Disclaimer: Tisn't mine. Well, the story is, but the characters belong to Fox & David Shore.

A/N: Thanks to beta Timbereads, and also to Damfinogal, who agreed to read this chapter for me. Their help was invaluable.

Rating: T for mature content, frank language and sexual imagery.

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She finds House in his office at 2 a.m.

There's no reasonable reason for Cameron to be at the hospital at that hour – it's not as if he's paged her -- but she can't sleep.

Tonight, there's a phantom ache in her leg; she swears she feels his pain.

It's almost supernatural, as if he's beckoned her to him like Rochester calling for his Jane to cross the moors and find him -- broken, crippled, and alone. She thinks she hears him call her name; so to him she goes.

There's something between us, she thinks.

More than anything, she wants to be near him, in his space, surrounded by his things.

It's too much to hope for that he'll be there.

But there he is, reclined in the Aeron chair, his good leg sprawled on the desktop. Spasms of pain cross his face as he massages the damaged leg. He has shed his Oxford shirt and wears his usual uniform of a t-shirt and jeans. Cameron notices the bulge of his biceps as his arms work the muscle tissue where the necrosis occurred.

At the door, she hesitates. He's made it pretty clear he doesn't want her pity, her love, or any efforts to save him from himself.

If ever there's a man who needs saving from himself, it's House, she thinks.

She enters the quiet room anyway. It's dark, except for a tiny desk lamp.

House looks up without surprise.

"Hi," he says. Exhaustion shows around his eyes. Still, he makes a feeble stab at humor. "The hospital is a house away from home. I'm not much good for talk, unless you want to inject me with goodies."

A partially filled syringe is on his desk. She leaves it where it is.

Instead, Cameron does what she seldom has the courage to do. She touches him, placing her hand on his strong shoulder.

Warmth is a conduit from his body to hers.

Most of the pain has left his face, but she sees the telltale signs -- beads of sweat on his forehead, his fist clenched on his leg.

"What does it feel like?" she asks quietly. She's surprised, but doesn't show it, when he gives her a real answer, undisguised by sarcasm.

"Ever been in an electric chair?" House asks, looking up at her, and schooling the grimace on his face. "Of course you haven't. Me either. But, it's what I think it feels like. That or electro-shock therapy, or getting struck by lightning."

She moves around to sit on his desk, and rests her hand on his sneaker. She waits for him to ask the inevitable. What is she doing there? As if she knows.

She waits for him to tell her to go home.

Finally, he turns to her and asks her this:

"You've made it clear you don't believe in God...Cameron, what do you believe in?"

For a while, she stalls.

"Take off your shoes," she says.

House cocks an eyebrow at her. "What are you up to?"

"Just relax, House. Rest."

She firmly grasps a foot between her small, capable, doctor's hands. Her deft fingers find his reflexology points, and she strokes the smooth front of his foot, and then kneads the underside with her thumbs.

"You asked what I believe," she says quietly. "I believe in bones, because they last forever. I believe in DNA, because it never lies. I believe in getting to the heart of the matter."


Cameron, what do you believe in?

I believe in music, I believe in love, she jokes to herself. But she knows it's no joke.

She believes in beauty, truth, and hope. She believes in life.

And as for the man who proclaims that everybody lies? She believes in him, even if she doesn't always believe him. She believes in him, in spite of her misgivings.

She cannot help herself.

House stirs something primal within her. No other man has made her want to do the things she wants to do to House. At the slightest touch, she feels like she could come. Right now, with his foot between her hands, she can barely stand up. Is he hard? She'd like to look; she can't. The attraction between them is more than that. It's metaphysical. There's a sense that somehow they are close -- like now -- as if they share a rib.

Sometimes she wonders if they would have had a chance if it weren't for her own faux pas. She blames herself for the way things have turned out with House.

The mindless sex with Chase was her idea.

It was supposed to prove -- to House and to herself -- that she had a life, a life apart from House. On some level, she supposed she'd hoped that House would be jealous, or at least take notice. But it was clear that he was bored with it, that he considered it predictable. If she'd hired a gigolo, that might have piqued his interest. Unlike House, she respected herself too much to pay for sex – and she cared too much about what others thought of her to do it.

It's time to end it with Chase, because now Chase expects it. Now he follows her around with longing looks.

Chase is basically a good guy. She respects him as a doctor, and even considers him a friend. But as a sexual partner, well, he's so young. She's known his kind before. He's a pretty white boy with a pretty white ass, she thinks with a smile. But next to House, he's an amateur. With one look, House can ignite her. Chase's ardor is sweet, but to get off, Cameron has to imagine House parting her labia with his tongue, House pushing her against the bed, and House looking down at her, desire spilling from his eyes.

She's beginning to disgust herself. It's one thing to be woman enough to seek to satisfy your sexual needs, she thinks, and another to settle for less than what you want. Lately, when she comes, it's as if her body has betrayed her, betrayed House. She has stopped kissing Chase. Her colleague is a whiter shade of pale -- that's what she imagines Foreman would say about him, if he knew they were fucking.

The date with House had been all her doing, too.

It had been her undoing.

What was she thinking, on that silly date, asking House for the impossible? Asking House, of all people, to talk about his feelings for her?

She should have known that feelings were the last thing House would share with her, or anyone else, unless it was to express his feelings of disdain for the Yankees, or his feelings of annoyance toward Cuddy, or the way he felt about clinic duty.

All she could say in her defense was that he had given her a corsage.

Why hadn't she kept the conversation casual? She could have asked him why he specialized in nephrology, or why he became a diagnostician, or if he had always loved to solve puzzles and play games. Where had that love originated? She'd like to know now, and she regretted not asking when she had the chance.

House might have been relieved if she had talked about herself. He might have enjoyed himself. He might have enjoyed her.

She could have told him about the first time she peered into a microscope. It was in grade school. The teacher had showed them an amoeba. She'd been fascinated by the one celled creature. What other mysteries could she discover under the glass, she'd wondered? Maybe a single drop of rain contained a miniature universe.

He could have listened to her talk about the time her older sister broke her arm. The doctor had called the bone by its proper name: ulna. The word sounded so exotic, that the next time her mom took them to the library, she'd checked out "Gray's Anatomy," and began memorizing the names of all of the bones in the human body.

The words seduced her.

She'd lain awake at night whispering into the darkness, "Mandible, clavicle, sternum, humerus, radius, coccyx, femur."

To her, it was poetry.

Maybe if she'd done it differently, there would have been a second date. If there had been a second date, she might have opened up enough to tell House about Mo.

(Her life has been a litany of loss.)

What would House give to get his hands on her early history, she wonders? He'd kill for some of the stuff she could tell him about herself. None of it is in her chart, and the only one who knows it all is her friend Mia, from Mayo.

It started when her younger sister was diagnosed with leukemia. Allison was eight; Mo was three. She remembers the day that Mo was so weak she couldn't make it down the staircase. That was when her parents knew something was really wrong. Their family doctor screwed up. First he'd diagnosed her with a bad case of influenza. When Mo didn't get better, he'd said it was mono.

More than anything, it's what made Cameron become a doctor.

For two years, doctors tried treatments for the lymphoma. She learned for the first time about the difference between white blood cells and red blood cells. Chemo and radiation were on her radar at the tender age of eight, and nine, and ten. Mo lost most of her long, brown hair. It fell out in humiliating clumps. Her little belly bloated.

Mo died at home on the blue couch. Cameron wasn't there. Prompted by her father, her mom had taken the rest of them for "a Sunday drive." Her dad had wanted the moment for himself. He'd always loved Mo best. When the station wagon pulled into the driveway, the hearse was pulling away.

She never saw her little sister again.

Not long afterward, her grandfather died. Her parents dressed all of them up and marched them past his open coffin, his face waxy and lifeless. Cancer took him, and it attacked the pancreas of her Uncle Cal. He lasted three months.

It was ominous.

Most kids grow up thinking they're invincible. That wasn't the case with Cameron. She felt forever poised for loss, and she felt fragile. She knew that she could die at any time.

It took years for Cameron to get over it. As a teen, she developed phobias. She panicked at the sight of a hearse and refused to attend funerals.

When at 16, her friend Andy died in a car accident, all of the terror returned. Her imagination was too vivid. She pictured him crashing through the window of the car, and hurtling into the pavement, his head split open. Worse still was the dishonesty of Andy in his coffin, dressed in clothes he'd never have worn, with industrial strength makeup failing to disguise the lack of life.

The irony was that he'd been drunk, and that in favor of drinking a fifth of Peppermint Schnapps, he'd skipped out on their plans to go see "Reality Bites." And because of his choice, he'd died.

She'd been merely damaged.

Years of therapy had helped her overcome her fear of death. She had come to accept it with such grace that by the time she met her husband, John, the news of his cancer seemed almost ordinary.

John was ordinary. Boring, House would have thought, and said. Sometimes she thinks about the difference between the two men. House has made her out to be a vulture, circling wounded men. But House and the man she married were of a different species. They were nothing alike. There was no doubt in her mind that House was damaged, but, besides the cancer, her husband had been about as normal and well balanced as a bicycle wheel.

The last few months he'd required a feeding tube. The last few hours, a cobwebby substance formed at the back of his throat, obstructing his airway. She'd swabbed it out with a sponge. His breaths jerked in and out. Time passed. Gunk gathered in his throat. She'd cleared it out again, and again.

Death was like that.

At the end, more time lapsed between each breath. Breathing morphed into the death rattle. She kept saying his name, kept saying, "It's okay. It's okay."

It wasn't okay.

She'd been reminded of when she was a little girl. Curled up in the top bunk of her family's summer cabin, she'd listen to her father snore. His sleep apnea kept her awake, and worried. Would he take another breath? As a girl she was edgy, waiting for him to inhale. Just when she thought she'd have to climb down from the top bunk bed and shake him, he'd suck in a noisy gulp of air.

Finally, her husband exhaled. Time stopped.

Then it was quiet.

There is no quietness like death, she knows.

Still, he finally looked relaxed, at peace.


In the office, Cameron focuses once more on House, running her thumb along the arch of his foot, grasping his toes and bending them gently as far as they can go.

A comfortable silence has prevailed, as she works her massage mojo on his feet. They're beautiful, poetic like his hands. She wants to him to lose the jeans so she can massage his calves, his thighs. So she can see his legs, and more.

So she can do the things she wants to do to House.

She can't tell him that.

His eyes are closed, his face in repose.

What has come over him tonight? What's come over her? It's like an intermission from their real life.

He breaks the silence, reaches for his socks and shoes and puts them on.

"Thank you. Thanks for that."

He stands, looks down on her from his six feet something. As usual, his eyes are like blue lasers, quickening her pulse.

"Are you hungry? And no, it's not a trick question. I'm taking the night off from being…." House picks up his cane and apes a golf swing. "An ass."

"A little, yes. But, what about your leg?"

House throws his free arm around her shoulder, and leans on her.

"It's bad tonight, but I'll live, Cameron. I'm going to live. Come on. Let's go split a pizza and a pitcher."

She nods her acquiescence, moved beyond mere words. Her spirit soars, her body sings.

Together, they walk out of the office, out of the hospital, towards Princeton and a slice of pizza.


House is in quite a state in the next chapter, There's Something Between Us. Can Cameron compete with a syringe of morphine? Read on to see. But first, review.