Week Nine: Blood is Thicker Than Water
Cameron began to dream about her child. Not in a specific sense, as if she saw the baby's face or its eyes or even knew its name, but in a vague, water-color kind of way, like a blurry painting she was supposed to pretend to know the meaning of. A Rorscach test.
In her dreams, she was walking along a beach, with no shoes, holding this child's hand. Their grip was tight. There were waves in the distance, and seagulls, too. Maybe it was the shore she was at; she never had time to go to the shore when working for House. Her parents had asked, though, when she had first moved to New Jersey, they'd asked her when she was going to the shore.
She was walking somewhere, but she had no idea where. Out into the sunset, she supposed, but there was no end in sight.
And then the waves started to get higher. Started to sweep over them both, threaten to drown them both. Cameron tried to hold on to the baby but everything was slipping, everything was too slick and the current was too rough.
She turned her head by force and looked to see House standing on the beach, just watching, cane in hand like he wanted to help but was unable, was rooted to the spot.
She sprung awake gasping and crying, twitching. She was twisted in the sheets and sweat was all over her forehead.
Cameron climbed out of bed and groaned. Great. She hoped this stuff wasn't going to be happening for another seven months. That wouldn't make work any easier; she got such limited sleep as it was and now it was going to be interrupted with that kind of business?
Her life just couldn't get any worse right about now.
But as she dressed, she was surprised to find her heart feeling decidedly light. There had been something in it, something in having that hand in hers, that must have done that.
It was odd. She figured there had to be something in the hormones, in that would deal, that had led to this. She didn't want to look for some kind of philosophical idea about the "glow" that she was supposed to be projecting outward. As much as she had felt for House in her past, in her more naïve days, this whole process served a practical purpose. There was no need for her to get caught up in nuances and assume that it ought to be more than it was.
There wasn't any time to just sit around, anyway, and just figure it all out. She had work to do. She couldn't let this get in the way of everything else she had to accomplish. On which purpose, if she was really going to stay in Princeton, at least for now, she was really going to need a job. She had subsided on her savings for a little while, but that wouldn't last her forever, especially with doctor's visits and other baby-related expenses.
She reached up and rubbed her head. She hadn't really thought this out, had she?
Cameron could always ask House for her old job back. Of course, she could do that. She could even go to Cuddy about it and see if she could intercede with House. But with Chase there? And Cuddy didn't seem to be House's biggest fan at the moment, either, nor Cameron's, so the likelihood she'd be doing either of them any favors right now was a slim one.
Neither of those were the biggest reason, though.
The main thing was that she didn't want to stand around and watch House die, watch time go through the hourglass and fade away.
She began to sort through her CVs, getting rid of references who were no longer relevant (she deleted House's name and re-pasted it four times before deciding to keep it) and changing her font size and headings color. Anything to be a little more appealing. Could a piece of paper really tell a hospital what they needed to know? If they had wanted to see Cameron at work, they should have seen her at work, saving lives, trying to give House a little more morality and a little less incentive to run over hospital ethics with a bulldozer.
She sighed. Admittedly, if any other hospitals knew half the stuff she had gotten mixed up in – or, hell, the real reason she'd left Princeton-Plainsboro in the first place – they would throw out her application without a second glance, no matter how good a doctor she was. So maybe the answer was just to appear normal, nonthreatening. A good ER doctor, one that could smile, be pleasant, have good bedside manner and get the job done. Maybe that was her place, back in the ER.
It hadn't been nearly as exciting as working for House, but it hadn't been a tenth as heart-wrenching, either. It was so often open and shut cases, bloody noses and people with a nasty flu and ear infections. There wasn't the same mystery, but she also knew…
Knew what were lost causes right off the bat.
There was enough mystery right in front of her; hell, right inside her. Growing. She'd always wanted kids, but like everything…
What was she even planning to do once this one came into the world? How would she treat them? Would she love them automatically? That had to be how it worked, you looked at this tiny person and they were yours and you just loved them.
Or would she just see the kid as a means to an end? Had she become that callous from being around House too long?
Was blood thicker than water? Would they be connected?
And shit, why did she have to figure these things out now? Why was it all hitting her in the face now? Couldn't she break them down, make them more manageable, fix them one by one, put them on a whiteboard and cancel them out if they were too complicated, maybe come back to them later?
But she had chosen this. She would just have to follow through. There was no way around it.