Disclaimer: not mine. I wish they were... :(
Thanks once again to everyone who reviewed. In particular:
LadyKnight19: I got your review and felt the urge to update!
Boy's Don't Cry: don't worry, House will still have a job to go back to!
nodaiibuttodaii: I did know about their engagement, and hope that they'll be very happy together. But as for Cam/Chase...
Saucyduck: Thanks, I love writing it!
danishdynamite, SilvaK, Psycho Strider, Dr. Cameron, sweetgreuy: thank you for all of those lovely reviews!
whoKMH: I'm glad that you saw the parallel between the new (and improved!) conference room and our lovely sunny Cam!
v-volatile: thanks for your review a couple of chapters back. I'm working hard to keep everyone in character (or to make them being out of character believable!)
I hope you guys enjoy this chapter. It's a new style that I'm trying out so please let me know what you think. I know that some of you might be disappointed with it, because it goes over everything so fast, but I really want to get House back quickly so that the sparks can fly!
With the House-problem pretty much disposed of, Allison Cameron felt that she could relax and get on with her job.
The fact that his job (now her job) was helping her keep her mind off recent traumatic events was, admittedly, ironic. But she tried not to think about it too much. Indeed, she tried not to think about House at all; which wasn't easy, since everyone in the hospital was comparing the two of them and evaluating her skills as Department Head.
Foreman and Chase had eventually got over her appointment as their boss. When they realised that she wasn't there to make their lives hell (like House always tried to do) they settled down and started to enjoy themselves.
They enjoyed Cameron's new method of working, and a little friendly competition had sprung up between them; it was always a race to see which one of them could diagnose their patient first. Although there was more work, Cameron made none of the unreasonable demands that House had; they weren't expected to perform tests all night, or lie to patients, or do everything she said without question. She expected them to talk about each other's cases and to try and help each other out. She had increased their clinic hours slightly (they knew that these counted against House's deficit, but both of them turned a blind eye). Allison was in before them every morning, and still in the office when they headed home at night. She continued to make the best coffee they had every tasted and never expected them to answer her mail. Even better, she gave them the most interesting cases and encouraged them to take to time research the articles that they were both writing and hoping to get published in medical journals.
In short, she was pretty close to being a perfect boss. And if sometimes she was a little snappy with them or a little evasive (especially if either of them remarked that she was looking tired), then it was nothing to compare to House's biting sarcasm and irritating smugness.
The two doctors soon settled into things and began to forget what it was like to have a jerk as their boss. They accepted Cameron's efforts to make the office a healthy working environment as the norm, and got on with things.
As for Cameron, since Cuddy had asked her to take over as Head of Diagnostics, her life had changed dramatically.
She did, on average, three hours of clinic duty a day. Only the minimum were logged as being 'Dr. Cameron's clinic hours'- the rest went against House's deficit. Cuddy knew what was going on, but she turned a blind eye- partially because it was none of her business how Cameron chose to keep herself occupied, but mostly because they were always short-staffed at the clinic. So, she kept her mouth shut, and Cameron was to be seen in the clinic (on weekends as well as during the week), dressed in a lab-coat that was three sizes too big for her and wearing a name-tag that read: 'Dr. House.'
If the clinic took up a lot of her time, it was nothing to the amount of time her patients took up. Finally free to choose them herself, she became less selective, not more. Most of the letters and emails she received (all addressed to House, of course) she answered to with positive responses. They averaged six patients a week (some of them overlapping), but Allison wished they could help more. It seemed that the more letters and emails she responded to, the more there were the following day.
Of course, helping people wasn't the only reason that she was working herself to the bone.
House might call her 'weak' and 'naïve', but she was no fool. She was aware that pretty much everyone in the hospital was waiting for her to fall flat on her face. Those who weren't, thought that she was incapable of running a department. To them, she was sweet, innocent Allison Cameron who'd quit her job and come back because she liked her boss. It wasn't that they didn't like her, it was just that her (temporary) promotion set a dangerous precedent. Now, more experienced doctors who had not yet reached such an elevated position were wary.
Cuddy was also watching her like a hawk.
She'd promised Cameron a free rein, but that didn't mean she couldn't monitor what she was up to. Allison knew it, and she understood it. Cuddy had given her the promotion. If anything went wrong, it would be Cuddy's ass on the line.
One of the reasons her boss had kept her word and not interfered with her team was because Cameron had unexpectedly discovered that she had a flair for generating income.
Since she'd taken on the role of Department Head, donations had been flooding in. It was ironic that the qualities that House had always found so annoying and useless in her were now securing donations to his department. The patients liked the way she always tried to find time for them. She was often to be found in the hospital, late at night, chatting to one of her patient's or watching tv with them. The patients' families liked her frankness and her ability to guide them through the inevitable medical jargon that ordinarily left them confused and uneasy.
So, the money rolled in without even having to ask for it, and Cuddy turned a blind eye to the overtime that Dr. Cameron put in- that she knew about, of course.
Cameron actually worked far more than anyone realised. In order to hide the fact from Cuddy, she developed little tricks: like bringing her paperwork home with her instead of doing it in the office (which would have wasted valuable time) or coming in hours earlier than her boss and then pretending that she'd arrived only a few minutes before her.
Yes, she was busy. She was working flat out. But it wasn't just the insane desire to 'fix' people (as House would say) that motivated her. No, she quickly realised that she wasn't working hard enough.
No matter how much time she spent at work, she couldn't avoid the inevitable night alone in her apartment. There, away from the buzz of the hospital, the image of House being shot would come back to haunt her. She dreamt of it when she slept; she saw it when she woke. Even as she worked, it was somewhere in the back of her mind, coiled like a snake, waiting to strike when she was at her most vulnerable. She still managed to sleep, but it was in short staccato bursts; a few hours snatched here and there (and often in House's office chair where she felt safest, for some strange reason that she didn't care to examine).
But when she was alone at home, and it all got too much for her, she would get up out of bed, get dressed and drag her weary body to the piano bar that she'd discovered the day that House woke up from his coma. The music soothed her, and was sometimes the only way she could get the horrible image of him bleeding out of her head.
She supposed that it didn't help that the last time she'd seen him, his life had been hanging in the balance.
How many times had she told herself that going to see him would make it all better? But for some strange reason she couldn't. In the three weeks that he'd lain in that hospital bed, only two floors away from her, recovering from his wounds, she hadn't been able to make it to his room. It wasn't that she hadn't tried, it was just that every time she did, an invisible force seemed to hold her back.
After he'd been discharged, the nurse with whom she'd struck a deal had become useless to her.
Since he was now doing rehab for him leg, she'd batted her eyelashes at the young doctor who was treating him, bought him lunch- and managed to get House's schedule from him. While Chase had been jealous (her turning down his offer of a drink hadn't stopped him from repeating it over and over until she wanted to explain to him exactly why she wasn't interested in him), she had been delighted. The schedule allowed her to know where House was- so that she could be elsewhere.
She kept herself so busy that she had no time to examine her odd behaviour or analyse feelings that she was working hard to keep buried. Most of the time she felt comfortably numb- and that was the way she wanted to keep it.
The only real pleasure she allowed herself was lunch with Wilson.
No matter how busy she was, or how many tests she needed to run, she made a point of taking a half hour break (minimum) with him in the cafeteria. Not only did he fill her in on how House was doing (without her even having to ask), but he was a genuinely funny guy that she soon realised she had a lot in common with. She was aware that he was missing House around the hospital, and he suspected the she was missing his best friend just as much as he was (if not more, because she hadn't seen him since the 'incident').
So, neither of them said anything about missing House; they eat their food and chatted about everything and anything. And a quiet, serene sort of normality descended on the team, the clinic and the hospital in general (never was House's disturbing ability to rock the boat more evident than when it was removed).
But then, Allison Cameron had that effect on people.
AN: How was that? Please let me know ! By the way, all the stuff I put (about fundraising and everything) all have a purpose, so I wasn't just writing crap for the sake of it. Please review!