AU after 6.08. I've been working on this for a while, and have it completed, so everything should be up within the next few days.
Why did he want what he couldn't have?
Because what he couldn't have was infinitely better than what he did have, a miserable, lonely existence, and that one thing that could make him morph into a person whose emotions remotely resembled happiness and contentment.
As irrational as it seemed, to spend even his waking hours adrift in fantasy, it was the only world in which she didn't go home to someone other than himself.
He could deny it out loud all he wanted, but there was still a large part of him, growing stronger and more assertive every day, that wished his delusions of happiness had continued, to the point where his traumatized brain had showed him what life was like for the misanthropic jerks who could give up their pride and get what they wanted.
He had just come from a very heated argument with Cuddy, and that had done nothing to keep his mind in reality, in the things that needed to happen there and then.
He ignored a newly rehired Taub as the shorter doctor explained about their current patient's liver failure, and walked into his office, mind whirling with a thousand things.
Different theories flew around his head, as well as pictures that would best be viewed later, and a throbbing sense of failure.
Fantasy allowed him to dwell on the things that he wanted to remember; reality let everything in.
He wanted to focus on the look on Foreman's face when he had first regained his license.
The smell of pancakes wafting through Wilson's apartment, his best friend yelling to the living room that House needed to pick up more macadamia nuts if they were going to eat House's favourite breakfast every morning.
The smile on his own face, a rare, beautiful thing, when had had gotten a secluded punk boy to trust him enough to clean the weeks old deep laceration on his arm, a thing that only his girlfriend had been trusted to do, a thing that a recently deceased car accident victim could never do, mumbled excuses about trust disappearing as soon as stories of his own childhood and overbearing father flowed from his lips, as easily as scotch had once flowed into the glasses he would leave by the piano. (It had almost been worth it, the renewed requirement for clinic duty).
The look on Cuddy's face when she realized just how much it hurt him that he was untrustable, unreliable, a liability and a bad investment, at least according to what he had gleaned from her reluctantly watchful behaviour.
The beautiful, delicious sound that the door made when he slammed it in anger, after he shouted to her beautiful, vulturistic face that he loved her, okay, would that ever be enough?
He wanted to remember these things, they were crisp, sharp, intense memories and he wanted to have something to remind him that life wasn't only lived at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey.
Everything else was hazy, and he didn't need it in his head.
He didn't need the sound of Foreman's voice telling him that just because he had his license back, he wasn't in the clear, reminding him of the duties that belonged to him once more.
He didn't need the cold, hard stare that he had gotten from an 18-year old's disapproving father, after he had escorted the now smiling young man out of Exam Room 2.
And he most definitely didn't need the memory of Lisa Cuddy's walls up, cold, uncaring stare after he had poured out the little bit of heart that he could actually get out of his chest to her.
He realized, clenching at his over-sized tennis fall, that she could never populate his fantasies again, not after that argument, because every imagined smile, every fabricated kiss, every invented touch would fall through at the memory of her finally not caring.
Maybe this was the breaking point, when weak medications and Wilson's friendship and his medical puzzles couldn't do anything more to ease the pain, the pain that seemed to have spread everywhere in his body, as if his maimed thigh had held a cancer and the emotional stress had caused it migrate throughout his system.
It was funny that he had picked cancer, the miserable specialty of his now obviously troubled friend.
Perhaps some sort of infectious disease would have been more appropriate; after all, he and Wilson had both slipped further into their respective depressions at around the same time.
House stopped at a bench outside of the hospital, after his bitter musings had caused him to get up, mutter a possible diagnosis for his team to note, walk to the elevator, through the front lobby (not sparing even a glance at the Dean of Medicine's office) and out the front door, to the harsh bitter cold that offered a contrast to the pulsing hot emptiness that he felt.
He sat down, feeling like shit, secretly reveling in the chill of the stone bench.
He put his head in his hands and looked through his fingers at the ground, knowing just how the brown, lifeless, and frostbitten patch of dirt felt.
He felt a presence sit next to him, feminine, and he wondered for a hopeless, irrational, desperate moment if it were Cuddy.
He felt a thrill of disappointment when he realized it was a numb, red-rimmed Allison Cameron.
She was no longer living with Chase, but had stayed at a hotel, waiting for the day an airplane would take her out of the poisoned world she had been immersed in.
"What the hell's wrong with you?" he asked, in his true, blunt, House fashion.
"As if you don't know," she replied clippedly, as if the very action of responding was something that cost too much effort. House remained silent, still staring down at the ground. "Of course you know," she continued, obviously wanting to let off some steam. "Because you're the reason he isn't coming with me, you're the reason that he's staying here, ending our marriage, it's all because YOU convinced him to!" House hadn't wanted Cameron to be the one sitting next to him for this precise reason: she would yell at him for what she considered to be an act of deepest betrayal. She deserved the wake-up call; she deserved the realization that Robert Chase couldn't cure her of her sickness for helping people.
"Is it MY fault that I pointed out that he would be better off staying here, where he can do well and not have to worry about a wife that isn't right for him, a wife who thought that he had been poisoned into evil?"
She scoffed at that. "And what exactly would you know about who's right for Chase?" she asked heatedly.
"I know that you two were built on a rocky foundation, and that it was only inevitable that your whole romance would blow up in your face."
"Hmm, so the fact that you've just ruined my life doesn't mean anything to you? I knew you were a bastard, but I thought that you maybe could feel some remorse."
Bitter Cameron, she was one of the Camerons that he liked the most. Gone was the soft, fluffy, caring doctor, now he saw the woman who had been through a comparable hell, albeit not as bad as anything he had been through.
"Remorse over what, fixing something that shouldn't have been broken in the first place?" he replied, feeling his misery intensifying; he hadn't wanted to think about anything else depressing, and yet here was a woman who needed to unload on him, who possibly, with correctly-placed stabs, could coax some sort of guilt out of him, guilt that he didn't need in his already fragile physical and mental state.
"Are you saying that we were just doomed from the start, House? That we were just so incompatible that our entire relationship was just a ticking time bomb?"
"I'm saying, you deserve better than him, and he deserves better than you. You want to fix people; there wasn't much to fix with Chase, at least nothing that you could do any more than surface damage to." She looked surprised at his response, as if she were unsure that he could be serious about something like this. "And Chase is too selfish for you, too sensitive; he can't deal with your reluctance to let him it. He never trusted that you would support him in ANYTHING that he did. He didn't think that you would ever forgive him for killing Dibala, and so he didn't tell you until you finally guilted him enough. You wanted to form connections with broken people, and Chase wanted romance, the kind of relationship that could last forever and never fade into the background. The caring that you two had for each other, the lust that you two shared, the long history of friendship, it wasn't enough. Nothing is ever enough, nothing will ever be enough." He finished his speech with a sad look at his feet, hating that the words he had spoken were true and would be true forever.
"Are you sure you're still talking about me and Chase?" He could feel her angry voice softening, the opportunity to comfort overcoming any resentment she wanted to express.
He supposed it was instinctual to her, helping people who were in need.
He somehow hadn't been born with that gene, he was born with the want to find answers and solve puzzles, a need that helped people as a byproduct in his profession.
"Why wouldn't I be?" he mumbled, looking up at her and looking down just as quickly, seeing the look of compassion despite the best reasons to ignore him, the look that he had learned to despise and resent over the years. "You two are the hot gossip around here; everyone at the Nurse's Station is abuzz with the latest on the Chases."
"Yeah, I'm sure that you're sitting out here in the cold on this bench without a jacket to get away from the droves of updates on my personal life. Something's wrong with you." Sometimes he missed her deadpan sarcasm; it was infinitely more entertaining than Foreman's brand.
The emotion in hers was subtle, whereas his was non-existent.
What he didn't miss was what she was doing now; the waves of compassion and pity were what had turned him off of her in the first place.
He wasn't attracted to beauty, he could find that anywhere. He wanted someone who could keep up with him without getting their feelings easily hurt, without falling prey to his self-destructiveness, a profile that seemed to fit no one in his life.
Except Lydia, a voice in his head reminded him, but thinking about her, when she was in Arizona, out of reach, physically, emotionally, and ethically, wasn't something that was good for him.
"Wow, what an incredible revelation! You should get some sort of award for that, Cameron; no one else has ever noticed that I'm wallowing in my own misery."
House didn't know what he would do without the concept of sarcasm. His deflections kept him afloat in a world that he could cope with, a world without his emotions out in the open, ready to be dissected by the nearest person who cared.
"So you're admitting to being depressed?"
He had been formally diagnosed with the depression by Dr. Nolan, the denial that he had carried with him all of his life finally snatched from him.
"I'm not depressed. I was depressed, but I'm not now." Medications, they were supposed to be managing his symptoms, but somehow sorrow had crept back in.
"You're just miserable."
"Yeah." he answered flatly, staring at the dirt beneath his eyes more intently, as if focusing on it enough would stop the unwanted tears from pooling in his eyes.
"Why?" There were a thousand reasons for his misery; half could be recognized by other people, the other half he kept to himself. That was the way that he kept sane, rational, functional, different pains locked up in different boxes.
"Why would I tell you? You'd probably go all lost puppy on me and drag me back to your tortured soul's shelter for some warm cocoa and sympathy. I get enough of the ridiculous caring from Wilson. You don't need to dote on me; in case you haven't noticed, I'm a big boy and I can function on my own." He injected bitterness into his words because it was what he felt, not towards her but towards himself.
"Well, I guess I'll be going then." she replied icily, giving him a cold, hating stare, but she still couldn't pierce him with her gaze, as much as she tried. "Have a nice life House; I'm sure that I will." She made to leave, but House grabbed onto her arm. He didn't want this to be the last interaction that they ever had, knowing that it would just be another guilt-ridden thing that would eat away at him. He wasn't going soft, but he was trying to be human, at least a little bit, something that could get people to believe him a little bit more.
"Don't go." He mumbled, wondering if an apology was a necessary sacrifice, deciding that any chance of talking to someone, of making himself feel worthwhile and not better off dead, lying in a pool of his own vomit, would probably be with Cameron. "I'm, I'm sorry. Just trying to figure things out." Predictably her face softened, and she sat back down, as he turned his head back away from her.
"What's wrong?" she asked delicately, in a voice that pained House. She was going back into her saviour mode, but as much as he hated to be the subject of her caring, he didn't have anyone else to turn to.
Wilson was on the brink of a breakdown, that much House could tell, and so he tried to tiptoe around him, an action that the old House would have scoffed at, but over the months he had learned to value his friendship with the oncologist more than he thought he could have.
No one on his team would care enough to listen to his personal problems, not after they had all seen the wall he had put up around himself.
Cuddy wasn't an option, she was the problem.
"Do you, wanna maybe go back to my place, have a few drinks?" he asked quietly, not looking into her eyes. It was an unusual request, a fact that she pointed out.
She hated him, she had made that clear, and yet, the inevitable pull that drew her towards him acted upon her.
"You're hurting, I'm hurting, we should drown out the pain together. That way if we both get alcohol poisoning, the ambulance only has to go to one place." She knew that there was a reason beyond the logistics, and suspected that he just needed some company. Presumably Wilson wasn't available. She had seen very little of the man lately, and didn't want to ask House about him, in case he was yet another cause of the older man's pain.
"Why would I want to get wasted with the man that ruined my marriage?" she asked, still trying to figure out whether or not she wanted to take him up on his offer. It wasn't something she had ever done before, casual drinks with him. The old Cameron would have jumped at the chance, but though her instincts for caring were still intact, her impulses were blunted, and she proceeded with caution in nearly everything that she did.
"I told you, it wasn't me that ruined the marriage, the marriage ruined the marriage. He thought he was ready for this type of commitment to you, you were angry at yourself for being afraid of his proposal and you wanted to prove to yourself that you could involve yourself with him so deeply. You were both deluded into thinking that you could just pretend that your lives were perfect and that everything would turn into a fairytale ending. Well, the original Grimm's tales weren't so pleasant, not until optimistic, sappy-seeking people like you and Chase transformed them into dreams that little children could have, with happy, conflict-free endings. But the base of the idea doesn't change, the people that you and Chase are won't change, you're both damaged and have too many problems to have anything resembling a healthy relationship." He went off on rants like this, wanting to prove to the other people that life wasn't something to be happy about, it was something to respect and fear and cherish, when he was feeling especially bitter.
"Well, that's reassuring." Cameron muttered, looking up into the grey sky, her eyes tearing up again. "So who exactly can I have a healthy, meaningful relationship with, then? If you're right and I only need, then who exactly is healthy for me?"
"How am I supposed to know? I'm not exactly the Madame Curie of successful personal relationships. All I know is that if I hadn't pushed him into staying, you two would have been miserable. If you thought that you and Chase could have just moved on after such a large breach of trust, then you're more naïve than he is." Cameron was silent after that, thinking about all the ways in which House was right and silently hating him for it.
He was always right, that was the foundation of all of his interactions with people.
"So, we going back to my place for drinks?" he asked brightly, breaking the silence.
She sat in silence awhile, conflicting impulses and emotions battling for the right to decide her reply, before a quiet "Yeah." escaped her lips and she allowed herself to follow his limping steps to his car.
She would most likely live to regret this, but her life was already full of things that she wanted to forget, and one more day with Dr. Gregory House couldn't possibly do any more damage than had already been done.
FYI, this is NOT a House/Cameron fic, but a friendship fic. With some romance later. But not between House and Cameron. Because they don't belong together. But Cameron is a good character. So I'm using her.