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Peripatetic
by showertiles
Peripatetic
showertiles
The sudden knock on his door is an almost rude interruption of the silence of his apartment, and not entirely unexpected, coming only seven minutes exactly after House readies himself for it. His answering machine flashes steadily in the quiet, twelve messages he cannot really be bothered checking - he can guess who they're from, anyway. With a sigh, he sets his glass of scotch down with a soft clink atop his piano, and walks over to the door.
He has to steady himself to open the door, bracing himself for what's coming. There's always the possibility of just ignoring the almost timid knock on his door, but he pulls the door open, instead, revealing Cameron's slight form, arms crossed over her chest. Evidently, she has been in a soul-searching mood since the end of the stupid dinner and subsequent speech - for once, she can't look at him directly, instead focusing her gaze on the riveting floor of House's apartment.
House smirks. She's predictable. He cocks his head, taps his cane against the floor. Gazes at her steadily, waiting for her to begin.
She breathes in, and looks at him. "You won't need to worry about firing anyone. I'm leaving," she informs him plainly. Her voice is quiet and direct, tinged with regret.
The seconds stretch out between them, long and silent, words hanging in the air like mist. House has to wonder how serious Cameron really is, taking in her vaguely tight sky-blue sweater, and lethal, two-inch heeled boots.
"I see," he says finally, quietly condescending. Suddenly, he doesn't want to ask why, because he'll get self-indulgent angst and puppy-dog looks if he does. Suddenly, he is sick of the bullshit and subtext, the glances and the sarcastic exchanges, so he doesn't do anything, but stare.
When she offers her hand for him to shake, he ignores it, staring off to the side like the petulant eight-year old he sometimes is. When he looks up again, he thinks he can see tears in her eyes, and immediately averts his gaze again.
"Goodbye, House," she says quietly, more to herself than anyone else. She turns around and closes his door, arms wrapping around her thin frame. Her issues and her sadness seem to follow her out, like a little rain cloud above her head. He stays standing in the same place for a long time.
.
The next morning dawns bright and obnoxiously sunny, sunlight streaming through glass walls and windows and sticking to plastic and polished-smooth surfaces. It's a pity that the bright, ambient mood is totally lost on House - it pisses him off, instead. It's always the little things that do; being easy to blame. Cheap throwaway shots designed to be easy to throw, to swallow, to make him feel better.
There are envelopes, unsorted mail littered all across House's desk. It's unfamiliar - through no effort on his part, normally his mail is sorted and stacked in a neat little pile beside Annie, his computer, but today, the crap is overwhelming. His mug looks like some sort of bold statement amongst them, filled with lukewarm black coffee, without any sugar - he has no idea where it was kept.
He walks in, and the room feels strangely still. Chase and Foreman are already there, looking over photocopies of a patient's file and tossing around diagnoses and ideas to each other.
"Cameron quit," he announces, insubstantial, to an office that might as well be empty.
Their reactions aren't particularly surprising, or inspiring. Foreman, predictably, tosses his labs on the desk and gets pissed off at House, ranting angrily about his inability to swallow his pride. House can only snipe back at him childishly, and can't help but feel the slightest bit guilty. For once, Foreman is mostly right, he thinks as he watches him storm out of the room. Chase is even more predictably silent, preferring not to inflame his already-pissed boss's temper. His head is bowed in what looks like mourning, blond hair falling into his eyes, hiding his guilt, because he knows that this is, at least, partially his fault.
Eventually, he leaves to go check up on Naomi with Foreman, their most recent admittance to the department. They both wear smiles and the feeling of distance about them, going about their routines with polite, sunny detachment, in stark contrast to Cameron's overly sweet, sympathetic manner. Chase looks at Foreman as they leave. Foreman shrugs, and Chase sighs, looking as if he is deflating like a balloon.
.
The next week is a strange dream, where House feels like he is weaving in and out of reality. Vogler continues on his rampage, taking Wilson, their patient, and almost taking Cuddy with him. For the first time in awhile, House feels like a failure. The days quietly continue to drift by, things culminate and Vogler quits, taking his one hundred million dollars with him. House and his remaining co-workers aren't particularly disappointed, except for Cuddy - who may as well have organised a commemorative day, complete with a minute of silence, to remember him by. Naomi's baby girl is released from the hospital, Wilson's office is put back in order, complete with golfing and various sporting trophies, Cuddy continues to try and dig her way out of a mountain of paperwork. Cameron is still missing, the only thing which has changed. Her presence almost lingers in the air, antiseptic and perfume clinging to their clothes and making House feel vaguely sick.
He thinks he doesn't miss her presence. The curve of her wrist as she hands a case file or a mug of coffee to him, always in the same red mug with "GH" written in marker on the bottom. The impatient sigh, the roll of her eyes, and the wrinkle in her forehead that comes when he says something particularly juvenile. Her diagnoses - her constant initial diagnosis of lupus that he could always count on. He doesn't miss that.
After hours, when the offices are quiet, lights off and markers and textbooks waiting patiently for tomorrow, when the only sounds are the consistent, steady beep of monitors and the occasional siren tearing through the cold night air, House thinks. About patients, about cases, about people.
Apparently, Cameron has found a place with Yule, at Jefferson - according to an associate of Wilson. A prestigious position, despite the many shortcomings (literally) of Yule. Pedantic, preachy, and so short he bordered on dwarf status - House had hated him from the moment they had first met, at some oncology seminar. He wonders how Cameron is doing under him, and exactly how long she will last.
He feels distantly seasick, drifting around at sea in a paper boat whose crew is short one.
.
A week later, Cuddy catches House while he tries, and fails, to escape from the clinic, a wad of files and papers stashed under her arm.
"House!" she yells across the clinic. He freezes, and turns around to see her - well, more of her breasts than anything else, but that's not a particularly terrible thing, really.
"I didn't do it," he tells her, more a defensive strategy than anything else.
She rolls her eyes, and he resists the temptation to tell her that will face will freeze like that if the wind changes, and what will she do then? Plastic surgery on the twins was bad enough, but her face?
Cuddy pulls out a stack of files from under one arm, and hands them to him. He pretends to lose his grip on them. She glares at him.
"What are all these?" he asks.
She shifts the rest of her papers under her arm to a more comfortable position. "CVs," she informs him. When he doesn't respond, she continues. "For Dr. Cameron's vacant position."
"Thank you, Captain Obvious," House tells her with a nod of his head. He pauses. "Incidentally, what will happen if I don't hire anyone to fill in for her?"
She tips her head to the side, thinking. "I cut your department's funding," she tells him simply. "And clinic duty, to boot," she adds as an afterthought. He's defeated.
She almost goes to leave, when she remembers - "Could you please hire someone female? Or at least someone with a sense of compassion?"
"Why?" he shoots back. "Need a female for your sexual fantasies about my department? Gay porn not your thing?"
She rolls her eyes. "I'd rather your department didn't have so many lawsuits in the period of a year." She gives him an appraising glance, and he thinks he can see the faintest traces of concern behind her gaze. He turns away.
.
The realisation that she really is gone is not really such a surprising thing, the way one is never really shocked when the waves from the ocean laps at and touches their feet, gentle and cold, then pulls irrevocably away, leaving only faint traces of it's presence behind.
Foreman spends one morning flicking through a stack of patient files that Cameron left. He almost feels like he's doing something wrong when he moves to throw them out. He misses, and the papers flutter to the ground insubstantially. He curses House as he leans over to retrieve them.
Chase, while looking for a pen, finds little things scattered around the office, a treasure hunt for little pieces of her incidence - a drawer with an almost-empty tube of lipgloss that looks and smells faintly of peaches; a coffee mug, stained at the bottom and the same lipgloss coagulated, like blood, on the edge. He stashes them away in a high-up cabinet, almost never used, waiting for the day she might come back.
.
House sits in his office, opposite Wilson, with his faithful ball in his right hand, a dwindling pile of resumes in front of him. So far, no-one's even come close to the standard that House has set for his next fellow - or that's the excuse he's using. Really, everyone he has interviewed is either male, too smart, too stuck-up, too annoying, or just wearing the wrong shoes - like the last applicant who just left his office.
"House." Wilson's voice is steady, serious - the exact tone House has categorised and filed away as being his 'serious, not-fucking-around' tone. "You've got to hire someone."
"You've seen those idiots," House replies. "You helped me interview them. You're telling me I should hire one of them?"
Wilson wonders for the millionth time in his like why nobody has beaten House to death with his cane yet. Watching him reject everybody la la la is almost like watching a grown-up child in a sulky, selfish mood - but then again, who's to say that isn't what House is? He sighs.
"You had the perfect person, and you blew it."
House feigns shock. "You saw the shoes!"
"I'm not talking about her," Wilson replies. "I'm talking about Cameron."
House rolls his eyes. "Cameron is so not perfect."
"Well, nobody's perfect."
House stares at Wilson. Wilson thinks it might be nice if House actually figured that out sometime soon.
.
The realisation that she is not coming back comes with the arrival of their new fellow. Dr. Gilmar sort-of fills in the bigger gaps that Cameron left in her wake. A twenty-nine year old female radiologist, she's sassy, sarcastic and on occasion, smart. She wears high-heels and suit jackets, sometimes makes coffee in the morning, and rolls her eyes when she sees the department's mail resting like snowflakes in the bin. Foreman is politely wary of her, already seeing the parallels between her and House, and Chase thinks she is a pretty face, but prefers to keep his distance.
House stands at their ever-present whiteboard, throwing out symptoms and sarcastic quips for the team to catch. Unexplained internal bleeding and seizures in a twenty-six year old female, differential? She's the first to throw back, suggesting something autoimmune, maybe lupus?
Something drops almost inaudibly onto the floor. No one moves to pick it up. House finally acknowledges the ghosts, which have lingered in the air for weeks past - now, he knows that there is something subtly wrong with the team. The air is still, questions and almost-regrets hanging tangible in the air; there is something missing. Something has changed - the lost are sometimes never found - people change, dreams change, the tides and time never stand still: something always changes.
A/N: Okay, so I screwed with canon - a lot. At least it was fun to write.
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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 Fox Television, 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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