AN: Glad to see you're all still hanging around. Drop me a note and let me know what you think. The story's written, so no way of swaying the outcome, but I am always curious what my readers think. And, as always, hugs and kisses to my beta, atavares.
A Change in Plans
The next week all she did was obsess over the question. Leave or stay? They'd texted a couple of more times, had Skype sex once, but neither broached the subject of her leaving again. Neither seemed to be eager to settle into a comfortable long distance relationship either. They weren't halfway kind of people.
Christmas was coming in a couple of days. She'd be spending it alone. No point in making the drive out to her folks home two weeks in a row and it was far easier to get the whole week off next week if she worked the holiday anyway. She volunteered her team for duty in the E.R. the remainder of the week since they didn't have a case. The fast pace was a welcome change and she was tempted to work a double every day just to keep her mind occupied, but the first night the ward slowed and she was told to go home around 5:30 p.m.
She decided to text Lisa Cuddy rather than go home. Cameron had a million and one questions she needed to be answered and the only person she knew could answer the most important of them was her friend. It might also serve the dual purpose of keeping her from drinking herself into yet another stupor. With the change in their relationship, she could no longer use House as a way to drunkenly express her feelings about her shitty life. Not with him answering back with a subtle sarcasm that made her care that she had a drinking problem. So, rather than help, it just made it worse, because she had nothing to distract her from taking the next drink other than passing out.
She headed from the ward to the locker room, opened her locker, fished her phone from her purse and turned it on. She sat on the bench across from her locker, as she waited for the phone to fully boot. Once it had, she texted Cuddy. - Got time for a drink? Dinner maybe?
Not expecting her to responded right away, Cameron placed the phone on a shelf in the locker and began to strip out of the hospital's scrubs. She tossed them in the communal laundry hamper across the room when she returned to her locker to strip from her underwear for a shower the phone buzzed against the metal of the shelf.
It was Cuddy. - Hey, there! Been wondering about you. Yeah, just finishing up here. McNab's 6:30?
Cameron smiled as she answered. - See ya there
K see ya - Cuddy replied quickly and Cameron tossed the phone back into her purse, finished undressing, grabbed her towels and headed for the showers.
The two women sat across from one another in a booth tucked in the way back of the cozy street-level pub. They'd often met here after Cuddy moved to Chicago, but in the last year, their meetings grew less and less frequent. Cameron didn't have the heart to unload her life on the older woman. Mostly because the reason she was in constant turmoil was related to the one person she couldn't pine over in front of Cuddy.
"Got plans for the holiday?" Cuddy asked after they placed orders for drinks and some appetizers.
Cameron shook her head. "Not for Christmas. Greg's with his dad, so I'm working. I'm taking him the Monday after up to see my folks for a few days then we'll have New Year's together before I have to give him back."
Cuddy smiled an administrator smile at the less than ideal situation and the small win it was for Cameron. "Oh, that sounds nice. How are your parents?"
"Fine." Cameron shrugged. "Mom's doing her Martha Stewart thing for my brother's family. I think Dad is pissed I didn't put my foot down with Ray, but I'd rather have a week than two days, so Dad's going to have to deal with not having the whole family together again this year. I'm always the one to disappoint. My brother can do no wrong."
"Boy, I know that feeling." Cuddy huffed. The waiter came back then and place a wine bottle and two glasses in front of them. They both muttered thank you as he gave them each a small pour and left the table. Each of them drank more than half the small serving, then Cuddy continued. "My mother and sister are peas in a pod. Oh, she's proud of me, but she wants it all. It's hard for women like us. Maybe the next generation will find women getting the support they need to be the breadwinners and mothers and wives, but right now it's like trying to be a damned unicorn."
"Yeah." Cameron agreed softly and poured them what she felt was a more appropriate serving of wine for the both of them. "So how's Rachel?"
Cuddy's face lit up immediately at the mention of her daughter. "Taking second grade by storm, she's smart as a whip. Oh, you'll love this one, I got called in the other day. She'd called her teacher an idiot over something to do with Hanukkah. I swear, she barely remembers him, but a little House-ism still comes out of her at least once a week. Big case for nurture over nature in there somewhere?"
Cameron smiled back both at the comment and because Cuddy has so effortlessly directed the conversation exactly where Cameron wanted it. She and tried to picture House and Rachel together. What she imagined was not so much fatherly as it was something worthy of a sitcom. "I still have a hard time imagining House playing Daddy."
"Oh, he wasn't really interested at first, but Rach loved him right away and once she proved able to engage in low-level commentary on cartoons, they were best pals. There were days I thought he was really great for her, others I thought I was raising two children and I wondered when they were going to come home with matching tattoos and biker jackets." That made Cameron laugh because she knew it would have had a real possibility of happening.
"So he liked her? Liked being a dad?" Cameron asked. During all the times the women had talked about House, Rachel had been more or less kept out of it. But the longer that Cameron was a mother, and especially after everything that had transpired earlier in the month, she thought more and more about House's relationship with the younger Cuddy.
"Well…" Cuddy paused for a moment, obviously considering how to frame her answer. "I think the idea of getting labeled as 'Dad' scared him more than the act of being a man helping his partner raise a child. You probably know he hated his father; his father was really hard on him. Abusive by today's standards for sure, teetering on the edge back then, I suppose. House felt his lack of a nurturing side would make him, at least, the verbal equivalent of his old man. I can't imagine him ever raising a hand to Rachel, but he did find it hard to offer genuine praise for anything a two-year-old does."
She smirked, with a memory that made Cameron assume it was bittersweet. "Except, maybe, cursing, or quoting him, and, I found out later from Wilson, House thought Rachel had an impressive natural delivery when she lied. So much so, he never even let on to me when he knew she was lying to my face."
Taking a drink, Cuddy fiddled with her napkin and stared into her wine glass. "He never once asked for Rachel to call him 'Dad,' he was 'House' to her just like the rest of us. Whereas Lucas had been all about the idea. He was ready to adopt her and everything. House was happiest when just going along for the ride. It was one of the reasons I felt I couldn't trust him to commit. He was there for her when I asked, but it always came with this immature act that required us to barter. I thought that was how he kept the whole thing from overwhelming him, so I played along. When he wasn't bartering, I learned he was probably hiding something he thought I'd be pissed about."
Cameron took the information in, filing it away for more consideration later. She couldn't let her blind lust for him cause her to put her son in harm's way. However, her heart wanted so badly for Cuddy's words to offer some assurance that House had father material in there somewhere.
She couldn't just ask all the questions she wanted to. That would sure as hell cause Cuddy to question her. Cuddy was a smart woman. Cameron kept it simple, leading the conversation but choosing a question that seemed natural enough given the topic. "Did he ever tell you he wanted a family? Maybe when he was younger or when he was with Stacy?"
"He and I nev-er talked about Stacy. Ever. Too much baggage for both of us, I think. The only time I wondered if he might want a kid was when I was trying IVF. He kept dropping hints that made me think he wanted me to ask him to donate sperm. Of course, I was still in my right mind then and ignored him, because I figured it was just another of his experiments. Since then, I've wondered if he was serious. Thankfully, I didn't do that. Because you know his stubborn sperm would do the job and no way in hell would they abort themselves. God. We would have been tied together then!"
Cuddy shook her head. Cameron raised her eyebrows and nodded her head a few times in agreement. Then poured both of them more wine. She could tell it wasn't the first time the older woman had this thought. If Cameron were in her shoes, she would have been thinking it the entirety of their relationship. Wondering, in those good times, how they could have been if only. Then in the bad times, being glad it hadn't happened.
Cuddy nodded her chin as thanks and put the refilled glass to her lips, then pulled it away her eyes fixated on the dark red liquid as she swirled it in the glass, then finally took a drink. Sighing she sat the glass down and continued. "Before he proved his complete insanity, I had wondered if I had stayed with him, approached him instead of my sister to be Rach's guardian if I died, if he would've dived into the pill-bottle again, or if he would've had a 'come to Jesus' moment and finally accept the full commitment he was dancing around making with us. It kept me up at night.
"House was not a halfway person. Why was he being halfway with us? Was it just his fear? Could he overcome that if I gave him another chance? Or was it just that he was showing the maximum amount of interest he could in a child that wasn't his. Maybe he was in all the way in his mind and, if that was the case, I did exactly the right thing. I wanted both to be true depending on the day of the week. On top of that, was all this pressure I had my from my mother pulling tricks to get us back together."
Cameron was mid drink and her eyes widened over the rim of the glass. She swallowed quickly and asked incredulously "Your mother wanted you with House?"
"Oh, she thought he was exactly what I needed and, if nothing else, the only man on the planet stubborn enough to ever stay with me. And that I was the only woman who was dumb enough to deal with him. She sure as hell backpedaled fast when his car landed in my living room."
The conversation was going in a direction that Cameron was quickly becoming uncomfortable with and so she reined things back to the topic she wanted to cover. "So Rachel doesn't remember him?"
Cuddy sighed again, knowing Cameron had reined her, but assuming it was for her own good and not for Cameron herself. She shook her head and took another drink. "No, not really. She has this vague concept of a guy named House. She was 3 when we broke up. She asked after him for a while. Definitely more so than Lucas, just because she didn't talk much before Lucas. When I left him, if Rach tripped or stubbed her toe, she'd want 'Lukie.' But she wasn't at the question stage at 2 and only knew a handful of words. After a few weeks, she stopped mentioning him at all. When I left House she asked 'Where's House?' every night for about two weeks and cried for him a couple of times when she got into something she shouldn't have or when I was tucking her in at night. But it wasn't long until she accepted he wasn't coming back and stopped. A few weeks is a long time to a 3-year-old and their memories are more conceptual than concrete at that age."
Cameron filed that timeline away.
The older woman continued after draining the glass once more. "She wanted to go see House every time I'd bring her into work for the first couple of months. I think the location triggered a routine of going by his office to say 'hi' and play with his toys… I'll give House one thing, at least he didn't go the route of emotionally blackmailing me via Rachel. At first, him not pulling that card made me think I'd been right about him not giving a damn about her. Then he cut his damned leg open in his tub. I told you about that one, right?" Cameron nodded and tried hard not to picture the scene. "Well, in the car ride over, he was completely great with her and I could tell he had missed her. Goddamn, how the hell did we get on this subject again!? The man's long dead and he's still got me all tied up in damned knots."
"Yeah, he has that effect." Cameron agreed as a waiter stepped up to save them by setting food before them. They avoided the topic of House the rest of the evening. Cameron had as much information as she was comfortable extracting. It would have to be enough. She couldn't continue to tear herself apart with a daydream. Some point soon, she needed to decide.
On Christmas morning her double shift ended a little after 2 a.m. It was almost 4 by the time she crawled into bed. Merry fucking Christmas to me, she thought and closed her eyes.
A buzz rang out from her bedside table a second later. She almost didn't answer, until it hit her it had to be the burner phone because she'd dropped her purse in the living room and didn't take out her real phone before heading to bed.
Got a question for you - it read.
It's 4 in the morning here - she typed back quickly.
His reply was just a quick - and yet you answer
yeah, I just walking in from a double - she furrowed her brow at the typo she noticed after hitting the send, then yawned.
On Christmas? thats very uncameron like of you - The device teased back.
Her thumbs worked a response as she rolled on her side and snuggled back into the sheets. - Ray's got Greg, why be home, besides working double xmas eve night got me next week off
So, anyway my question. how would you like to host xmas for Don and his mother?
Her heart lunged into her throat at the mere suggestion that he would be coming to see her. But she tempered her response in case it was some sort of strange House joke. - Why is your mom in chicago on xmas?
My stepdad doesn't know he's still a stepdad
Since I died she's told him she needs to be alone for the holidays
He goes to see his family, we pick a city and meet
This year I suggested Chicago
Cameron's heart pounded in her chest. God, she wanted this. Needed this. - Sure, what time
5 work for you? out of your hair by 11
It wasn't nearly enough time. She wanted more. - Beats being alone, you both can stay here. Don't waste money on a hotel. Unless sleeping with me with your mom in the next room is a problem for you :P
Three quick messages followed:
We're way past that lol
Thx I'll let her know
She's going to love you. You both suffer from xmasitis and you both like too much red wine when you're emotional
Cameron smiled at the glowing screen and responded. - I'll get a case ;)
Some good scotch too. Some of us don't have a vagina
If you'd like one…
Not in town yet or I'd be inside it now
Well if you get here early, and you'd like some
Wrap it in red lace and a bow for me?
Of course. It's christmas ;*
She thought about rubbing down a quick one — not sure if he would send her another response — but she was far too tired to bother. House would see her itches were all scratched tomorrow.
Another buzz did come. - Good girl. Santa's got a nice big present all wrapped and ready for you
She smirked. - Little early to put on the wrapping
The next buzz followed a moment after her reply. - I'll let you wrap your own present then. See you soon. Now go to sleep.
She ended with a simple - I do love wrapping - and drifted to sleep with the phone still in her hand.