Title: Precious
Summary: This is a songfic! About Cameron. Some of you had "music playing" Depeche Mode as you blogged, and it turned on me. I heard "Precious", and was struck in my mind about how much it relates to Cameron's character. This is my twisted take on her past…and a song I dedicate to her.
Disclaimer: I own nothing in relation to House MD, I just have the DVDs, and the lyrics belong to Depeche Mode. Enjoy.
Precious
and fragile things
Need special handling
My God what have we
done to You?
We always try to share
The tenderest of
care
Now look what we have put You through...
Allison had a special relationship with her maternal grandmother. Grandma Jeannie was the embodiment of things earthy, loving, and caring. She was the person who taught Allison to sew, crotchet, and can green beans. Even as a little child, Allison would hold Grandma Jeannie's hand super-tight while walking through the toy store, with the elderly woman's dark gray eyes casting down loving glances. When Allison brought a "sick kitty", or "sick puppy" to "doctor up" it was Grandma Jeannie that as always her assisting nurse.
When she was nine, Grandma Jeannie did not get play hospital anymore. Now, she was in the real hospital as Allison watched with great fascination as these tall men in white coats helped her grandmother. Words like "emphysema" passed over Allison's head in a world of confusion. Allison and her mother moved in with Grandma Jeannie so that she would have a caretaker. As her mother sat by Grandma's bed, Allison saw the same loving look cast from Mommy to Grandma Jeannie.
A few months later, Allison had to put a dark dress on and sit quietly in a graveyard as her grandmother was laid to rest. A minister shouted words like "come again", and "rest in peace", but as she held her mommy's hand none of the words brought her peace.
Things
get damaged
Things get broken
I thought we'd manage
But
words left unspoken
Left us so brittle
There was so little left
to give
At fourteen Allison had begun to excel in sciences and math. She was able to take the Advanced Placement Algebra and Anatomy while balancing her part-time job at the Veterinarian clinic. The chemicals and science connecting objects fascinated her, they were pieces of an equation she could work out. They made sense. Concrete concepts of science and math gave her a sense of stability during her parents divorce and her mother's immediate remarriage. When she saw her dad less and less, she was able to commit herself deeper into her studies. When the world did not work out to her plan, she could turn to her anatomy book and examine the constants of the nervous system, controllable and correctable variables. 2 +2 4, the answer would not change; granted, the questions got more complex, but the scientific method never failed her.
During these turbulent years from girl to woman, she found recognized it was her body, not her ideas that gathered attention. She tried to down play her looks to be taken seriously by her teachers; she wore her glasses instead of contacts, wore her hair in a severe ponytail, and multiple layers of clothing. Although she tried, it was her stunning features that got the attention, not her score of 30 on the ACT.
Angels
with silver wings
Shouldn't know suffering
I wish I could take
the pain for you
When she met Dean, he was full of life. He had the same deep gray eyes as Grandma Jeannie. When he looked at her across the lab, it was with genuine love. Dean was her friend, her lover, and the closest thing she ever had to a best friend.
She knew she loved him, and he loved her. In one day, Dean came in and dropped her world out from her. "I have thyroid cancer", those four words flipped her mind. The conversation that followed came like something out of a dime-romance novel. A marriage before dying, death to us part, these words fell past her concerned smile. She simply did not want him to be alone, and she loved him. Those pains, the loneliness, she did not want him to be alone. Like her mother before her, she would be the caretaker. Dean would not be alone; he would be loved until the day he died.
If
God has a master plan
That only He understands
I hope it's your
eyes He's seeing through
Six months after the wedding, Dean was gone, and she was left alone in the small apartment that was their home. Surrounding herself with books and her laptop, she dove head long into her pre-med program. With a semester until her graduation, she had just enough time to pick up a few extra courses. Her applications to medical school had gone through, her grants had worked themselves out, and her future in the medical field looked hard, but brilliant. Something inside Allison kept driving her; the constant need to help people, to cure them, to save them kept her focused on her task. Medical school would get her one step closer to that goal. If she could not fix the ones she loved with morals and beliefs, she would do it with science.
I
pray you learn to trust
Have faith in both of us
And keep room
in your hearts for two
A year working for House taught her many things. The most important of which: everybody lies. She watched him self-destruct, search for puzzles to solve, and dissect everything and everyone around him. This utterly fascinated her. His intelligence, his snarkiness, his devotion to doing what was the right thing to do attracted her to him. She was a moth, and he was the flame.
The one chance she created to connect with him burned her. "You don't love, you need", his words echoed in her head. Maybe it was true. Maybe she gave up on the conventional ideal of love and gave in to another baser instinct: need. Everyone enjoys the necessity of their existence and Allison was no different. Necessity was a constant in life, she felt complete when she helped others. True, it could be a debilitating and unfair existence, but she knew no other way.
Although the surface feelings for House had changed, deep inside she never conceded defeat. There was something about him that turned her on and turned her off. The verbal assault on her character, the moral shaping, even the challenges were beginning to change her for the better. He challenged her, but slowly she felt something fading away, something that Grandma Jeannie taught her; the softness was fading.
Things
get damaged
Things get broken
I thought we'd manage
But
words left unspoken
Left us so brittle
There was so little left
to give