Café Spoleto
A.N. 2020 is here, and so this story continues! Fun times. Couple of things. We're still burning slowly, but Hameron will develop like there's no tomorrow. I'm still deciding how to write it, and I'm not offering a time frame, but there's a good chance things will get steamily explicit. The rating of the story will change as and when that happens, and I'll forewarn you so that those who don't like that kind of thing can look away. Secondly, rather than attempt to cast back into 2006-7 (who can even remember that far back) going forward I've simply updated House for modernity. So, phones have excellent cameras and Bush is not the president.
Finally, a cricket ball is visible on House's desk in several episodes (and in this chapter), and in the season 6 episode '5 to 9' he can be seen brandishing a cricket bat. I'm assuming this was a nod to Hugh Laurie who is an enormous cricket fan. So am I. Not only this, but the House character is based on Sherlock Holmes. And, fun fact incoming, Sherlock Holmes was actually named after two English county cricketers in the late 1800s, Mordecai Sherwin and Frank Shacklock. This story will likely allude to cricket a few more times before we reach the end. For those of you who have no idea what it is, you have my pity (and my scorn).
Sorry for the long note. They will be kept to a minimum in the future. As always, thanks for reading, and do feel free to drop a review if you liked or disliked. Feedback good or bad is always welcome.
House was alone in his office waiting for news on the patient. It had been a busy first week back and his Gameboy remained in its drawer. Not only this, but he had yet to decide what to do, and what to feel, about Cameron. He needed more time. So, to cover up his indecision, he had treated her in the usual manner: occasional flirtation with a dose of snappiness. It was a messy problem. House sighed and took hold of the cricket ball on his desk, examining it. The leather was a deep cherry red despite a few scuffed patches where it had impacted against the wall and floor. The stitching on the seam was largely intact. Cricket was a sport he had long enjoyed and, when it had been necessary to get something out of Chase, they spoke about it. Not frequently, though—he didn't like to get too close to the workforce. At that, a vision of Cameron shimmered through his mind while he tossed the ball from hand to hand. Go away.
Chase had been noticeably frosty since the team's reuniting, often contributing to differentials with that faintly martyred air House found so unappealing, or else finding a way to dispute proposed treatments whenever possible. Ordinarily House wouldn't have given the matter a second thought, but since the hallucination he had come to appreciate how much what one felt could influence how one acted. More than this, though, Chase had generally been a loyal subordinate (Vogler fiasco aside), and his behaviour was somewhat out of character.
Out of the three of them, House could predict their reactions to any given command: Foreman wouldn't do it all, or he would do his own thing; Cameron would do it but with clear moral objections; and Chase would do it no questions asked. The Australian was the archetypal yes man. His sudden intractability was puzzling and something to think on. It couldn't have anything to do with Cameron—they had barely spoken all week. But this was for another day.
House closed his eyes and promptly fell asleep.
Several days earlier
Foreman let out an enormous yawn and threw his pen onto the pile of papers stacked before him. He looked over at his companions whom, he could see, were similarly flagging. Cameron's hair, normally tightly coiled, had largely escaped its confines and was tumbling piecemeal down to her shoulders, and her bespectacled eyes looked bleary. Meanwhile Chase had loosened his tie and now sat at the computer with his hands clasped behind his head looking into the middle distance. Together, the three of them had made a serious dent in House's paperwork. As for the man himself, they had not seen him since late morning—no doubt he had clocked off a few hours ago.
Foreman looked forlornly into his coffee mug which contained nothing but sludgy dregs. "How are we getting on?".
"I think I've done as much as I can manage for one day", said Cameron, removing her glasses and rubbing the eyes beneath. "Were you aware House has started signing his name, and writing snippets of his reports, in foreign languages? I was able to interpret Gregor Haus, Gregorio Casa and Grégoire Maison, and Gregorius Domus was manageable. But it took me a while to decipher…these", she held up the relevant papers: Γρηγόριος οἶκος and グレゴリーハウス.
"Well", scoffed Chase, "if he spent less time dazzling us all with his linguistic ability and more time with patients, he'd be Mother Teresa reborn".
Cameron, who regarded House's remarkable command of languages as just another dimension of his virtuosity, merely shrugged. Her colleague may complain that their boss was showing off, and he would be right. But she believed that House didn't have to be humble. Humility was for everyone else, and House was not everyone else. It was part of his charm.
"You finished your allocation, Chase?", Foreman asked.
"Yeah. I have answered all his important emails, archived most of them, and deleted the rest. I truly feel that I have lived up to the Hippocratic oath".
Foreman raised an eyebrow at the younger man's waspishness but remained silent. Chase had been in a bad mood all afternoon. "D'you guys fancy celebrating our first day back? I'm starving".
Cameron replaced her glasses and got up from the table, shuffling papers as she did so. "Sure. What're you thinking?".
"Café Spoleto?".
She experienced a flash of adrenaline but nodded at the suggestion.
"Chase?".
He, too, inclined his head in agreement.
"Great. Outside in ten?".
xxxx
Foreman took a final mouthful and placed his knife and fork on the plate with a satisfying clang. Chase was also nearly finished. Cameron, meanwhile, was making hard work of her pasta. This was not unusual—she rarely seemed to eat much at all—but combined with her taciturn demeanour it caused Foreman to think that something was up. Add to this the fact that Chase's mood had not improved much even after a good meal and wine, and Foreman was becoming suspicious. It was entirely possible that the two had got into an argument before returning to work. Foreman still couldn't believe that they had slept together, but they had, and maybe their mutual awkwardness was the result of a lovers' spat which had occurred behind the scenes.
In the event, Foreman was both right and wrong. His colleagues were indeed thinking on matters of the heart, and, for one of them, such matters did concern the other. Chase wasn't happy and it was down to a combination of factors. Firstly, following House's shooting and time away, the Australian had been hoping to spend more time with Cameron in hope of asking her out on a date. But since Cuddy had redistributed them all throughout the hospital, he had not had much of a chance to see, let alone talk to, her. Secondly, if nothing else, he had anticipated that distance from House would cause Cameron's feelings for their boss to fade. He had been the first person to whom she had revealed her attraction for House, and it had caused him great discomfort. On the one hand it was none of his business whom she liked. But on the other…
Chase had liked Cameron for a long time. This in itself was a novel experience. Generally, he was happy moving from one woman to the next, running little risk of becoming attached to any one person. It helped, of course, that he knew himself to be a handsome man. But with Cameron his charms hadn't worked. When he had first asked her out, she had shot him down before he had even finished his sentence. He had been respectful, defended her to House, and kept his distance. But he wanted more than a one-night stand—he wanted a meaningful relationship. What frustrated him the most was that she refused to see it because she was so starry-eyed about their boss. House was completely wrong for her. Chase stabbed the last piece of veal with his fork and chewed it aggressively.
Foreman had become fed up with his companions' monosyllabism. "I have a question. What is going on with you two? Did you have an argument or something?".
"Huh?". Cameron, hitherto completely lost in her own thoughts, looked up from her plate and the piece of pasta she had been turning over for the last five minutes. "An argument? No, why would you think that?".
"Well, neither of you have said anything for the past few minutes and you barely acknowledged my joke about House".
"House?". Cameron seemed to perk up at the mention of his name.
Chase snorted into his glass of wine.
She felt her anger rise. "What the hell is your problem, Chase?".
"My problem? I could ask you the same thing". The mention of House's name and, again, Cameron's reaction to it was the final straw. "You were all over House earlier. Don't you have any self-respect?".
"What? How was I 'all over him'? And even if I was—which I wasn't—what business is it of yours?". Cameron's anger was on the point of exploding. "How dare you comment on my self-worth. You have no right to tell me how I can or cannot behave".
But rather than cow Chase, it spurred him on. "You wanna know why Cameron is so quiet, Foreman? I'll tell you—it's because this is the place she had her disastrous date with the great doctor House last year, the place where it all came crashing down. Yet she still pines after him, yearning for his attention. When will she learn?".
People at the neighbouring tables were beginning to stare.
"No, Chase, when will you learn. I am not attracted to you, OK? You and I will never happen. I'm not interested. Frankly, after this little display, I'm surprised I even slept with you at all, drugs or no". Cameron could not remember ever being so angry. She was used to men telling her what to do, had been dealing with them her whole life, but for Chase to reflect his own anger at House back on her was beyond the pale. The worst thing was that he was right—she had been thinking about her boss. Seeing him today, being in this restaurant, had brought up all her old feelings, so much so that she had been forced to remind herself of the pact that she had made over her hot chocolate. Be strong. She got up and buttoned her coat. "Thanks for dinner, Foreman. See you tomorrow". With that, she was gone.
Foreman had said nothing throughout the exchange. He looked over at Chase, whose anger had burned out to be replaced with guilty awkwardness. "I've fucked up, haven't I?", he asked, running a hand through his hair. "I can't help it, Foreman. I like her".
"You have a funny way of showing it".
"No, you don't understand. I like her".
Foreman sighed, though he had suspected as much. Pieces were beginning to fall into place. Chase had declared for Cameron and, if the former was correct, the latter had declared for House. The biggest unknown was House—how would he react if he discovered Chase's interest in their female colleague, and, the most important question of all, how did the man himself feel about Cameron? Where that left Foreman was anyone's guess. He didn't have the answers. All he knew was that things at PPTH were likely to get uncomfortable if the situation was not properly managed. So much for a gentle reintroduction to Diagnostics.
The neurologist rubbed his face with another sigh and retrieved his wallet. "I'll get the check, shall I?".
"House? House…". Somebody was shaking him.
"Huh? What?". House woke with a start and looked into the offender's eyes. Cameron. She was crouched down by his easy chair, eyes level with his. It would be so easy to kiss her. "What is it?", he asked, massaging his eyes with the heels of his palms.
"You were right. We biopsied a brain lesion. Acute promyelocytic leukaemia. The arsenic in his apartment was inadvertently keeping it at bay. We've put him back on it. He'll still need a bone marrow transplant, though. Chase is trying to track down the parents for a possible match". Cameron had not removed her hand from his arm and he could feel its warmth through the thin cotton of his shirt.
"Good". House got up and walked over to his desk, sitting on the edge. "Speaking of Chase, I've noticed that you've barely spoken to each other all week. I don't blame you—that antipodean twang is annoying—but it seems to have been affecting his work. When one third of your team isn't co-operating with another third, things get weird. Care to explain?".
She went to stand in front of her boss, arms folded across her chest. "I thought weird worked for you".
House raised an eyebrow: she was quoting the words he had used when convincing her to come back to work following Vogler's departure; an extorted date the only condition. Café Spoleto. She had worn a flowing black dress and her mother's earrings. He had given her a corsage and felt horribly out of place.
"We had an argument", she continued.
"About…?".
Cameron took a step closer. "Politics".
"Closet Republican, is he?".
"Something like that". Another step forward. "Chase complained that American politics wasn't competitive enough. I argued that in those rare cases where the voter knows what she wants, excessive competition can be as harmful as it is pointless".
"Competition is at the root of democracy, Cameron".
"I think democracy is overrated. There's something to be said for a strong leader knowing what he wants and enforcing his policies no matter what. Much easier to keep the house in order that way". Cameron had walked right up to where he was sitting on the corner of his desk. She stood in such a way that the insides of his knees brushed against her hips.
House brutally suppressed the urge to grab her waist and pull her closer. His mind flashed back to the hallucination and their moment in the corridor. She would not conquer him, even if she was inviting his touch. He smiled inwardly, resolved not to give her the satisfaction. Instead he rose from the desk and kept his hands locked at his side, towering over her. Close but not close enough. The woman's eyes betrayed her heightened state.
The body never lies.
"Hey, Cameron?".
"Yes?".
House leaned forwards to whisper into her ear, careful not to brush against her with his stubble. "I was never much into politics". Pulling back, he continued briskly: "I want your report, with full case notes, on my desk first thing Monday. And smooth it over with Chase".
House retrieved his leather jacket from the rack and helmet from under the desk before striding from the room. The door clanged shut behind him, leaving Cameron standing alone in the dim office.
