Sometimes Why
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Rating: R
Feedback: Apologies in advance.
Random: HC Ficathon III. The provided prompt was lines 1-4 of Shakespeare's 94th sonnet.
Summary: He was born a screaming baby boy and will always hate endings.
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Afterwards: it's over.
He'll joke about his mid-life crisis to Wilson while thinking foolish thoughts like these hallways seem more narrow or I don't have a picture of her, but his favorite, what have I done? She will fade from his mind, though he won't forget because this thing, this not love or this not hate, basically it burns, those scraps of her she left with him.
As for him, he's been added to her list of people that she couldn't save. After, she's not as nice to him, but not on purpose. Now that she knows him she can't help but to hate him and finds that it comes very easily.
It's kind of a relief, anyway—he never liked her, not really, and she will always wonder what she finds so attractive about men who are dying.
•
The limits of reason: the sky more black than blue with stars like broken glass.
The ninth time, her sharp hipbones, he's on his back with swollen lips, and she liked it when he bit. Later, he slides out of her and rolls over, red latex slithering across the top of her thigh in the process. He thinks about this the next day at work.
"Come here."
He's rumpled and smirking, seated at his desk. She walks over with a handful of mail that he will ignore.
He points his cane at her mouth. "Over the lips and past the gums—"
She frowns with her eyebrows. "I'm not putting that in my mouth."
He puts his cane on the desk.
"I'll put a condom on it," he says.
The stupid conversation eventually turns to accusations and insults. He is mad at her, not because she drunkenly fucked Chase a few months ago, but that she stayed the night. She is upset with him for insulting her mother over the phone, though they both agree she had it coming.
A week later is another argument, more silent that time, and it's over. It wasn't close to love and they both pretend not to care. It's easy because they really don't.
•
Time's up: and, both oh, why did it take you this long to see me?
He doesn't bother to open his eyes when her hears her hovering at the doorway to his office. The doorframe is pressed up against her shoulder blade as she waits. Their patient just died and she's got some time. When he speaks his voice sounds like ashes.
"Yes?" he asks.
She wants to press him against the smooth walls of his office or into the carpet with her heel between his shoulder blades. It's not that he makes her hate, but how he goes about it. He was like an ocean with a memory and her heart ached because of it. The day he hired her, it was the same way—a few seconds into the interview and she already felt his hands on the backs of her thighs.
•
This one, all the time: and him. And her. And their pointless work preventing corpses.
They have power over each other. His is more obvious: the cutting remark or the extended leer, his eyes slide down her body like a fireman down a pole, fairly quick and with enough resistance to make it worthwhile; it makes her feel dirty, which is how he'd like her, if he liked her at all.
She greets strangers with a smile and bookends conversations with 'please' and 'thank you'. She's nice and it and scares him because the most frightening things are often the most predictable. It was the death in her that fascinated him. Not of her husband and not of their patients—of her. The capacity she had for loss, for taking another person's grief and making it her own; she captured him with her reasons.
They manage to stand still by moving. House is angry Cameron is quiet, House is quiet Cameron is angry, House is Cameron is House is Cameron. Nothing changes and the only remaining variable is a patient. It is not surprising that it takes another dip in the population for things between the both of them to change.
•
But, her really: that then this now, a few more words and it would all be a lie.
Pieces of him or her, not them, and she once swore to her husband, though he now occurred in the ground underneath her feet, that she would never—but she's not one to drag the remnants of her marriage across the face of the Earth. She never left him but took away more than she gave. Each affliction was accounted for long before his casket was packed in mud.
If she had been dying, she asks herself when she's feeling righteous, if she was dying young, would it matter that he was there? Would it make a difference to her if he sat unflinchingly by her side along with all those machines? Those machines, which at the very least were keeping her alive. She's not sure if he would matter. (Can't she admit it out loud already, if only to herself?)
She gently closes the file (read: life) laid out before her and thinks, no. Her thumb rubs over a crease in the folder and, almost as an afterthought, in the end his death was more interesting than he ever was.
House limps into the room. Soul stretched black across his face. He brings to mind words: pain or lust, self-reverence.
She is pouring his coffee before she realizes it. When she is in front of his desk, arm outstretched and fingers wrapped around his mug, he doesn't take it. Only regards her silently, head cocked to the side, eyebrow quirked asking something. She roughly puts the mug down on his desk, as if to say there, fuck yourself with the grounds, and tries to anticipate the harshness of the remark he's sure to make. She waits. It never comes.
•
About her: and he hates her at times.
Allison Cameron, who stood tall in the midst of death shouting out her grief, was unaware that it echoed back much more loudly. He wants to sit her down and tell her, Men are beasts. She won't believe him and he'll keep at it, the inherent instinct for survival, keep at her, the primitive urges, until she's discouraged to tears, mentioning, a skeleton and organ system that became both obsolete and a burden the instant they were perpendicular to the ground. He's even got a closing: Men are beasts, reiterated quietly, and so am I.
•
Previously on: he knows what it means to be broken.
Give him ten minutes in a well-lit exam room with a complete stranger. He will tell them their lies and judge their faults, but only the ones he deems acceptable. There is no room for error or preference because he is a bastard, but not a lucky one. There are rumors. No one can really explain why he is obnoxious at times. He has known love, and better, more intensely than most because he has been betrayed by it and cannot let go. His life did depend on it and when he sees withered tissue or symptoms indicative of death he's reminded of . He has a cane and a permanent prescription. There's the pain and he's decided he's lucky in that regard because it will more than likely never go away.