek with it."

The emphasis on the word 'I' let Wilson know exactly what was on House's mind. The same thing that had been on his mind for over a week. For a man who claimed not to identify with or be affected by, his patients, House was doing a piss-poor job of it.

"Not Sebastian again," he said wearily, dropping into the easy chair.

"What about him? I don't remember saying The Good Doctor's name."

Wilson rolled his eyes and snorted. "He's been gone for two days, House. I think you can stop whining anytime."

House managed to look both offended and injured at the same time. "Why would I even be thinking about that Schweitzer wannabe?"

"Oh, I don't know," Wilson said, with the tone of one who has said it all before. "Maybe because you've been doodling all over his picture for the past five minutes." He indicated the mangled cop of Newsweek that was currently serving as House's coaster and scratchpad.

House dropped his pen and picked up his red ball instead, tossing it into a lazy arc from one hand to the other. "I can't help it if the man was a walking ad for Unicef."

A subject change was definitely in order. "C'mon. Let's go to lunch. You can tell me where you and Cameron went over the weekend."

The red ball was snatched out of mid-air and House put it back on the desk with audible force. Great. Another subject he didn't want to talk about.

"We didn't go anywhere. We had a patient, remember?" House said stiffly.

"Sebastian was just taking his TB meds. You had plenty of time for a nice dinner somewhere. Are you telling me you haven't been out since the last time? I thought things went well?"

"I think I said, they went as well as could be expected."

"Yeah, that's practically a written five star review coming from your mouth."

House tossed the ball again and then slammed it down onto the still smiling, but otherwise defaced image of Dr. Sebastian Charles.

"Yeah, well, last I heard she was weighing her options and checking flight-times. I'm surprised she's not winging over Africa right now in a single prop plane, flinging care packages out the window with one hand and squeezing TB-Boy's hand with the other."

"What? What the hell are you talking about?"

"Oh, you missed the memo? He invited her to dinner. And Africa."

Wilson shook his head in disbelief over House's obvious jealousy. "And yet, you seem to have missed the fact that she's still here. Right down in the lab, if I'm not mistaken."

"Yeah, she's stubbornly loyal that way," he said, ignoring the memory of her voice when she'd lightly told him that she'd pencil him in. Damn it, why did she have to contradict his perfectly good ranting theories with her own reality.

"Right. Because you've given her so much to cling to," Wilson's sarcasm could be even thicker than House's when he wanted to. "Well, I talked to her this morning and she was smiling, so I'm going to guess you haven't spewed all this nonsense all over her yet."

House glared at him for a full minute before looking away and staring down into his now-cold coffee. "I suggested we could do something this weekend."

"That sounds more like it." Wilson stood up and House heaved himself to his feet as well. "Listen, House, I know you don't take my advice on a regular basis, but try not to be an ass for just a little while."

With unexpectedly nimble steps, House limped around his desk and beat Wilson to the door. "No promises."

A slight tilt of the head and one raised eyebrow. "I never expect any," he muttered under his breath.

House was half-way to the elevator when Wilson caught up with him, and the two rode down the two flights to the cafeteria in silence. It was the height of lunch-hour so of course there were too many people there for House's liking. Wilson was just glad that he didn't pull the old 'steak under the salad' trick again. He knew that if House got caught, for some reason he would be the one with the red face.

The aura in the cafeteria was always just slightly off despite the attempts to make it seem like an especially large café, complete with mood lighting, fake plants and not completely uncomfortable chairs. Death was just down the hallway, and yet people were talking noisily and laughing. Families ate together, with one member seated in a wheelchair or hooked to a wheeling oxygen tank; a futile attempt to pretend that things were normal. Doctors shoveled steak and cheese sandwiches into their mouths and tried not to think about the triple bi-pass or pacemaker surgery they were scheduled to perform in less than an hour. Everyone pretended that life inside the hospital was just like life in any other office building, and everyone knew that they were just pretending.

As usual, House led the way to a small corner table. It was partially hidden by a large and slightly dusty fichus tree, and far from both the lunch lines and the doors. He dropped his reuben-bearing tray onto the speckled formica and dropped into a chair. He'd taken his first bite before Wilson was even properly seated.

"So are these the table-manners that so impressed Dr. Cameron?" Wilson asked with long-suffering grace.

"She thinks boorish is sexy," House replied around a mouthful of food, emphasizing the last word and making a ridiculous face to go along with it. He swallowed before continuing with, "and why don't we talk about your love life for a while? Oh, right! You're still married. You're not supposed to have one."

Wilson made appropriate mock-laughter expressions before rolling his eyes and picking up his sandwich.

They were seated such that Wilson had a fabulous view of the wall, while House was able to see the entire room. A few minutes later, House was particularly glad for that arrangement. He was able to continue to eat while nonchalantly observing Cameron and the rest of his team. They were laughing together, a consequence of not having a current patient to worry about, and huddled around a table near the center of the room.

House took another bite and chewed viciously, only half-paying attention to Wilson's rambling complaint about his sister-in-law, while berating himself for his strange new inability to ignore one Dr. Allison Cameron. When he watched another doctor approach her his responses to Wilson grew even more vague and grunt-like. Hardy. Harley. Hanson. One of those. He was an attending up in pediatrics or down in maternity. One of those.

Whoever the hell he was, he was flirting with Cameron. Badly. Obviously. Sloppily. House forced himself to look away and concentrated instead on Wilson's face. Except now Wilson looked puzzled and he wasn't talking anymore. House swore under his breath when his erstwhile friend turned to look across the room, and then turned back and looked at him sympathetically.

"What are you staring at?" House growled.

"You know she's not interested in him."

"Well she should be."

"But she's not."

House snorted, the last refuge of a man who had no good counter argument. "How would you know, anyway?"

"Because he's come on to her for months and she's never responded."

Leave it to Wilson to know the hospital gossip.

House grunted again and pushed the last bite of sandwich into his mouth while keeping his gaze stubbornly fixed away from middle-distance. Damn her for making him notice things that he had happily ignored before. He'd happily ignored any indication of Cameron's life outside the hospital walls, and specifically his insular department. Now, he was being forced to see her as someone people… men… took an interest in. Men who weren't him. Men he compared unfavorably to.

He hated comparisons. He lived his life in a manner that assured he would be compared to no one. The brilliant misanthropic bastard niche was one he had painstakingly carved out for himself. If someone told him he was a bastard, he could make his 'duh' face and move on. If someone told him that another doctor had a better bedside manner he could make a derogatory comment about their abilities and brush it off. Comparison in terms of relationship material was never something he'd had to worry about. Unless the other man was Pee-Wee Herman or Fred Mertz, it was unlikely he could come out on top.

Which was exactly what made him doubt Cameron's motivations. She had to be even more fucked up than him if she found something desirable in his irascible, disheveled, thoroughly insulting person.

That last bite was hard to get down, and he swallowed several times and took a long drink before feeling it slip down his throat, seeming to scratch all the way down to his stomach.

"You have no faith in her, do you?" Wilson made his words less question than statement.

"She has more faith than some nuns I've met," House muttered. "Most of it, misplaced."

"Because you're so undeserving," Wilson said dryly. "A broken man with nothing to give her but heartache and a snide 'I told you it wouldn't work'."

Dry lips twisted into a sneer. "Something like that."

Wilson stared across the table with a look that was closer to disgust than any House had ever seen from the man.

"Self-pity really doesn't look good on you," Wilson told him, "especially when you'd rather cover yourself in it instead of accepting the possibility that there might be someone out there besides me who cares enough to take the time to dig through your bull-shit."

House was in the unusual position of being thrust onto the defense by the man who usually propped him up. "I told you we're going out again," he said, irritated at how ninth grade the words sounded.

"I know you did. So try acting like a man who deserves a third date, instead of a man searching for the fatal flaw in the plan."

"And here I thought my pessimism is what made me so desirable," House countered, regaining his mental equilibrium.

"No," again, Wilson, master of the dead-pan reaction. "Not really."

"I like you better when you're on my side," he groused.

"I'm always on your side."

So she reminded him of the father he hated. That was good to know.

Friday morning, and Cameron sat at her desk answering emails she wouldn't remember an hour from now, and thinking about everything that had happened since Tuesday. The answer was: a lot.

They had a patient upstairs who wasn't expected to live through the weekend and another patient who would never forgive himself for causing his son's death. Yet strangely, the acute sympathy she felt for both of them, was overshadowed by what she was feeling for House.

Maybe it hadn't been a good idea to maneuver him into seeing his parents, but Wilson had gone along with her and he obviously knew him better than she did. She'd thought she was helping. Of course she always thought she was helping; that was her problem, as she was sure House would agree. She'd watched him ride off on his own, out of the corner of her eye as she was walking out of the hospital with Wilson. She'd been too far away to see his expression, but the hesitation as he pulled on his helmet and the way he slouched forward before he took off, made her doubt her own motivations.

She reminded him of the father he hated, and yet he'd still opened up to her. He'd revealed more personal information in those five minutes than he had during their entire date and he'd done so without her even asking a question. His little barb about her being over-emotional hadn't even stung because she'd been so surprised to hear him still talking. As her eyes lost their focus on the computer screen, she could see his face in her memory again, soft for a change, almost relaxed, with none of the tight masks he usually wore pulled down to hide his emotions.

He claimed that she and his father shared the same innate moral compass, and apparently he missed the irony in that observation. It had been less than a year since she'd told him that the reason she liked him was because he always did what he did because it was right. If that wasn't indicative of the same moral compass he accused her of having, she didn't know what was. The only difference was that he tried to hide his under insults and brash behavior, while hers was on display for all to see. She could only guess that his father had held his out as an example to be followed and chastised his son for not measuring up, never seeing beyond the shield of sarcasm.

That's how it was in families. The people closest to you never knew you at all. Never bothered to know you. She could relate to that. Hell, she could relate all too well.

She sighed and blinked to clear her vision, then resumed her typing.

Friday morning and House wasn't in yet, and he hadn't mentioned going out over the weekend, not that she'd expected him to after everything that had happened. She hoped he'd made it home in one piece on that bike of his, and then allowed herself a small, twitch of a smile. It had been amusing to pretend she'd never seen it before. Just as well that no one else knew the truth. She didn't need any grief from Chase or Foreman.

As if on cue, her coworkers arrived, Forman with his jacket slung over his shoulder and Chase carrying a bag from the bagel place down the street.

"Morning guys," she called out, glad to hear that her voice sounded perfectly normal. She'd gotten very good at hiding her little disappointments from them.

"Morning, Cam," Foreman replied. "Chase brought breakfast."

"You sure you didn't sneeze all over those?"

"I'm not House," Chase scoffed, then laughed as he tossed the bag on the table. "No germs, guaranteed."

"Coffee's already made. House isn't in yet."

"No surprise there," Forman remarked. "Current patient is diagnosed, and we don't have another on the horizon. That's pretty much the cue for House to slink away and avoid clinic duty."

"I thought you were still covering for him," Cameron teased, referring to the bet that was now common knowledge.

"That was last week, and after the grief he got, I don't think he's eager to trade with me again."

"You're right about that. If I want to have Cuddy breathing down my neck, I want to at least have the fun of having done what I'm accused of." House was leaning against the doorway, cane swinging back and forth on a low arc in front of his feet.

"No leather jacket. You leave the bike at home?" Foreman asked.

"Only take it out on special occasions," House replied, fixing his gaze on Cameron and knowing that the others would miss his pointed stare.

"And what was special about Tuesday," Cameron kept her eyes linked with his for a split second before looking away.

"I was in a good mood."

Chase and Foreman were completely oblivious to the little play being performed right in front of them, but Cameron was starting to feel self-conscious, and she stood up and went to refill her coffee mug to give herself something to do. House watched her, following the line of her body, the sway of her hips, the tightness in her shoulders, and the tilt of her head. He said nothing else.

"Surprised you aren't hiding in an exam room," Chase said around a mouthful of bagel. "It's going to be a slow day."

House reached towards the paper sack and grabbed a bagel for himself. "Give me time. Meanwhile, you can finish the paperwork on Carnell."

Chase looked perturbed and shifted his gaze towards Cameron. "She always does the follow-up."

"Exactly. Time for you to get your chance," House replied. "I've got another job for Cameron." He headed towards his office and indicated that she should follow him.

She hesitated for a second, not sure what he was up to, but there really wasn't any way she could refuse him, so she carried her mug into his office, careful to shut the door after herself, and glance around to make sure that Foreman and Chase were otherwise occupied.

"What do you need me to do?" she asked, as House limped around his desk, bagel shoved between his teeth, and sat down heavily in his chair.

He removed the bagel, and put it and his coffee down on his desk. "Nothing," he replied.

She knew there was more to it than that so she just looked at him questioningly without saying anything.

"I just wanted to make sure you haven't done any erasing."

She was sure that the extra thump in her heart was causing the blood to rush to her face. Hopefully he wouldn't notice.

"Not yet. I wasn't sure… after your parents… and what you said…"

He waved his hand dismissively but she thought she saw a little spark of nervousness in his eyes. "I thanked you for not eating. I owe you dinner."

Her thin fingers tightened around the warm mug. "I don't want you to think you owe me something," she said, with more strength than she was feeling.

"Get over it," he replied, and now she was sure she saw a bit of uncertainty under his bluster. "It's still my name in pencil, right? You didn't schedule someone else in, did you?"

She shook her head. "No. It's still you." It'll always be you, she didn't bother to add,

"Good, because I got tickets, and I'd hate to have to take Wilson."

"Another monster truck rally?" she asked, relaxing and letting a small smile tug the corners of her mouth.

"No, a bit more high-brow than that. You can dress up."

"All right. I think I have something I can wear," she told him, and when he just nodded without giving any more information, she turned and headed back towards the conference room.

"House…" she turned her head slightly as she reached for the handle.

"Don't worry. No corsages. I remember."

She nodded once and opened the door.