Cameron followed House's loping gait to the front door and slipped under his arms as he held the door open for her, a gesture that betrayed his lack of confidence about the situation.
Relatively few remarks were made as he strode over to the kitchen, fetching a bottle of whiskey (Wilson had hidden it well, but boredom had bred strange activities) and two glasses.
He sat down on the dark brown leather couch, and gestured for her awkwardly standing form to sit down next to him.
She complied, nervously sitting a few feet away from him, taking advantage of the spacious piece of furniture.
"You don't need to sit that far from me, I'm not going to bite." Unless you want me to, Cameron thought, expecting the comment to rise from his lips, but it never came.
She shifted closer, under the pretense of grabbing her drink, and sat tensely.
"So, what do people usually talk about when drinking with a colleague?" House asked cheerfully, breaking the silence. She took a sip of her drink, wincing as the liquor slid down her throat.
"I don't know." she half-muttered, half-choked.
'Don't do much of the hard drinking?" House asked, picking up on her discomfort at consuming the alcohol. "More of a wine person?"
"Yeah." she replied, not wanting to go into the detail of the last time she had consumed a large amount of hard alcohol, wincing at the memory of the solid bathroom floor in the bar and the ear-splitting knocks she had endured before the bartender had unlocked the door and dragged her body out of there.
It had been one week after her husband had died.
House took a large gulp of his drink, and leaned back against the couch, looking up at the ceiling.
Cameron remained in her position, sitting forward and keeping her legs firmly together.
"Geez, Cameron, I invite you to my home and you can't even relax? Have more booze; it'll make you feel better." Cameron sighed and turned around. Now was as good a time as ever.
"Why did you invite me here, House?" she asked, looking into his eyes. "Is it because you thought I would be fun drunk? Or maybe you thought I would spill something about Chase and you could blackmail him into doing your dirty work for the rest of your life." Of course, she assumed the worst about him, but he couldn't admit to her how much that hurt him, not yet, not when he still had the façade to keep up.
"If I wanted someone who was fun drunk, I would have gotten Wilson to come home early. Chase already does all my surgeries for me, so blackmail wouldn't do much, although it might get him to do some of my clinic hours." he replied, not giving her an answer.
"So I'm here because…?"
"I…I wanted to talk to someone." House said quietly, looking away from her, ashamed.
That was an answer that Cameron hadn't been expecting.
"Don't you have a therapist for that?" From what she had heard, House's relationship with his shrink had actually helped him quite a bit.
"I… already talked to Nolan. He… said that I should try…" House trailed off and looked at Cameron, looking like a lost little boy, reminding her of a patient she had seen in the ER what seemed like an eternity ago. "Letting her go." he finished, talking another long drink of his whiskey.
Her heart ached for him at that moment, but she also felt a strange sense of pride.
He had finally admitted to her that he was in pain, that he was human, and that he wanted something that he couldn't have.
He had shown his vulnerability, if not completely willingly then at least without his usual caution in dealing with the irrational and emotional.
Despite this, though, she had no idea what to say to him.
She wasn't practiced in the art of comforting the uncomfortable, despite her best efforts to the contrary.
"But you don't want to…" she said slowly, testing the waters.
"Of course I don't want to," he said bitterly, smiling grimly. "But what choice do I have? She doesn't feel the same way, at least not about me. I'm sure you've seen her boyfriend around the hospital." he finished nastily, displaying his obvious loathing for the man.
Cameron nodded slowly, chancing a glace back up at her former boss, who had refilled his glass.
Hers remained on the coffee table, only missing a few mouthfuls of whiskey.
"Well, then you'll know how happy they are together. I shouldn't ruin that." His voice betrayed the sadness he felt, and she found herself touching his forearm with her hand in comfort, but he just shrugged it off.
"I shouldn't be burdening you with this." he muttered, taking another drink. She looked at him, concerned, knowing that at this rate, he would be on the floor in a pile of his own vomit before nightfall.
"Should you be drinking that much?" she asked weakly, bracing herself for his response. It never came though, and they sat in silence together, as he swirled the amber liquid around the crystal glass.
"I was an alcoholic." House finally said, breaking the silence.
"I would come home from work and drink until I passed out. Trivial things would trigger it. A disappointed look from Wilson, things that patients said, things that I saw in the clinic, sometimes patients dying, there was never a rational reason. I… pretended that the things that people said to me didn't matter. I would brush them off and go on like I always did, but I was… depressed. The Vicodin, it helped with the pain, and the alcohol blurred everything else out, but sometimes it wasn't enough. Sometimes I would wonder what the hell I was doing, still alive, when I should have died years ago. I would try and convince myself that I knew the truth and that was all that mattered, but it wasn't enough. Nothing would ever be enough. I would never be enough, for anyone."
He finished his speech with a self-conscious mumble, immediately wishing that he could just suck the words he had spoken back into his mouth.
Undoubtedly she would spout some sort of nonsense about all over the people he cures every year, about the scads of people who looked up to him, yeah, he had heard that all before. It never made a difference.
"House, you save hundreds of lives, you-" Cameron told him, trying, just as he had predicted, to let him know why he was still worth it, even if he didn't feel like he was, but he cut her off.
"That's just my job. If I didn't have my job, I wouldn't be anything…" He trailed off and looked back at his feet, and she knew what he was thinking about.
He was thinking about a time, not so long ago, when he hadn't been anything at all, according to his definition of worthiness, when he didn't have his job, or even his rational mind.
She was sure that he was going back to everything he had been through, an experience that she knew next to nothing about.
Her mind burned with curiousity about his stay at Mayfield, but she didn't want to close him up by pushing him too far, and so she remained quiet again.
He broke the silence once more. "I was scared that I was never going to get out of there, at one point." he started quietly, still not looking at her.
"I had tried to cheat, to scam my way out, after I had detoxed. He… he made me stay, even though I wasn't hallucinating anymore, because I thought that I could get better. I'm… happy that he did that. I don't know where I would be if he hadn't. Probably passed out on a street corner, looking for a heroin fix."
He had meant to make that last part a joke, to lighten the somber mood that he had put the room into, but there was too much truth in the statement.
Had he not gotten better, had he not realized that happiness could be achieved, he would still be wallowing in his misery, nothing to his name but a bottle of bourbon and a reputation long gone because of what he had become.
But wasn't he wallowing in his misery now?
Weren't the whiskey, and the company, there because he didn't know the mature, adult thing to do about his problem?
But Cuddy was much more than just a problem; she was what was holding him back from contentment, from a life that didn't make him want to join his former employees in the afterlife.
He was happier than he had been before Mayfield, he knew that, and that was what kept him going, what let him try to improve himself and his life.
He just needed to get out of the hole he had fallen into.
He realized that Cameron hadn't said much since he had started talking.
She had taken to staring at the fireplace, as attentively as though there were flames dancing in it.
"Cameron." he said, softly, trying to get her attention, but she was obviously deep in thought. "Cameron!"
She turned around abruptly at the sound of him shouting, her mouth open in surprise.
"Are you… are you okay?" he mumbled, not knowing what he was supposed to do with a woman who was empty and hurting and confused.
"Yeah, I'm, I'm fine." she answered quickly, looking away. "Just thinking…"
"About what?" He hoped she hadn't paid too much attention to his rants about his life, hoped she wouldn't try to talk to him about his feelings, or what he needed to do to move on, because he didn't wanted another therapist, he had just wanted someone who would listen without passing judgment.
"About Chase…" She adopted a wistful, mournful look, but House didn't feel sorry for her, he didn't regret what had happened between his two former employees.
He did, however, feel a strange need to make her stop feeling sorry for herself.
"Are you… going to be okay?" he asked, hoping that if she were to have an emotional breakdown that she would at least have the decency to let him know so he could get his ass out of the room and Jimmy Wilson on the phone.
"I… don't know." she replied, and he cursed inwardly, wondering if the price to pay for a one-sided conversation about his personal issues was enduring her tirades on Robert Chase.
"Are you ever going to know?" he asked, rather more nastily than he had intended, and she whipped her head around to look at him, all traces of sadness replaced with anger.
"How the hell am I supposed to know, House? You don't just get over a divorce, you know, although how you ever would know is beyond me, because I'm sure you're never going to know; no woman in her right mind would ever consider anything remotely resembling marriage with you, because you're so damn closed-off and acerbic that getting anywhere near whatever you have for a heart just screws you up permanently, to the point that you're sitting alone in your room, listening to Shania Twain and screaming your heart out to the pouring rain as your life just floats on past you."
She finished her rant with a large huff of breath and an even larger gulp of whiskey, tears streaming down her face from the burning sensation in her throat and the burning sensation in her chest.
"Well, you seem to be awfully descriptive of such a situation to not-"
"To not what, House? To not have been there before? Fine, that's what I did, after our 'date', I went home and I sobbed for hours. You broke my heart that night, my stupid, naïve, over-eager heart. The same heart that took Chase in, the same heart that eventually gave in to his 'It's Tuesday' routine and his unhappiness at only having one drawer, the same heart that found the engagement ring in his socks and didn't know what to do about it, the same heart that married him, the same heart that got broken when it found out about the thing that he was hiding from me. You and Foreman knew about it, and yet, nothing! So forgive me if I'm not over it, if a little tiny part isn't even over you, because that same heart saw its husband die. So don't you talk to me about broken hearts, or ordeals, because I know what it's like. I know what its like to be in love with someone and not know what to do about the inevitable crash that comes later. "
He really had nothing to say to that.
He had no desire to stir her up again by pointing out that she had just admitted to everything he had ever said about her.
"Are you going to say something sarcastic, or are going just going to stare at me like I've grown a set of wings?" He blinked at her question, then responded.
"No, I thought staring at you would give me a better chance of getting into your pants." House replied sarcastically, sighing when she continued to attempt to pierce him with her glare.
"You going to say anything else, or are you done pouring your heart out for the day? Is it my turn now?"
"You've already done enough heart-pouring, House."
"Yeah, well, that was my old limit. I grew three heart sizes more while in the mental ward, so I have a lot more to rant about."
"Yeah? What more do you have to say, House? You've already screamed to Cuddy that you love her, you've already told me about your alcoholism and your rehab. What else is there to say? Going to talk about your abusive childhood or your agony over Wilson's coming mental breakdown?"
The last two she had said in sarcasm, but one look into House's darkening blue eyes told her the truth. She gasped, struggling for apologies.
"House, I'm sorry, I meant it as-I didn't think-" Her platitudes died in her throat as she saw the dangerous look on his face, his features shifting from the warning signs to full-blown anguish.
"You're right, you DIDN'T think! Ever wonder what exactly screwed me up so bad? Ever wonder if there was ever MORE to my pain, more to my depression, more to my understanding of just how FUCKED UP the world is?"
Her eyes widened, and filled with tears, but he disregarded them, needing to keep going, not knowing how to end the stream of thoughts that seemed to have simply burst from his mouth, words flowing from his lips, unstoppable, the dam finally broken.
"I've been there, Cameron. I've been there, when an officer is whipped for his disobedience, I've been there, when a good wife is slapped because of her screw-ups, I've been there, when an innocent boy-"
And at this point, tears started flowing freely out of his heavy eyes, onto his weathered face and onto the couch-
"When an innocent boy has to sit in an ice bath, because he wouldn't listen to his father, because he thought that he knew everything and that this one time, just one more time, his father was wrong."
His voice was choked, and while he could hardly get the words out, she heard every single one of them, loud and clear, and never before had she ever felt so helpless.
" I've survived these things, and I know that they live with you forever, and that no amount of therapy will ever make them seem better than they were. So yeah, maybe I WILL go on about my childhood, and how it felt to never be in the same place long enough to a make real friend, and while I'm at it, maybe I will tell you about how Wilson's losing his mind and how I can't stop thinking about how I should have been there for him, a little bit, because he IS going to have a breakdown, and I'm going to have to be there for him now. But you never thought about those things, did you, Cameron, because it NEVER occurred to you that maybe I had problems behind my addictions, and that yeah, maybe I am going to be facing bigger things that Cuddy and some guy that I can't get rid of."
At the end of his speech, his eyes were red, his breath was shaky, and his face was wet, wetter than it had been in a long time, covered in tears that had finally been released after weeks of holding them in. The last time he had cried had been when he had seen them walk off together, and he had promised himself that he wouldn't cry anymore, that he would throw himself into his work and pretend that he didn't need her affections.
"House…"
He said nothing at that, but allowed himself to be taken in by her arms, allowed himself to continue his sobbing, against her chest, allowed himself to let loose everything he had ever felt, allowed himself to not be who the rest of the world saw for a few heartbreaking minutes.
"I don't, I don't…I don't know what to do anymore…"
"Shhhhhh…. Everything's going to be just fine…" She said these words knowing that they weren't true, that they likely would never be true, for anyone.
"No… no it's not, I can't do anything about it, he's, he's going to have a breakdown and I'm not going to be able to help him…"
"Shhhhh… Yes you are, House, you can help him. You're his best friend, he'll listen to you."
"He never listens to me; he just assumes that I'm being mocking and deflective. I don't know how to help… I can't help…."
"Yes you can, House, you've been through it before. You got help for yourself, you can help Wilson." At this point she was spouting nonsense; she had no idea what was going on with Wilson and was clutching at straws. But some of it seemed to have an affect on House, who was removing himself from her arms, after a brief stay that seemed to have calmed him down.
"I'm sorry about th-"
"Shhhh…" Cameron said, once again, and it seemed to shut him up, at least for the time being. She didn't want to hear him apologize for showing his human side, that wasn't something to feel guilt over.
"Bet you didn't expect to be…comforting me." House said, in between wobbly, deep breaths. "Bet you thought you would be… crying into my arms and I'd… be making it all better. But… nothing's going to be all better. Nothing's going to turn out… right."
"Yes it will, House. Something's going to turn out right. You'll, you'll get her eventually, I know you will."
"Yeah?" he replied with shaky laughter. "And what if I can't wait? What if…I can't live like this, knowing…that she's with someone else."
"House, you've been through worse. Your life is good now, you're off Vicodin, you're starting to have meaningful relationships with people, that's a huge step for you! You can't give up now, you're finally improving!" At least, that was what she had wanted to believe. But his ridiculously manipulative behaviour during their last case had convinced her otherwise, her opinion of him sinking lower still.
But she still had hope, her stubbornly good mind refused to give that up.
Her hopeful look almost made him turn away, but he couldn't, her eyes were too earnest and bright.
"Then why do I still feel like I'm trapped? Why do I come home and wonder if what I've accomplished is enough to keep me motivated to live?" She didn't have an answer for that, and he didn't expect her to.
His pain shouldn't give him an excuse to destroy everything he touched, and yet, his angst managed to wrestle sympathy from her, and she gave him platitudes, reassurances, encouragements.
"House. You're a good person, beneath all of your deflection and arrogance and pain. Don't let one woman make you think otherwise." When the words left her mouth, she realized her hypocrisy, that her placating statement had voided all the arguments she had given him the night she left the job, but he didn't notice the contradiction; in his hurt, he had ignored all else.
"What if that's what I tell myself? Everyday, when I see what I've become." She looked into his miserable blue eyes, and couldn't help the look of pity that escaped from her own pair. "Good God, that sounded cliché." he added in afterthought, and looked away.
"House…" Her whining voice cut through his misery like a knife, and he snapped.
"What?" he barked at her, and she shrunk away in alarm. "It's OKAY to be miserable; it's okay to feel like complete crap 'cause I can't even get the one woman that I have a chance in hell of working out with to see that I actually love her? It's NORMAL, to come home, night after night, and wonder just how fast the end is coming, to wonder when I'M going to have to be the caretaker and when Wilson's going to be the one who's needy? Is it nothing to be ASHAMED about, preferring the fantasy to reality, wondering what the worst thing would have been if I had just continued on in my delusion?" His eyes were frightening, and she found herself unable to look away.
I can't even look myself in the mirror, not without wondering where the hell all the lines in my face came from; how all the time went by without me noticing it; when the time will come when I just give up and let myself go; what the final straw will be; who will find me on the floor in my office, gun in my hand, hole in my head. You can't tell me that it's OKAY to feel these things, because it's not! I'm a miserable bastard, and no one deserves the burden of having to look after me. You shouldn't even be here!" He finished his rant with a heavy note of bitterness, and Cameron took his face in her hands, heart broken over everything that he felt.
"You are NOT worthless, you are NOT just a miserable bastard, you are an amazing, complicated, terrible, wonderful person. There are people who care about you; there are people who want you to be happy!"
"Yeah? Like who?" he asked quietly, and she moved his face so that she was looking directly into his eyes, their noses almost touching, his heavy, ragged breaths blowing into her face, coming in contact with the tears that still covered her face., chilling her, but not as much as his words had.
"Wilson does. Chase does. I know that Taub does, even if he seems just as miserable as you. Thirteen does. Hell, I'm sure that even Foreman does." House scoffed at that, but didn't turn his head away. She paused before speaking, disappointed in the fact that the words she was about to speak were still true. "I care about you. And I know that even if she doesn't show it, Cuddy cares about you a lot, and that's why she hid her relationship from you, not because she didn't want you barging in on her dates, or mocking her with Wilson, but because she didn't want to hurt you. But she didn't realize that the act of hiding it from you was the worst thing that she could have done. Because even though you try to hide it, being trusted is something very important to you. And knowing that she doesn't think that she can rely on you to be the adult and not screw things up hurts you more than she'll ever know." House blinked away rebellious tears and willed himself not to cry again.
Cameron had spoken truths more powerful than he had ever thought her capable of, and for that he was proud of the woman she had become.
"Why… why do you care about me so much?" Again, his face resembled the face of the little boy in the ER, just as reluctant to believe what she said, just as afraid of bad news, just as closed off and yet ashamedly hopeful.
"Because-" She wondered if she was really going to do it, to say something that she was sure he hadn't heard in years, and decided that tonight, her last night, was the night for him to hear it. "Because, I love you." She gave a sad smile, and his eyes widened in surprise, his mouth opening and words stopping in his throat.
"Wha-….why…? What have I ever done to get your love? I understand that in your young naivety, you fell for the bad boy, but now? I've been nothing short of horrible to you; you have no business loving me. You should have given up on that years ago; loving me is something that only helpless, ignorant people do." He was looking at her incredulously, almost disappointed, and she supposed that disappointment was a valid reaction; after all, she had gotten married and was supposed to be over him. But what Gregory House didn't realize was that there were different kinds of love, and the feelings she felt toward him were the sort of feelings that Wilson felt, caring, compassion, a need to keep him from harming himself in his endless quests for truth.
She relinquished his face from her grasp, and backed away from him.
"Yeah? Well maybe I AM helpless and ignorant! Or maybe, love is something that just happens, House, something that cannot be rationalized away! You should know that, you're in love with your god-damnned boss!" This wasn't how he was supposed to react; he was supposed be happy that at least someone loved and cared for him.
But no, he had to ruin that by insulting her; well maybe he was right, maybe she was still a confused little girl who had to make herself useful by fixing people.
"Are you jealous, Cameron? Now that you've told me that you're in love with me, I'm supposed to forget about Cuddy and run away with you?"
She seethed in anger, wondering for the umpteenth time why she bothered trying to reason with the man.
"I am NOT 'in love' with you, not anymore! I love you, we're FRIENDS, at least I thought we were! All romantic feelings died out YEARS ago, House! I don't want to BE with you, I want to help you, I want to-"
"Fix me?" He regarded her darkly, and saw the momentary flash of fear in her eyes.
He looked at her in resentment, frustrated at how much she hadn't changed. "Is that what this is all about, is that why you're here, you wanted one last chance to FIX me? Because that's NOT why I asked you to come. I wanted someone to talk to that wouldn't judge me, or try to talk me out of anything. But if you just want to patch up all of the holes in my life, then you can just leave. I don't need another therapist; I need advice that doesn't include undeserved praise or glossed-over accounts of everything that's ever happened to me."
She wasn't the right person for the cold, hard, uncensored facts, but she would try, oh, she would try. Anger was on her side, and everything that she had ever wanted to say to him, everything that she had ever thought would convince him to change, had she had the guts to say it, came spilling out of her lips.
"You want the TRUTH, House? Is that what you want? Because I can tell you the truth, don't you worry. I was only trying to be sensitive on account of you crying earlier, but if you want the hard-as-nails version, here it is. Your life sucks; you're a miserable old man who's got nothing going for him except his intelligence, something that the majority of the population can't care about. You go home to Wilson every night, and that's an unhealthy enough relationship, but now you're trying to go after your boss, and there's not a rat's ass chance in hell that she'll ever go for YOU, because she has a nice stable boyfriend and you're nothing but a bad risk, a liability, an inevitable failure." Her voice shook, but she kept going.
"You're going to die alone, overdosed on some inane drug that you found to block out the pain, pain that's only been intensified by all of the emotions that you've been denying. Wilson, your only friend, will have moved on and left you by then, and some new, just as smart but not as screwed up doctor will have taken your place. That's where I see your life going, House, if you keep up this self-hate and destruction. You really want that, or are you going to stop treating people like crap? When you got out of Mayfield, I had thought that MAYBE you had finally changed for the better. I guess it turned out to be yet another of my naïve hopes."
"Is that really what you believe?" House challenged, knowing that she was lying, that she still believed in the good in him, that she still believed he could overcome his demons and become the person that she had seen in him, all those years ago.
She faltered under his harsh gaze and looked away.
"Yes." She could feel him staring a hole into the back of her head. "No," she said softly, resignedly. "But it's what YOU believe. And I'd do anything, ANYTHING, to change that."
"Because you love me?" he said mockingly, bitterly, hopelessly, knowing that letting her into his emotional fortress would be strategic suicide.
"Because I care about you. Love is just another word to describe not wanting to let you go." Her eyes were sincere, and he didn't doubt that this was what she believed to be the truth.
"You should let me go." he muttered, looking away, but she took his face in her hands once again and forced their eyes together.
"Sometimes you CAN'T. Sometimes someone is just such a huge part of your life that you CAN'T separate from them, as much as you need to. House, I'm LEAVING tomorrow, but you're ALWAYS going to stick with me, no matter what happens. You can't force everyone to just stop caring about you because it's not good for them. It's rare that we ever do anything that's good for us."
House remained silent after that, but his eyes were quietly pleading with hers, an unspoken cry for acceptance and trust.
"No one means to hurt you, House. They just do."
He didn't have anything to say to her after that.
Because he was sure that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of people who wanted to hurt him.
He though back to the man who had shot him, to Tritter, to all of his enemies back in university.
Surely those people felt no compassion towards him; surely they had meant all of the harm that had come to him.
"Nobody who CARES about you wants to hurt you." Cameron said, noticing his silence and faraway look. "Those are the people that matter, anyone who doesn't care about you isn't worth your time."
He remained silent, looking down at the space between their laps, and for the first time since they had gotten into their arguments, she noticed the awkwardness of the situation.
His face was still in her hands, and their noses were almost touching again, but there was no tension, only a sense that she needed to do something about the pain emanating from him, that she needed to stop the pain for at least a little while, be his Vicodin.
And so she crossed the minute distance that was still between them, and kissed his lips softly.
He didn't do anything, didn't even look up, and that angered her; she kissed him again, longer, more tender, full of meaning; she thought he was worth something, she wasn't going to do one thing and say another.
He closed his eyes and allowed her lips to chase his own; he moved with her mouth and suddenly lost himself in the emotion of the moment; he kissed her as if she would float away at the slightest show of passion, but he needn't have worried about that, because there was no passion between them, only a mutual need to feel wanted and needed and not in the way.
House kissed her to know that he could; Cameron kissed him to know that she wasn't too soft not to.
His hands traveled down to her waist and she leaned over him, her blond hair cascading down as House lowered himself down onto the couch, his hands still supporting her body above his own frame.
Their mouths never mingled enough to not be able to be separated a second later, and his hands never drifted southward, keeping their grip around her waist.
But their feather light, whispering kisses could only go on for so long, and soon Cameron was delicately tugging at the bottom of his t-shirt, indicating that she wanted it off, that whatever they were doing, the next step was necessary.
He backed off slightly, looking into her eyes.
"Bedroom?" he asked quietly, full of hesitation and insecurity, and she nodded.
They got off of the couch, its pillows now disturbed, and she followed his loping form down the hall and into his bedroom.