It's a strange way of coping with death (she realised that ages ago), but she does it anyway.

She remembers the first time she was here. Her husband had died in the small hours of the morning, slipped away (finally) after over a year in a lonely hospital bed on the fifth floor of Princeton General. It was winter then, and everything had seemed grey - the hospital bed, the windowpanes and the eyes of her husband that gleamed dully in the tired light cast onto his face - making him seem even more lifeless, dead than thyroid cancer ever did. She remembers leaning over to kiss him for the last time and feeling the railing of the bed digging into her hipbone.

A few hours later, she clutched the death certificate in her hand (the cherry on top of a truly magical year) like a lifeline, sitting on a swing in a playground she found driving aimlessly around the bare streets of Princeton for three hours. She had seen the swing, stopped, gotten out, and spent the night watching the day progress from twilight to midnight and back to sunrise, trying not to feel anything except her bruised hip and the paper clutched in her hand.

The second time she came here was the first time she saw one of her patients die. She remembers the thrill of being fresh out of medical school, a bright new diploma hanging on her new office wall, and feeling like she could do anything, save anyone. But then came a seventeen year old female, her case file thrown carelessly in front of her. Her face is crystal-clear in her memory - her pixie-cut, mousy brown hair, pale, protruding cheekbones, and the ever-present bags under her eyes, but strangely enough, she couldn't recall her name at all - Milly? Mary?

Hughes' Syndrome. There was nothing her and the team could do. By the time she was referred to Immunology from OB-GYN, when they finally realised something was amiss after she developed haemolytic anaemia and her blood started clotting - right after her second miscarriage, it was too late for them to do anything. It wasn't her fault - that was obvious. But since when has emotion listened to logic, she wondered, sitting for an hour in the car, trying to find the playground again, as if everything would be okay, that Marly would spring back to life from in the autopsy room, if she just found the playground again. Funnily enough, she didn't.

This time, five years onwards, the playground, and she, haven't changed much. Except for a new job for Cameron, a new paint job on the seats, new graffiti on the slide and tunnel, and the notable absence of a once-tall oak tree in the playground, everything's the same.

Now it's a thirty-two year old female with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She doesn't want to think about it too much - the point is, they screwed up and she's trying not to think too hard about that. Guilt is something she is all too well-acquainted with.

She doesn't know why this case has gotten to her so badly. Patients die - it's a reality she's learnt to deal with over the course of seven years spent working as a doctor. She knows that. She decides to blame it on the stressful past month she, and her team, have shared. Emotionally, she knows she's probably had the roughest time of them all, and she wants to escape it for at least one night, feel a peaceful state of nothing again.

She's got company tonight - her iPod. Dido filters through her headphones and it's all she can do not to scream. She feels fairly melodramatic, angsting here like a teenage girl who's just been dumped, but she's beyond caring. Music distracts her from reality, provides an alternative backdrop to the thoughts spinning through her head. Melodramatic, yes, but who's here to see her?

~

That's not Cameron. That is Cameron. Is that Cameron? Could be. She's wearing the same peasant blouse she was wearing at work today, and despite the fact it's the middle of the night (why was she in a playground, anyway?), he can see the signature white wires of an iPod running from her ears into the pocket of her black pants.

That's Cameron, all right.

"Well, shit," he says, more to the wind than anyone else. What the hell was Cameron doing here at three in the morning at the local playground? Sleeping on the streets? Her salary wasn't that bad, was it? He thinks back, and decides it must be something else keeping her awake at night. Dead husband? Guilty conscience? He's never been the sort to leave a puzzle untouched.

He walks up behind her surreptiously, with the intent of scaring her. His distinctive three-beat gait, step, thump, step, is drowned out by a mellow female voice asking the world why pain is the only way to happiness.

He's right behind her, yet she still has no idea that there's anyone near her for miles. He can see every strand of hair falling over her shoulders, every thread in her coat, he's that close, and he has to stop himself from breathing in too deeply.

He stands like this for half a minute, then, lifting up his cane, taps Cameron on the shoulder with the handle.

The reaction he gets from her is surprising, especially from someone of her size and usually sympathetic personality. She shrieks, spinning around. She's about to punch the guy in the face when she realises exactly who that annoyingly familiar smirk belongs to.

House. Of fucking course.

"What the hell?" she yells, half-shocked, half-scared out of her mind. "You moron! You scared me!!"

House looks distinctly unrepentant, amused by her overreaction. "Pah," he says, plopping himself down next to her. Cameron shakes the hair out of her face, still angry. House notices her feet are bare - her ballet flats were seated next to her, two faithful, prim and proper black companions on a Friday night. There's an almost-full cup of coffee next to the shoes, her lipgloss smudged on the white Styrofoam edge. Cameron is ignoring him, staring off into the city skyline. Her fingernails have been chewed and ripped to shreds. He wonders why.

"What are you listening to?" he asks, the closest thing she'll probably get to a personal question from him right now.

"Dido," she replies quietly. The track starts again, and she sings along quietly in her head to the familiar guitar notes.

He sighs. "I should have known. Did Chase introduce you to her?"

She looked at him blankly. "Being British and all," he clarified.

"Australian," she corrected automatically, kicking her legs out from under the bench. For once, she didn't seem all that interested in a conversation with him, wanting to fall back into the comfortably numb feeling of being alone with her thoughts.

"Do I look like I care?" he asked rhetorically, into the breeze. He doesn't get an answer, just the sound of white noise being turned up louder. She sighs, and it's like watching a balloon deflate.

She notices, for the fourth time that hour, that the sky is a particularly nice shade of dusky pink. Ambulance sirens cut through the city-silence, more casualties to the ER of Princeton-Plainsboro. Who knows - maybe one of them will be referred to her.

She feels noticeably uncomfortable under the streetlights. This tense, subtext-riddled silence feels ridiculously familiar to her - something they've both gotten good at in the past few months. She wants to break the silence, but tries to ignore the fact that there's a tiny part of her that wants him to initiate a conversation between them - letting him do the chasing for once.

He doesn't like these silences either. They overwhelm him, and he hates that he feels so out of control when they're together. To say that the past month had been difficult would be a gross understatement, he thinks, what with the date that never should have happened, Stacy's return (he made it sound like a freaking movie or something), and Cameron's subsequent rhetoric on why he could never love her. Since then, they had fallen back into a halfway-decent, if slightly uncomfortable working relationship. Only Wilson had noticed the tension between the two, and regularly annoyed House about it. Tonight is just another event in their volatile, screwed-up relationship. The fact that they are together, in a park at three fucking am in the morning is so disgustingly twisted, so utterly clichd that he feels like swallowing the rest of his bottle of Vicodin and killing himself.

He can't stand it any more. He pulls the earphone out of her ear, a strangely intimate motion that makes her flinch.

"You don't think this is a fairly teenage response to emotional trauma?" he asks sarcastically. No answer. Her iPod is turned up to the maximum volume. Dido pisses him off - Wilson is also a fan, and has put her album "Life For Rent" on his iPod, making him all-too familiar with "See The Sun".

"Want to go slash our wrists together? I'm fairly sure I have a few Simple Plan songs we can cry to," he continues.

She glares at him. "You know who Simple Plan are?"

"Is that relevant?"

She rolls her eyes, then hops off the bench, quickly walking over to the climbing equipment. With agile movements and leaps, in a few seconds she's at the top of the tangle of metal poles and bars, shaking her hair out of her face and replacing her earphones.

He limps over to the base of the playground, and stares up at her. Pity she wasn't wearing a skirt instead of her work-sensible trousers - he probably would have been able to look right up it.

"Kids these days," he yells up at her. "No respect for cripples!"

She smirks down at him, then switches her gaze from him to the sky. If it were any time except for right now, she would have welcomed his obvious attempts to garner her attention. But right now, all she wanted was to be left alone.

He stands there for a few minutes, until his leg begins to protest. He rolls his eyes, silently cursing her stubbornness, and limps to a nearby see-saw. He sits down on one end, and reaches into his jacket and pulls out his bottle of Vicodin. The motions of unscrewing the cap, tipping a pill into his hand, and swallowing it are all too familiar to him, he thinks. He considers throwing it up in the air and catching it with his mouth, but he can't be bothered, plus, dirt-covered Vicodin has never really been a fetish of his.

He's about to put the bottle back in his pocket when he remembers his manners.

"Want one?" he calls, proffering the bottle towards her tiny frame, perched on top of the equipment.

She looks over at him. His Vicodin bottle is resting in his outstretched arm, the bright white of the plastic a stark contrast to the rest of the nighttime scene. 

"No thanks," she answered.

Suddenly, she jumps to the ground from the very top of the playground, landing on the tanbark that covers the ground for metres around in a crouching position. A perfect landing, he notes, wincing at the chemical, bitter aftertaste of painkillers swallowed dry.

She's walking towards him now, which is strange, considering she was doing her best to ignore him minutes earlier. Towards the other end of the see-saw. It becomes apparent she's planning on joining him. And with a hop and swinging of legs over the plank of wood, she does. He silently curses the god of sexual tension. Right now, it could be cut with a knife. Or scalpel, if he wanted to keep being all doctor-y. He could leave, if he wanted - but he decides he kind of likes it. This.

"Why are you here?" she asks suddenly. The grind of metal-on-metal is a comforting reminder of her childhood - days spent at the local playground with her older brother, of coming home with bruises and scratches and innocent memories.

He pauses. "Why is anyone here?" Creak. His feet touch the ground again. The pain that jolts through his leg with each thump against the hard ground feels duller than normal, numbed by his Vicodin. He grimaces slightly, pushing himself upwards with his good leg.

"Not existentially speaking," she tells him, noting the way his right leg is hanging limply in the air. He sees her staring, and covers up his discomfort with his standard sarcasm.

"Well, to tell you the truth, booze, hookers and music just doesn't do it for me some nights. I get bored."

She wrinkles her nose. "That's disgusting." She thinks back to the night she, Foreman and Chase were drinking at the local bar together, just after House had asked her out on their non-date, and makes a mental note never to doubt Foreman's judgement again.

"It also has the benefit of being true." He pauses. He's beginning to enjoy the simple up-and-down motions of the see-saw, despite his leg being jarred every time he touched the ground. "What are you doing here? Angsting? Got a razorblade in your pants somewhere?"

She feels like throwing her iPod at him. Maybe if she throws it hard, enough, it'll give him a concussion - it's certainly big enough to hurt him.

"Can we get over the overemotional-teenager jokes, please?" Her voice is pleading.

He grins. "Never."

He falls silent, looking at her expectantly.

"What?" she asks.

"Well, I know it might be kind of difficult for you to remember, but I did just ask you a question--"

She feels the urge to throw her iPod at him again. "You're an ass."

"And you're good at avoiding questions."

"Fine!" she half-yells, frustrated. She looks away from him, instead, at the ground. "I'm here because I feel like crap! We screwed up, with the patient, and she died, and it's our fault!" She breathes in heavily. "And I hate that. I don't want to feel like crap." She pauses to look up him again. She didn't want to feel at all. Damn House and his ability to rile her up without fail. He could go take his cane and shove it right up his--

"We're doctors," he says angrily, interrupting her internal monologue. "We screw up! It's a part of the job! Stop acting like an melodramatic teenager and deal with it."

She glares at him, something she's used to doing. Especially tonight.

"This is how I deal with it." She smirks, knowing she's just gotten a one-up on him.

He doesn't know what to say to this. His normally sharp wit has been dulled by prescription medication and insomnia. Then something clicks.

"But if it were only because the patient died," he says slowly, "Then you'd be here every time one of our patients died." He looks at her. "Which you're not."

Silence. The streetlights are flickering on and off above them. "So I'm guessing there's something else that's wrong."

She hates how he's always right. "No."

"Dr. Cameron, everybody lies." Standard. So true. She wonders if there's anything bigger than an iPod she can hit him with.

"I've. . . had a rough month." She sighs, hating herself for admitting that to House, because she knows that he'll be able to use it against her somehow. Damnit.

Obviously, her feelings for him haven't changed. "Hence the acting like a fifteen-year-old."

"That well never runs dry, does it?" she fires back.

"Never," he replies, for the second time that night. She doesn't reply.  

"You think you love me," he begins, breaking the silence.

She looks at him. "Stop," she tells him, tiredly. "Please."

He stares at her, and both know the other is thinking back to their disastrous date. 

"You're wrong, you know," she tells him quietly, looking him in the eye. "You think I need you because you're damaged, and I need to comfort you and make everything better again. You do realise you're more than just an infarction and a whole lot of misery?"

He stops, raising an eyebrow. This is interesting.

Her voice grows stronger, more insistent. "You're not. I like you because I see something in you. So does Wilson, Cuddy, everyone who gives a damn about you. You know, you can keep being a misanthropic son-of-a-bitch," he smirks - him and misanthrope are two words commonly associated with each other, "but we'll still be there, because we see something worth staying around for." She exhales. She feels strangely freer than she has in the past month or two, and allows herself to smile the tiniest bit.

He's surprised. She's developed some balls in the past few days, it seems. She's still got her eyes on his, and he doesn't want to break contact, because that would be admitting she's right.

But maybe she is, he realises.

"So, I can keep being an ass to you? And I thought Chase was my only duckling who was into being tortured," House said finally.

She doesn't respond, looking down at the ground from high up in the air.

"Why the hell are we on a see-saw, anyway? This doesn't seem too random for you to comprehend?" he asks her, back to his usual sarcasm. She doesn't mind - she never expected to him to return with his own confessions of eternal love.

She hops off the see-saw suddenly, ignoring House's subsequent crash to the ground.

"Shit!" he yells. She looks over at him, wide-eyed and worried. "Oh God, did I hurt you? I'm sorry," she apologises.

"You seem to forget the basic fact that I'm a cripple," he answers, eyes rolling. He pauses. "I'm fine." He lifts himself up, using his cane on the ground next to the see-saw as support. "I'm going, anyway. Don't know how much more of this psychoanalysis shit I can take."

He limps off, stepping over the wooden railing nailed to the ground and onto the footpath outside. "Don't be late tomorrow. And turn that frown upside down!"

She smiles slightly to herself, watching his figure disappear past a fence next to the playground. She walks back to the climbing equipment, scrambling up to the top. She gets there, and replaces her earphones, thinking maybe it's not such a bad thing, feeling.

~

a/n: Written for the House/Cameron ficathon on LiveJournal. Two people need to be thanked for their help in creating this fanfic: Lia, for unwittingly inspiring this fanfic (House marathon ring a bell?), and Rory, for his beta services, too-nice comments and for being there whenever I need to gossip about House. Hearts to you guys.