Week Two – Where Do We Go From Here?
By the next week, Cuddy and Wilson had stopped discussing Cameron, but not stopped discussing House. They worried about him constantly, and even when he was not the direct subject of conversation, all roads appeared to lead back to him as every story, every reminiscence, every concern seemed tinged with his influence.
Cuddy considered, as she played her fingers over the touch tone buttons of her cordless phone, whether she ought to maybe consider asking him to come back to work. It was a bad idea, the worst – and yet maybe a good one. She couldn't decide. Things with House had so often been gray and they had turned grayer. She could not hate him as she wanted to, the necessary hate when a relationship turns toxic.
She pushed the thought to the back of her mind as she dialed another construction company, trying to get the best estimate for the best work. Maybe it didn't matter – she made enough as Dean to cover pretty much any price they could ask, but it was the principle of the thing – she hadn't asked to have her crazy ex-boyfriend drive into her home, it wasn't as if this was voluntary remodeling on her part.
Maybe she should make the most of it, she considered – maybe this would be the time to invest in a nice new patio or nicer windows (or maybe much smaller windows so that people cannot easily look into the house). Maybe this would be a blessing in disguise.
She doubted it.
Chase tried to get a hold of Cameron. He called her old cell phone number, but it had been disconnected and the new owner appeared to be a man who spoke only Pashtu and was getting tired of Chase calling him. He hadn't seen her again at the hospital, and he couldn't help but think that maybe she had thought better of her idea and decided to go back to… wherever she had come from.
Even when he tried to shrug it off, he couldn't stop his brain from cycling, bringing her back to the forefront even when he had no desire for her to be there. He was thinking about Thirteen now, so often, and he had decided that he could be happy with her, he really could. He truly could, if Cameron would get out of his head for good. But every smile or touch from Remy reminded him of smiles and touches from Cameron. He was lost.
Thirteen was quickly getting irritated with the whole thing. At the moment, Chase was trying to talk with her, but was looking past her at the wall and thinking of Cameron.
"Foreman doesn't have to be such an ass," she continued, but underneath the comment was the implication that Chase didn't have to be one, either. He hadn't looked directly at her the entire conversation, and she was tempted to put her foot down and tell him that if he wasn't going to pay attention, then what was the point of doing this? If she had wanted closed off and impossible to reach, she could have stayed with Foreman. At least he wouldn't be comparing her to Cameron.
House didn't talk to Cameron for that week, either. The whole thing seemed like a mistake now – how could he have been so stupid? It was another idealistic Cameron plot, one that would never work. There was no way he would ask her to try again – hell, he hadn't even asked her in the first place, only acquiesced. She could keep her hare-brained schemes to herself from now on; now was no time for false hope. He needed to accept the inevitable, the bad news that maybe wasn't actually all that bad. He would be done.
He could just be done with all of it – with the lingering reminders of how wrong everything had gone with Cuddy. Maybe it was actually better this way; he wouldn't have to deal with wasting away and being a burden on her. He would have never come back if he had had a choice; he would have stayed in Antigua and spent his final days sipping tequila and dancing with half-naked girls, but they had shipped him back like a defective product.
But what if it did work? What if Cameron's crazy idealistic scheme worked halfway or part-way? What if the universe finally decided things in his favor for once in his life?
He didn't know what he would do then – it was, if anything, far scarier than it not working and him being able to write it off as a loss and say "sayonara" to the whole damn cruel world. What did he do if it worked? If Cameron had this kid, was he supposed to take care of it? Or was he supposed to just say "thanks", extract the bone marrow, and then continue on his way? Was he supposed to stay with Cameron out of gratitude? With her kid out of obligation? Was he supposed to just take the gift she was giving him and just leave?
Or should he just cut his losses now, leave in the night, and go somewhere else to die? Maybe Florida would be nice, or even just New York – somewhere with a lot of hookers and somewhere where nobody knew his name, where nobody expected him to come running back and solve a case when he thought he had finally gotten away from – from – from the only thing he really loved in his life. It was too damn twisted and complicated and hellish to understand, and it was only going to get harder if Cameron succeeded.
He didn't want her to succeed. He wanted her to see that the world was the crapsack place he had spent all those years telling her it was. He wanted to run off and die happy. Or die miserable. Or just die. Was that so much to ask?
House twiddled the Vicodin bottle between his fingers and sighed. Life shouldn't be this difficult, but it is. Dying shouldn't be this difficult – but it's harder.