New Fic: 100 Seasons: Cameron
Jul. 1st, 2007 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
namasteTitle: 100 Seasons: Cameron
Author: Namaste
Summary: The third season, according to Cameron.
A continuing set of drabbles, prompted from moments in each episode of the third season, from each character’s point of view. You can find House’s split into two parts: So It Goes and Big Brains and the rest collected under the title 100 Seasons beginning with 100 Seasons: Cuddy then 100 Seasons: Foreman and 100 Seasons: Chase
Spoilers: All of the third season.
Sample:
She’s been a daughter, a student, a wife. She’s been a widow. Different roles, different names. But she’s always been what everyone else expected.
For the first time, she’s doing things on her own terms and it feels good. It’s like a vacation away from the person she was, the person everyone expects her to be. She hadn’t realized how hard it was being Allison Cameron until she stepped aside and let everything go.
Meaning
In the first months of their marriage, Brian was still on chemo.
Allison learned the pattern: the days after treatment as he began his slow descent, the days he couldn’t eat, the days he’d manage a few bites as he regained strength.
But there were also the days between treatments, when he felt nearly normal and tried to squeeze in everything from long dinners to a day at the beach.
Cameron watches House gliding back and forth on his skateboard, and wonders why that image of Brian -- happy, but knowing it wouldn’t last for long -- keeps flashing through her mind.
---
Cane & Able
This is wrong. They’re wrong. Cameron fights every urge to run down the stairs and follow House out to the parking lot, to show him Richard’s file, to tell him he was right, that he was right all along.
She can’t understand why they’d hold back the information, what they hope to gain. Cuddy and Wilson mumble something about humility, about how they’re doing this for House’s own benefit.
Cameron shakes her head. She doesn’t understand -- or maybe they don’t understand what they’re doing. But they’ve known House longer, and she can only hope that they know what they’re doing.
---
Informed Consent
Cameron stares up at the empty pulpit and the stained glass. She’s not sure why she came here, why she’s looking for meaning in this place, from a god she doesn’t believe exists.
She can still feel the soft leather of the pouch taken from House’s desk, the coolness of the syringe, the smooth surface of the glass that held the morphine as she drew it out. When she closes her eyes she sees the faint smile on Ezra’s face as the drug entered his system.
“I’m proud of you,” House says.
She wishes she could say the same thing.
---
Lines In the Sand
It was nearly a week after the shooting before they were allowed back in the conference room. Cameron stood looking down at the uneven splotch in the center of the room until Chase stepped in front of her, blocking her view.
“He’s OK,” he’d reminded her, and she’d nodded.
Cuddy said she’d ordered new carpeting, and asked them to make do for now. They all learned to avoid the spot, stepping around it in some kind of macabre dance.
Cameron studies House as he moves from room to room -- everywhere but their office -- and wonders what dance he’s doing now.
---
Fools For Love
“How’re you going to stop me?” House asks.
For a moment Cameron thinks that there’s nothing she can do. House is in charge. It’s his case. They’re his patients.
All her life she’s done things the right way, the proper way. She’s followed the rules, obeyed her teachers, obeyed her parents.
House doesn’t do any of those things. House doesn’t respect the rules. He listens to no one but himself.
Cameron takes a breath and remembers what else House has said, about standing up for what you believe. Maybe he’s daring her now, to take her stand. Maybe she should.
---
Que Sera Sera
See the world through your patients’ eyes, they said in med school. Empathize with them. Understand them.
House wants to know everything, but only because he’s curious, not to identify with them. George tells Cameron he doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him. He says he’s happy with his life. She can’t see how.
House has never claimed to be happy about anything, and sometimes Cameron can almost believe that.
Cameron wants to understand both men, but can’t. She sees only glimpses, and just hopes that the future for House won’t be as dark as the one waiting for George.
---
Son Of A Coma Guy
“I’m Dr. Wilson.” He’d stood and held out his hand when Cameron met him. Wilson had led the interview. House’s only comment was to ask why she hadn’t been first in her class.
“Second place is useless,” he’d said, “but fifth is even worse.”
Cameron was sure she’d screwed up, that she wouldn’t get the post, but Wilson called the next day to offer it to her.
It’s Wilson who’s always there, translating for House, explaining him, excusing him, easing his way.
So why, Cameron wonders, would House have stolen Wilson’s pad and forged a prescription? It doesn’t make sense.
---
Whac-A-Mole
Wilson glares at her from across the room, his mouth clamped tight. Cameron doesn’t blame him, but wants to tell him to go yell at House, to take it out on him.
She’s heard them argue before, their voices cutting through the glass walls and past the door. This time he doesn’t say anything, just bites back on his anger, tries to swallow it down. She’s not sure why, but wonders if it’s because he’s waiting for House to be the one to make the first move this time. She hopes she’s wrong, but doesn’t think that’s going to happen.
---
Finding Judas
Tritter thinks House has changed Cameron. He’s right.
She’s not the same person who walked into his office for that interview. She’s not the same person who showed up the first day to find only Chase and an unopened stack of mail in the trash. She’s not the same person who thought House could change, if only he had the right person to help him.
Cameron’s not always sure who she is now, but she knows she’s not the person she was, and knows that’s a good thing. The person she was wouldn’t stand up to House, or to Tritter.
---
Merry Little Christmas
Cameron is surprised by her own anger when it comes out, then finds she can’t hold back. Wilson is the one who did this. Cuddy helped. Just like before. Just like every crappy plan of theirs.
They think they know House. They think they know what’s best for him, think they can control him. Last time that was enough for Cameron. She let them make the decisions.
This time she isn’t keeping quiet. It isn’t about proving she’s right and they’re wrong. It isn’t even about House -- not completely. It’s about standing up for what she believes. House would understand.
---
Words & Deeds
“Pay attention to the nurses,” one of Cameron’s attendings once said. “They know everything that’s happening.”
It was true. They knew which patients were hiding something. They knew which members of the family were the best to approach in an emergency.
They were the first to know every piece of hospital gossip.
Sometimes Cameron wondered if the real reason House didn’t trust nurses is that he knew how hard it would be to hide secrets from them.
It was a nurse who told her that House had actually apologized to Wilson, and a nurse who said that he’d meant it.
---
One Day, One Room
His breathing is shallow now, not much more than gasps, and sometimes a groan. He’s hanging onto consciousness, and Cameron’s eyes flick to the syringe still on the table, thinks about how it would make his death easier.
She wasn’t there when Brian died, but her father-in-law had said he’d died easy, his pains quieted by morphine. It was morphine that Ezra begged for, to ease his death.
This man wants nothing easy, wants no comfort. He wants to remain a sharp and uneasy point in her memory. Cameron sits back, watches him breathe, and gives him what he wants.
---
Needle In A Haystack
“You’ll be a great doctor,” Brian told her, again and again during their golden summer together.
But once she was in medical school, she struggled in the middle of the pack. She knew that should have been good enough, but it wasn’t. Not for her.
There was so much to remember. The words, the Latin, the symptoms, the diseases -- they tangled themselves into jumbled messes of letters and symbols. She stared at the anatomy chart: scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. She laughed when another student told her his secret: “Scared lovers try positions that they can’t handle.”
---
Insensitive
Allison’s mother called it “making love.” She lectured her daughters to save themselves for the man they loved.
Allison just rolled her eyes. She wasn’t a virgin when she married, but she’d always been careful, always been good.
Chase had been ... a mistake, Cameron told herself. She’d let down her guard, let the meth sweep away her inhibitions. She knew better. But it had been fun.
She’s not just her mother’s daughter any more, not the widow, not the good girl. She’s changed from the naive woman who first met House, she reminds herself. And she wants to have fun.
---
Half-Wit
“This is no good,” Foreman says. “We know nothing.”
“We know he has cancer,” Chase says.
“Brain cancer,” Cameron adds.
“Which is next to nothing,” Foreman says. “Where’s the tumor? What stage is it? What treatment is he getting?”
Cameron knows he’s right. They don’t know enough. She tries not to remember the way that Brian tried to disguise his worst symptoms, so she wouldn’t worry. Instead she recalls how he’d relax, almost forget his pain as they lay together.
She looks up. It’s a stupid idea, but the only one she has. “Maybe I can get us the blood.”
---
Top Secret
Cameron knows it’s wrong, but maybe that’s what makes the idea so appealing.
She’s been a daughter, a student, a wife. She’s been a widow. Different roles, different names. But she’s always been what everyone else expected.
For the first time, she’s doing things on her own terms and it feels good. It’s like a vacation away from the person she was, the person everyone expects her to be. She hadn’t realized how hard it was being Allison Cameron until she stepped aside and let everything go.
She puts her feet up on the table, and waits for Chase’s reaction.
---
Fetal Position
She thought she knew him.
House hates people, Cameron tells herself. He doesn’t care about his patients, apparently doesn’t even care about his friends.
So who is this person? She puts the photo up on the light board, wondering if a new angle can explain away the image she sees. There’s a softness there she had convinced herself didn’t exist -- a softness that even Stacy claimed didn’t exist.
But there it is. Maybe it only lasted for a fraction of a second, caught by a fluke as the shutter clicked.
Or maybe nobody has ever really known House at all.
---
Airborne
Chase is startled when Cameron pushes him down onto the bed. She can see it in his eyes, the wondering, the curiosity, the questions that linger there.
But he doesn’t ask questions. And he doesn’t judge.
Cameron wonders if that’s why it’s been easy for her to push him for more, to get him to try things. She sees confusion just for a moment, then he blinks and seems to accept whatever she wants without hesitaton -- accepts her. It’s so easy with him, so comfortable that Cameron finds herself falling into a state of happiness she’d never thought was possible.
---
Act Your Age
Cameron watches the door after Chase walks out, wondering if he’ll come back, say what he meant by the note, by the knowing smile on his face.
It was easier when Chase had no demands. Cameron thought she’d had everything she wanted.
Then he changed the rules, and it was easier just to be mad at him.
This feeling is new and unexpected -- like the flowers that she holds in her hand -- and she doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean. It’s not what she had before, it’s not what she’s lost. It’s something else, and she can’t explain what.
---
House Training
When it happened to Chase, he went silent, sitting at the end of the table with a paper spread out in front of him, never reading, never turning a page, just staring at the newsprint.
Foreman can’t seem to stop talking. He goes through the list of symptoms and tests again, as if repeating each word, each result, out loud will somehow change what happened.
Cameron wonders what her reaction will be. She knows better than to believe that she’ll have a perfect record. No one does -- not House, not Wilson, not Cuddy, not Chase. And now not Foreman either.
---
Family
Cameron hates Tuesdays.
She knows that sometime, when they’re alone, Chase will casually mention the day.
“I like you,” he says, and claims he doesn’t expect her to respond.
“It’s just a reminder,” he says, as if she could forget.
She doesn’t know what he wants from her. She doesn’t want a relationship, she just wants what they had. That was fun. That was nice. Why couldn’t Chase have been happy with that?
Cameron ignores the voice in her head, asking why she wouldn’t be happy trying it Chase’s way. That voice never shuts up, and doesn’t wait for Tuesday.
---
Resignation
Cameron leaves a message on House’s phone, and waits for him to call her back. It’s five minutes, then ten.
“Are you sure you called the right number?” Chase asks.
Cameron just glares at him.
She tries House’s cell phone. No answer.
“Maybe he turned off his phone,” Foreman suggests.
She calls his land line again. No answer.
“We should stop the steroids,” Chase says.
“No kidding,” Foreman says. “Then what?”
Cameron watches both Foreman and Chase, but neither of them have an answer. She grabs her coat.
“I’m going to find House,” she says. “You two watch the patient.”
---
The Jerk
Chase doesn’t get mad when Cameron tells him she thinks he’s the one who scuttled Foreman’s interview. At first she thinks that’s because he’s guilty. But he doesn’t act guilty, just casually mentions that it’s Tuesday, and that he likes her.
Instead, he seems confident, as if he’s figured something out.
She sees him later, leaving House’s office. He’s smiling.
Cameron used to think she knew who Chase was -- the fortunate son gliding by on charm and his father’s connections. She doesn’t think that any more. He’s something different, something she didn’t expect.
And maybe some Tuesday, she’ll surprise him.
---
Human Error
“I don’t want to be House,” Foreman says.
“It’s time for a change,” Chase says.
Cameron studies the letter, her pen hovering over the empty spot where her signature should go.
She doesn’t think she’ll change into House if she stays, but she’s already changed. And it’s been good. She’s stronger, smarter, more confident. She knows more about who she is. She knows she’s a better doctor. She hopes that she’s a better person.
“Take the good, and leave the bad,” she’d told Foreman.
She can do it all: take the good, leave the bad, change.
Cameron signs the paper.
Author: Namaste
Summary: The third season, according to Cameron.
A continuing set of drabbles, prompted from moments in each episode of the third season, from each character’s point of view. You can find House’s split into two parts: So It Goes and Big Brains and the rest collected under the title 100 Seasons beginning with 100 Seasons: Cuddy then 100 Seasons: Foreman and 100 Seasons: Chase
Spoilers: All of the third season.
Sample:
She’s been a daughter, a student, a wife. She’s been a widow. Different roles, different names. But she’s always been what everyone else expected.
For the first time, she’s doing things on her own terms and it feels good. It’s like a vacation away from the person she was, the person everyone expects her to be. She hadn’t realized how hard it was being Allison Cameron until she stepped aside and let everything go.
Meaning
In the first months of their marriage, Brian was still on chemo.
Allison learned the pattern: the days after treatment as he began his slow descent, the days he couldn’t eat, the days he’d manage a few bites as he regained strength.
But there were also the days between treatments, when he felt nearly normal and tried to squeeze in everything from long dinners to a day at the beach.
Cameron watches House gliding back and forth on his skateboard, and wonders why that image of Brian -- happy, but knowing it wouldn’t last for long -- keeps flashing through her mind.
---
Cane & Able
This is wrong. They’re wrong. Cameron fights every urge to run down the stairs and follow House out to the parking lot, to show him Richard’s file, to tell him he was right, that he was right all along.
She can’t understand why they’d hold back the information, what they hope to gain. Cuddy and Wilson mumble something about humility, about how they’re doing this for House’s own benefit.
Cameron shakes her head. She doesn’t understand -- or maybe they don’t understand what they’re doing. But they’ve known House longer, and she can only hope that they know what they’re doing.
---
Informed Consent
Cameron stares up at the empty pulpit and the stained glass. She’s not sure why she came here, why she’s looking for meaning in this place, from a god she doesn’t believe exists.
She can still feel the soft leather of the pouch taken from House’s desk, the coolness of the syringe, the smooth surface of the glass that held the morphine as she drew it out. When she closes her eyes she sees the faint smile on Ezra’s face as the drug entered his system.
“I’m proud of you,” House says.
She wishes she could say the same thing.
---
Lines In the Sand
It was nearly a week after the shooting before they were allowed back in the conference room. Cameron stood looking down at the uneven splotch in the center of the room until Chase stepped in front of her, blocking her view.
“He’s OK,” he’d reminded her, and she’d nodded.
Cuddy said she’d ordered new carpeting, and asked them to make do for now. They all learned to avoid the spot, stepping around it in some kind of macabre dance.
Cameron studies House as he moves from room to room -- everywhere but their office -- and wonders what dance he’s doing now.
---
Fools For Love
“How’re you going to stop me?” House asks.
For a moment Cameron thinks that there’s nothing she can do. House is in charge. It’s his case. They’re his patients.
All her life she’s done things the right way, the proper way. She’s followed the rules, obeyed her teachers, obeyed her parents.
House doesn’t do any of those things. House doesn’t respect the rules. He listens to no one but himself.
Cameron takes a breath and remembers what else House has said, about standing up for what you believe. Maybe he’s daring her now, to take her stand. Maybe she should.
---
Que Sera Sera
See the world through your patients’ eyes, they said in med school. Empathize with them. Understand them.
House wants to know everything, but only because he’s curious, not to identify with them. George tells Cameron he doesn’t care what anyone thinks about him. He says he’s happy with his life. She can’t see how.
House has never claimed to be happy about anything, and sometimes Cameron can almost believe that.
Cameron wants to understand both men, but can’t. She sees only glimpses, and just hopes that the future for House won’t be as dark as the one waiting for George.
---
Son Of A Coma Guy
“I’m Dr. Wilson.” He’d stood and held out his hand when Cameron met him. Wilson had led the interview. House’s only comment was to ask why she hadn’t been first in her class.
“Second place is useless,” he’d said, “but fifth is even worse.”
Cameron was sure she’d screwed up, that she wouldn’t get the post, but Wilson called the next day to offer it to her.
It’s Wilson who’s always there, translating for House, explaining him, excusing him, easing his way.
So why, Cameron wonders, would House have stolen Wilson’s pad and forged a prescription? It doesn’t make sense.
---
Whac-A-Mole
Wilson glares at her from across the room, his mouth clamped tight. Cameron doesn’t blame him, but wants to tell him to go yell at House, to take it out on him.
She’s heard them argue before, their voices cutting through the glass walls and past the door. This time he doesn’t say anything, just bites back on his anger, tries to swallow it down. She’s not sure why, but wonders if it’s because he’s waiting for House to be the one to make the first move this time. She hopes she’s wrong, but doesn’t think that’s going to happen.
---
Finding Judas
Tritter thinks House has changed Cameron. He’s right.
She’s not the same person who walked into his office for that interview. She’s not the same person who showed up the first day to find only Chase and an unopened stack of mail in the trash. She’s not the same person who thought House could change, if only he had the right person to help him.
Cameron’s not always sure who she is now, but she knows she’s not the person she was, and knows that’s a good thing. The person she was wouldn’t stand up to House, or to Tritter.
---
Merry Little Christmas
Cameron is surprised by her own anger when it comes out, then finds she can’t hold back. Wilson is the one who did this. Cuddy helped. Just like before. Just like every crappy plan of theirs.
They think they know House. They think they know what’s best for him, think they can control him. Last time that was enough for Cameron. She let them make the decisions.
This time she isn’t keeping quiet. It isn’t about proving she’s right and they’re wrong. It isn’t even about House -- not completely. It’s about standing up for what she believes. House would understand.
---
Words & Deeds
“Pay attention to the nurses,” one of Cameron’s attendings once said. “They know everything that’s happening.”
It was true. They knew which patients were hiding something. They knew which members of the family were the best to approach in an emergency.
They were the first to know every piece of hospital gossip.
Sometimes Cameron wondered if the real reason House didn’t trust nurses is that he knew how hard it would be to hide secrets from them.
It was a nurse who told her that House had actually apologized to Wilson, and a nurse who said that he’d meant it.
---
One Day, One Room
His breathing is shallow now, not much more than gasps, and sometimes a groan. He’s hanging onto consciousness, and Cameron’s eyes flick to the syringe still on the table, thinks about how it would make his death easier.
She wasn’t there when Brian died, but her father-in-law had said he’d died easy, his pains quieted by morphine. It was morphine that Ezra begged for, to ease his death.
This man wants nothing easy, wants no comfort. He wants to remain a sharp and uneasy point in her memory. Cameron sits back, watches him breathe, and gives him what he wants.
---
Needle In A Haystack
“You’ll be a great doctor,” Brian told her, again and again during their golden summer together.
But once she was in medical school, she struggled in the middle of the pack. She knew that should have been good enough, but it wasn’t. Not for her.
There was so much to remember. The words, the Latin, the symptoms, the diseases -- they tangled themselves into jumbled messes of letters and symbols. She stared at the anatomy chart: scaphoid, lunate, triquetral, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate, hamate. She laughed when another student told her his secret: “Scared lovers try positions that they can’t handle.”
---
Insensitive
Allison’s mother called it “making love.” She lectured her daughters to save themselves for the man they loved.
Allison just rolled her eyes. She wasn’t a virgin when she married, but she’d always been careful, always been good.
Chase had been ... a mistake, Cameron told herself. She’d let down her guard, let the meth sweep away her inhibitions. She knew better. But it had been fun.
She’s not just her mother’s daughter any more, not the widow, not the good girl. She’s changed from the naive woman who first met House, she reminds herself. And she wants to have fun.
---
Half-Wit
“This is no good,” Foreman says. “We know nothing.”
“We know he has cancer,” Chase says.
“Brain cancer,” Cameron adds.
“Which is next to nothing,” Foreman says. “Where’s the tumor? What stage is it? What treatment is he getting?”
Cameron knows he’s right. They don’t know enough. She tries not to remember the way that Brian tried to disguise his worst symptoms, so she wouldn’t worry. Instead she recalls how he’d relax, almost forget his pain as they lay together.
She looks up. It’s a stupid idea, but the only one she has. “Maybe I can get us the blood.”
---
Top Secret
Cameron knows it’s wrong, but maybe that’s what makes the idea so appealing.
She’s been a daughter, a student, a wife. She’s been a widow. Different roles, different names. But she’s always been what everyone else expected.
For the first time, she’s doing things on her own terms and it feels good. It’s like a vacation away from the person she was, the person everyone expects her to be. She hadn’t realized how hard it was being Allison Cameron until she stepped aside and let everything go.
She puts her feet up on the table, and waits for Chase’s reaction.
---
Fetal Position
She thought she knew him.
House hates people, Cameron tells herself. He doesn’t care about his patients, apparently doesn’t even care about his friends.
So who is this person? She puts the photo up on the light board, wondering if a new angle can explain away the image she sees. There’s a softness there she had convinced herself didn’t exist -- a softness that even Stacy claimed didn’t exist.
But there it is. Maybe it only lasted for a fraction of a second, caught by a fluke as the shutter clicked.
Or maybe nobody has ever really known House at all.
---
Airborne
Chase is startled when Cameron pushes him down onto the bed. She can see it in his eyes, the wondering, the curiosity, the questions that linger there.
But he doesn’t ask questions. And he doesn’t judge.
Cameron wonders if that’s why it’s been easy for her to push him for more, to get him to try things. She sees confusion just for a moment, then he blinks and seems to accept whatever she wants without hesitaton -- accepts her. It’s so easy with him, so comfortable that Cameron finds herself falling into a state of happiness she’d never thought was possible.
---
Act Your Age
Cameron watches the door after Chase walks out, wondering if he’ll come back, say what he meant by the note, by the knowing smile on his face.
It was easier when Chase had no demands. Cameron thought she’d had everything she wanted.
Then he changed the rules, and it was easier just to be mad at him.
This feeling is new and unexpected -- like the flowers that she holds in her hand -- and she doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean. It’s not what she had before, it’s not what she’s lost. It’s something else, and she can’t explain what.
---
House Training
When it happened to Chase, he went silent, sitting at the end of the table with a paper spread out in front of him, never reading, never turning a page, just staring at the newsprint.
Foreman can’t seem to stop talking. He goes through the list of symptoms and tests again, as if repeating each word, each result, out loud will somehow change what happened.
Cameron wonders what her reaction will be. She knows better than to believe that she’ll have a perfect record. No one does -- not House, not Wilson, not Cuddy, not Chase. And now not Foreman either.
---
Family
Cameron hates Tuesdays.
She knows that sometime, when they’re alone, Chase will casually mention the day.
“I like you,” he says, and claims he doesn’t expect her to respond.
“It’s just a reminder,” he says, as if she could forget.
She doesn’t know what he wants from her. She doesn’t want a relationship, she just wants what they had. That was fun. That was nice. Why couldn’t Chase have been happy with that?
Cameron ignores the voice in her head, asking why she wouldn’t be happy trying it Chase’s way. That voice never shuts up, and doesn’t wait for Tuesday.
---
Resignation
Cameron leaves a message on House’s phone, and waits for him to call her back. It’s five minutes, then ten.
“Are you sure you called the right number?” Chase asks.
Cameron just glares at him.
She tries House’s cell phone. No answer.
“Maybe he turned off his phone,” Foreman suggests.
She calls his land line again. No answer.
“We should stop the steroids,” Chase says.
“No kidding,” Foreman says. “Then what?”
Cameron watches both Foreman and Chase, but neither of them have an answer. She grabs her coat.
“I’m going to find House,” she says. “You two watch the patient.”
---
The Jerk
Chase doesn’t get mad when Cameron tells him she thinks he’s the one who scuttled Foreman’s interview. At first she thinks that’s because he’s guilty. But he doesn’t act guilty, just casually mentions that it’s Tuesday, and that he likes her.
Instead, he seems confident, as if he’s figured something out.
She sees him later, leaving House’s office. He’s smiling.
Cameron used to think she knew who Chase was -- the fortunate son gliding by on charm and his father’s connections. She doesn’t think that any more. He’s something different, something she didn’t expect.
And maybe some Tuesday, she’ll surprise him.
---
Human Error
“I don’t want to be House,” Foreman says.
“It’s time for a change,” Chase says.
Cameron studies the letter, her pen hovering over the empty spot where her signature should go.
She doesn’t think she’ll change into House if she stays, but she’s already changed. And it’s been good. She’s stronger, smarter, more confident. She knows more about who she is. She knows she’s a better doctor. She hopes that she’s a better person.
“Take the good, and leave the bad,” she’d told Foreman.
She can do it all: take the good, leave the bad, change.
Cameron signs the paper.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 10:00 pm (UTC)Fantastic job.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 10:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 11:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 11:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 01:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 01:31 am (UTC)I'm in awe.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 01:49 am (UTC)And thanks. Cameron is tough for me to wrap my brain around sometimes because she's almost my polar opposite. It forces me to work harder to find her motivation, and I'm never quite certain if I have her nailed down.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 01:52 am (UTC)Actually it was "Fools For Love," which isn't really a Cameron-esque episode that nailed it down, the point when House challenges her, and I started thinking about how a challenge to take a stand could go back to "Informed Consent" and "Cane & Able" and ahead to the Tritter arc and beyond.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 02:26 am (UTC)Or there's
Cameron is extremely difficult to write convincingly. She's a complicated girl, and her motivation is almost impossible to pin down.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 03:11 am (UTC)You've conveyed her beautifully.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 07:23 am (UTC)*memmed*
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Date: 2007-07-02 02:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 02:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 03:47 pm (UTC)Great work.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 09:33 pm (UTC)I liked you entering parallels between Bryan and House since AYG she might not be done with that yet (though it could have been the lats time...). Anyway, I liked that.
LOVED your take on the Chase/Cameron! I always believed she feels more but it's still so much clearer after reading this!
One thing I kind of disagree on: In The Jerk, I actually took Chase's reaction as extremely offended ans shocked (his "I like you" was still cute but it sounded very defiant and angry). I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that's how I went-Still loved those last two lines there about her realizing she was wrong about her impression of him and her surprising him maybe on a Tuesday :D
I'm guessing it had to be pretty difficult trying to write from her POV (to me she'll always be the most unexpected character-Even more than House sometimes) -I think you handled it wonderfully anyway ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 09:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 10:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-02 10:04 pm (UTC)And don't sweat the Bryan/Brian. After all, we still don't know the poor guy's name.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-03 11:25 am (UTC)Great job!
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Date: 2007-07-03 04:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-03 11:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-03 11:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-03 11:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-04 12:51 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-06 02:01 am (UTC)Thank you, that was such a refreshing read. You write so eloquently, and it's so nice to see someone really give the effort to delve into the character; I know it's hard to, considering Cameron is the biggest enigma of the show, if you will, but a lot of people don't take the time to even think about it, which is frustrating.
And bonus points for using the medical lingo. I avoid it like the plague in my fics. If anybody asks, it's Lupus! ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-06 04:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-20 04:16 am (UTC)So true... of all of them, I think that House succeeded w/Cameron the most. She grew up because of him, matured into both a physician and a person to be reckoned with.
And you're right... I think her position and life experiences do give her a perspective about House that neither Cuddy nor Wilson have. And as much as I was annoyed w/her for much of S3, still, through this I can begin to see why she was so guarded and cynical.
You captured this evolution beautifully....
-Katrina