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The Good That Won't Come Out
by Nicola
Rating: R
Spoilers: #2.07, 'Hunting'
"Why are we doing this?" said Chase, exasperation hitching in his voice. Evidently he regretted speaking the question aloud (or, at least, phrasing it so simply), because he shook his head, half rolled his eyes and muttered, "Never mind."
"Sex is—" she broke off as he thrust more deeply inside her. "Sex is life-affirming." She collected herself and choked off the words: "It's what you're supposed to do during funerals."
"Makes sense," he said mirthlessly. "Except we're not actually at his funeral."
". . . what time is it?" she asked distractedly. Calculating time difference had always messed with her head.
Chase's voice was pleasantly sarcastic as he gasped out, "You want me to go find a clock?"
"It can wait," she conceded, feeling the onset of her orgasm.
She angled her hips as he bore down on top of her; she willed him to fuck her harder, break her apart. The flash of chemicals finally succeeded in quieting the parts of her brain that wanted to do math or hold conversations about the philosophy of sex and death; banishing the niggling voices that told her sleeping with Chase again, especially now, was a Very Bad Idea. Her ears were full of a nonsensical mantra of swearwords that she had long since eradicated from her everyday vocabulary. Her fingernails clawed reflexively against his back. She had short nails, shaped and filed down—but if she'd been able to break the skin, she felt she would have done.
She always closed her eyes when she came. He never commented on it; it was part of their understanding.
*
Chase always wanted to hold her afterward. It was something that surprised her a little. To the extent that she would often grow uncomfortable and irritable in his arms; wishing to cut and run like a man. The first time, he had stayed and stayed and stayed; watched her throw up and then cleaned her up with the matter-of-fact kindness of a nurse. He'd only left when she'd screamed, "I don't need a girlfriend to hold back my hair!"—followed by a string of those same suppressed obscenities.
A snide voice at the back of her head noted, things would be so much easier if you could just spend your life strung out on crystal meth.
Today there was no time for niceties, anyway. Cameron reached for her clothes and allowed the dull chatter of the hospital to penetrate her consciousness once more. A gurney squealed along the corridor on the other side of the door, and she could feel Chase's blank stare as he watched her dress. She realized again that she had no idea of the time; in the sleep rooms, buried deep in the bowels of the hospital, it always felt like 3am. Maybe in Australia it really was 3am.
"You should go home," she said quietly. Chase was listlessly tugging on his pants. She noticed, not for the first time, how strangely breakable his body looked; skin stretched across bone, pale and sad in the half-light.
"What for?" He paused and met her eyes. "Or did you mean home to Australia? Because there's definitely nothing for me there."
"You're bleeding," she noticed suddenly. She hadn't yet snapped back into doctor mode and she didn't think of fetching gauze or vasoconstrictor nose drops; she merely felt shaken by the sight of blood. She reached out to touch him, but pulled back her hand when he jerked his head away.
Blood trickled sluggishly out his nostrils. He sniffed hard and then wiped the heel of his hand across his nose, smearing the blood across his palm. ". . . shit," he muttered. He caught her concerned look and narrowed his eyes. "It's fine," he said more clearly. "I used to get nosebleeds all the time." He grimaced. "It's . . . stress." He enunciated the final word with a sharp bite of sarcasm.
Suddenly she didn't want to look at him anymore. "Did you get them before," she asked carefully, "when your mom died?"
"Yeah," he said coldly. "I got them during finals at uni, too. Don't read too much into it."
He reached for his shirt, using it to wipe his nose.
"Don't," she said. "You're getting blood all over it."
"I don't care," he said, wiping more vigorously.
Chase's nosebleed stopped quickly, although a large, rust-coloured stained was left on his shirt. He put it back on anyway, and Cameron guessed it was intentional: he wanted to wear the blood across his chest; challenge people to question why.
*
The conference room was empty when Cameron arrived, so their elaborate charade of staggering their departures of the sleep room and showing up to the meeting separately was rendered pointless. Cameron made a pot of coffee—super-strength to compensate for the hour she hadn't spent sleeping in the sleep rooms. She reached for her bag, emptying a multi-coloured mound of pills into her palm. Vitamins and placebos, she guessed—they still made her feel queasy. She started at the sound of a cane hitting the glass door. Then she exhaled and tossed the cocktail of pills into her mouth, gulping down her coffee. She turned around and smiled.
"Good morning," she said. When she glanced at the clock, she realized it read 4:46pm.
House didn't seem to care, if he even noticed. He walked toward her, stopping mere inches away from her. He reached out, brushing her hair with his fingertips as he took her face in his palm. He moved her jaw, and squeezed hard against her glands.
He dropped his hand, frowning. "You're okay." It wasn't a question.
"AIDS is a manageable illness," she replied, taking a sip of her coffee. She felt wearier every time she parroted the statement. "I could live longer than you."
"You probably will," House said mirthlessly. After a moment he added, "And Chase is all right."
Again—"Is that a question?"
House moved his shoulders in a loose approximation of a shrug; he looked like he might smile.
"Considering his dad just died, and considering he's"—she paused—"one of the most closed-off guys I've ever met, yeah I think he's doing okay." She smiled sardonically. "Your concern is touching."
Minutes passed; Foreman arrived, but Chase didn't.
The three of them made a half-hearted attempt at an argument, but it soon became apparent that they were all in agreement over the patient's prognosis. "Wait and see" was the fairly mundane conclusion. Even House couldn't come up with a suitably borderline-lethal drug to inject Mr Peterson with. He seemed tangibly frustrated as he dismissed them, and Cameron felt the gently scalding memory of his hand at her throat.
*
Cameron thought about going back to the sleep rooms, getting some rest for real this time. She thought about going home, but she heard Chase's muttered words in her head—nothing for me there. She ended up at the hospital's chapel, as she'd known she would. As she stood at the threshold, she felt the same unaccountable stillness that she'd felt as a child. Mostly she had been bored by church—and because she was a good girl, that had made her feel guilty. So she would yawn and fidget and berate herself during the lengthy sermons. But once in a while, she'd look up, feel herself caught in the church's enormity; that strange inner calm that she was never able to hold on to.
The moment passed, and she made her way along the pews to where Chase was seated. He looked up at her blankly; it seemed to take him a moment to recognize her.
"I'm sorry. I forgot—" He broke off. "I—Shit." The word sounded out loud and tasteless. It seemed to shock Chase a little, even though there was no one to offend. He reached up, rubbing the heal of his hand across his left eye, although there were no tears to wipe away. He just looked worn out.
Cameron sat down close to him. "Don't worry, House understands . . ."
There was a pause, and then they both laughed at the absurdity of the statement.
"He's so understanding these days," Chase said. "We're all getting to be as fucked up as he is." Again, the swearword rang out unnaturally in the high-ceilinged room.
A silence stretched between them, until Chase bit out, "I came here to pray. But I can't even think of what to ask for.
"I just want something that won't . . . fade away. Something that doesn't change—when I least expect it. Let me down. Fuck me up." His hands tightened into fists. Cameron could feel the coils of rage beneath his skin as she pressed herself closer to him. She laid her cheek against his upper arm, making herself small and angling her gaze downward. Suddenly she didn't want to look at him; didn't want to see his desperation, his petulance and pleading.
"At least you're alive," she murmured. The words sounded hollow—just as they did when she repeated them to herself every morning.
"Yeah, that's everything." His sarcasm reverberated around the chapel. "Everything and nothing."
She'd played out their goodbye in her head so many times. She'd wanted it to be perfect—poignant and loving and everything their relationship hadn't really been. But more than that, she'd wanted not to be surprised. This marriage came with a use-by date and she thought she had readied herself for the moment it would inevitably turn sour.
"I'm so glad I met you," she would say, holding back tears. "Yes, yes," he would murmur, as he kissed her gently (she always edited out the hospital tubes in her fantasies; he was pale, but beautiful as he said goodbye). "You made my life the fullest it has ever been," he would say. "Live bravely, live honestly, live happily, Allison." He would die quietly, with the slight smile of "live" across his lips.
Except, of course, they hadn't gotten their romantic deathbed goodbye. It had been 3am and she'd been getting coffee, weaving ghostlike through the hospital corridors; she'd been sleepy, cowardly and reluctant to go back and listen to her husband choke and gasp through the small hours. She'd missed the furious life-saving attempts (if, indeed, there had been any); she'd returned to his room to find a cooling body and a worn-out doctor pronouncing time of death.
His last words to her had been, "no sugar".
Their pagers began to scream simultaneously, tuned louder and more unsettling by the acoustics of the chapel. They fell apart, scrambling to their feet and forgetting all contact. They ran—arrived breathless and energized at the patient's bedside. There were tubes to be fitted, drugs to be administered; heroics to perform.
Minutes dissolved into an hour and they were still working and the patient was still breathing. Cameron looked up briefly—Chase caught her gaze and smiled.
"Nothing at all," he repeated, his voice laced with an odd intensity. "And everything."
". . . what?" the patient gasped.
"Nothing, Mr Peterson—" Chase's practised doctor voice clicked back in; cocky and with a fake world-weary twang "—we're just doing everything we can to make you feel better. Now just relax . . ."
November 2005
Note: written for the House rareathon. Prompt: "Nothing can be proven except that it be made to bleed. Virgins, bulls, men. Ultimately God himself." (Cormac McCarthy)
Muse music: 'The Good That Won't Come Out' by Rilo Kiley.
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