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Threshold
by phineyj
When you're having a bad day, you usually tell yourself that it's nothing like as bad as when you woke up to find a big chunk of your thigh muscle gone and most of your self-respect with it. But as you lie face down across the treadmill in the PPTH therapy gym, you know you've hit a new low.
You figured if you just kept taking Vicodin you could run through the pain, and what do you know, your leg had other ideas and just crumpled under you. You've cracked your chin and your right shin feels like it's on fire where it hit the flat edge of the machine. At least the damn thing shut itself off, otherwise maintenance would be picking bits of you out of it tomorrow morning.
You consider your options. You are in serious doubt that you can drive home like this. You could lie here and hope the pain will subside enough that you can walk, by the time the night cleaning staff evict you. You could call Wilson; even as the thought flickers through your brain it is chased away by a tide of anger. No, Wilson is the last person you want to see right now. You could call a cab, but that still means getting yourself down to the main entrance.
That only leaves one person.
Cameron.
She's been watching you all day, cataloguing your walk, your wince when you jumped up in the theater and landed on your leg; she even commented when you leaned on the table. It drives you crazy that she can tell so accurately how much pain you are in. You work so hard to cover it up; joking, distraction, misdirection, but it doesn't ever fool her. There again, she is a doctor; one of your doctors, and it is her job to notice these details. It just isn't her job to sympathize with someone who clearly doesn't want her sympathy.
Sympathy makes you feel ill; it's just a tacit statement that you look so bad it's perceptible to other people.
Still, you need to get home sometime, and she'll come if you page her; you're sure of it.
---
You recognize her footsteps outside in the corridor. Determined and diffident at the same time; you'd know them anywhere. You don't get up from where you are lying on the treadmill, in the dark, wondering just when your options became so lousy.
You feel the rush of cold air as the door opens and closes behind her, and then she says, "House?" She sounds confused, and worried.
You roll over and get yourself up to a sitting position, wincing as your right foot touches the ground. The pain has diminished a little, but not enough.
You reach down for your backpack, scatter the contents on the floor, grab the bottle of pills and take two. You look up at her, prepared for a lecture, or at least an expression of dismay, but you see she isn't surprised in the slightest.
"You knew I was using again," you say, flatly, not even sure yourself if it is a question or a statement of fact.
"Yeah," she says, dropping her gaze.
"I need a ride home," you tell her, standing up, and then wishing you hadn't, as the extra weight on your abused thigh sends pain shooting through it. Cameron rushes over to you, and puts her arm around your waist. You are reminded of your hallucination, and nearly say, "This is just like old times." Then your common sense kicks in and informs you if you want a ride, you'd better not make her think you have more mental problems than the ones she already knows about.
"Okay," she says, and you can see her sizing up the state you are in, relative to the distance down to the front entrance.
"I'll go down and get the car and bring it round to the side entrance - you know the one by the loading bay?" She sounds decisive.
"What, smokers' central?" you say. You haven't touched a cigarette since the infarction, but somehow you still know every place the smokers congregate.
---
Oh, this is jolly, you think to yourself, sourly, as she drives you home. The embarrassment of asking for a ride from a subordinate, coupled with the fact she's only ever been to your place that one time. This is so far beyond awkward, it needs a new word. You wish it was Wilson in the driving seat; he's seen you at your worst so many times; he'd just drop you off, give you his patented `House, you are a continual disappointment to me' look and leave you to get on with it. Cameron thinks she's seen you at your worst, but she really hasn't.
She opens the door for you and for some reason, follows you in. You sit down heavily on the sofa, and hope that if you ignore her, she'll go away; she does go away, but only as far as the kitchen, unfortunately.
"House, have you eaten anything today?" she asks. You can hear her opening and closing your cupboards. You're about to mock her concern, when you run your mind back over the day and realize that no, you haven't, actually. You felt too sick this morning and you didn't stop for lunch, which explains the lightheadedness.
"Only the three course meal while you lot were doing all those bleeding tests," you lie, pointlessly. You hear her running water into a pan and you feel like saying, don't bother, but you haven't got the energy to argue with her, so you lie down on the sofa and close your eyes. You must have dozed off, because next thing you know, you can smell tomato sauce, and a bowl of pasta and a fork have magically appeared on the coffee table in front of you.
"You don't have to do this," you say, wearily, but you start eating anyway, because you've never been one to reject offers of food.
"Yes I do," she says tartly, as you chew and swallow, "If you take so little care of yourself you keel over and die, I'm out of a job."
Despite yourself, you laugh, and then you wince as the movement jars your leg.
"House, you have bruising, don't you? Will you let me look at it?"
Weirdly, your shin is hurting more than your thigh at the moment, in the same way that a stubbed toe dominates sensation; it's the novelty factor of the newest pain.
You can feel you have some quite impressive bruises from when you fell earlier, overlaid on the tapestry of marks from the skateboarding. For some reason you always fall on your right side. You think it must be because you're trying so hard not to - it has some sort of magnetic attraction to the ground.
You figure this has gone well beyond pride. What have you got to lose? And you roll the leg of your sweat pants up. It should be embarrassing, sitting here while Cameron examines your leg, but she's got her doctor face on, impassive and professional.
She gets up and goes to the kitchen, returning with a bottle of olive oil you didn't even know you had, and a plastic coffee mug with a lid, which she puts on the coffee table with your now empty bowl of pasta.
"Where do you keep the whisky?"
You nod over towards the shelf by the piano, surprised that she's getting you a drink. But she's not; she brings the bottle over, pours olive oil into the coffee cup and then splashes an equal amount of whisky in.
"That's the weirdest cocktail I've ever been offered," you comment, watching as she shakes the ingredients in the coffee cup, and wondering at the same time if she waitressed her way through college, because her movements are deft and fluent.
"Old remedy for bruising," she says, "Learnt it at sports camp," and she coats her fingers in the mixture and works it into your shin. It stings a little but it's quite bracing. You try to think of a smart comment about jocks but your brain isn't playing ball tonight.
"That was a criminal waste of single malt," you say, when she's finished, but it lacks your normal bite, because your leg does actually feel a bit better. You roll the leg of your sweatpants back down as she gets gracefully up off the floor and sits beside you.
"Why are you still here?" you ask, wearily.
She glances over at you.
"There's nowhere else I have to be," she says, picking up the remote from the coffee table and clicking the TV on. You are so tired; the mixture of Vicodin, whisky, the massage and the food are all combining to make your eyelids heavy. You lie down on the sofa, on your left side, and put your head in her lap. You tell yourself it's just because she's in the way.
It's like Wilson told you, it's a threshold effect: You can't be around all that niceness without getting some on you, House. She doesn't go away or give up, and she builds up in the blood like drugs.
You know she'll be gone when you wake up. Most of you is glad about that, but just a tiny part wishes she'd stay. You tell the tiny part to shut the fuck up.
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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