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Black Ice
by Vita
For one final screw you to his colleagues, Foreman had died in the middle of the coldest winter on record in New Jersey.
Black ice, and House decided that it didn't get more ironic than that. Foreman had survived growing up in some crappy neighborhood and falling in with the wrong crowd, and defied the odds that said he should have ended up in prison or bleeding to death on a street corner. He survived the lousy retention rates for African-American students at Hopkins, and made it through his residency with his cognition intact. Foreman had even confronted disease, the true nemesis and mortal enemy, and beaten it down but good.
Then one morning, Foreman was late. That wasn't the strangest thing, since he had the longest commute, but normally the lateness was a matter of minutes. They had tried his cell phone, his home phone, and there was no answer. Maybe he was in a dead spot for cell reception, they happened here and there.
Then Cuddy had walked into the conference room with an expression that spoke of something awful before any words came out of her mouth. She didn't seem to know where to look when she started talking, until her eyes fell on House. Then she spoke, steadily, and told them that Foreman had died that morning, in a car accident on Route 1.
Fellows always left, some more quickly than others, but House had always had a say in their departure. He didn't know what pissed him off more, that his favorite sparring partner had left or that he hadn't been the one to force him out. There hadn't been time to form the thick armor of being better off without Foreman's input before it was no longer available.
When they entered the church, Foreman's father had looked at them with barely concealed resentment (you could fix him once, why not this time?) that he blinked away and replaced with thanks for their kindness. They hadn't been the ones to treat Foreman this time,
There had been no farewells, no desperate attempts to save their colleague; just Cuddy's shaking voice bringing the awful news. Chase had sat there, staring while Cameron asked questions, as if asking the right one would bring Foreman back.
"Is he here?" Chase asked abruptly, and when Cuddy said yes, Chase was out of his seat and heading out of the room. Cuddy told them to go home, and Cameron, her eyes already wet, nodded and followed Chase, wherever he was going.
Well, if it was a party, House supposed he had to join them. He trailed them down to the ER, and saw through the glass walls of the trauma room that Chase was doing something that looked suspiciously like praying, and Cameron doing something that was definitely crying. He didn't do either of those things, so House went off to do what he was an expert at - he shouted at the harried attending that his overworked, overtired residents were probably incompetent and idiotic and a dozen other choice insults, until Wilson had appeared out of nowhere to try to placate him and Cuddy snatched Foreman's chart from the nurses' station and stuck it under his nose. The data, the brutal facts of the case didn't lie. The EMTs practically had to shred what was left of Foreman's car to get him out of it, and the doctor had suffered massive internal bleeding. There weren't enough hands to stop what the forces of physics had started. All the brilliance in the world was no match for what a ton of steel, an overpass near Quakerbridge Road, and a wafer-thin patch of frozen water could accomplish.
The services inside the church had concluded and the funeral had processed onward to the cemetery, where Foreman's casket would be lowered into the earth. The wind was so sharp that Chase looked like he was wearing rouge, and Cameron's tears must have formed icicles on her eyelashes. His leg ached deeply even after a couple of Vicodin, warning him of the snow to come, 6-12 inches, according to the perky blonde on Channel 6. There was a preacher and there was a coffin and as always, there was no point in saying goodbye to someone who couldn't hear you anymore.
*****
Cameron didn't know what she wanted to do. None of the choices were fun. Sob, throw up, scream. She looked at Chase and saw nothing but blankness, uselessness, in his pale face.
She dropped to the bench beside him. Foreman's father hadn't mentioned anything about his son's things at the hospital. She supposed Mr. Foreman would have dealt with anything back at Foreman's place, or maybe his brother. They weren't asked, and when she thought about it there wasn't any reason that anyone would ask.
In the end, Foreman had been right. They were colleagues, not friends, and death decided where the line fell.
So here they were, with Foreman's locker open in front of them, and everything in there was probably junk anyway, but Cameron had decided that their job was to take care of it. Chase was still sitting there, so Cameron swallowed the sick, achy feeling in her throat and started sorting through what little there was. The definite trash first, toiletries and things that couldn't be used by anyone else. There was an unopened can of shaving cream and a bottle of shower gel that she could put in the homeless shelter collection box, and Cameron put them aside, on the bench next to Chase, who was apparently decorative, or just here for moral support, or something. Cameron rolled her eyes and took out some books. The library would be happy to have a text on tropical diseases, and a couple of paperbacks could be dropped off in a waiting room. Then from the back of the locker, she pulled out Foreman's flashcards.
Cameron didn't remember deciding to throw them out, but she heard the clang as they hit the bottom of the metal trashcan. She almost stomped over to the locker and grabbed Foreman's lab coat off the hook. As the coat floated in the still air of the locker room, the slightest hint of Foreman's aftershave hung in the air. And then the thing in her throat returned with a vengeance, and turned into an ugly, desperate sob that she wasn't expecting.
Chase's little fugue was over, because the next thing she knew he was taking the coat out of her shaking hands. Foreman had been a jerk, smug and impatient and twenty other awful things, but she could still remember when he had been kind to her without being patronizing, and playful without being cruel. That was the man she would miss, and while she might have hoped that she'd see the man who could have been her friend again, now the possibility had dissolved like smoke into the brittle winter air.
"We'll send it to his dad," Chase said softly, and he folded it up and laid it neatly on the bench. Cameron wiped her eyes quickly with the sleeve of her sweater. She didn't know death kept managing to surprise her every time it sidled its way into her life. She had expected Brian's death, known almost from the day she met him that his time with her would be short, and it still tore her heart out when he was actually gone. She had been stunned the first time she had defibrillated a patient and seen the heartbeat leap back into life. When she had given Ezra Powell the extra morphine and held death within her own two hands, there was no peace to be found, only grief finding another way to twist her heart in its grip and leaving her to wonder who she really was, and whether any of it mattered.
There was no forgetting, with Chase standing in front of her with his hair drooping in front of his eyes, how she'd reacted to the vague prospect of her own death. She knew better now. They needed to finish this work. They needed to clear the path. Time was going to march on and new people would walk into their lives, and this was just a bunch of stuff, not Foreman at all. The person, the one who had cured and laughed and trembled with fear for his life, was the only thing that really belonged to them.
*****
Attending Foreman's funeral provided Chase ample evidence for everything he wanted to avoid when he kept his father's death a secret. He hadn't wanted to see that look in Cameron's eyes, that aching sympathy. At that particular moment he hadn't wanted House being House, or worse, not being House. He hadn't even wanted to hear Foreman's honest "sorry," the same "sorry" he uttered to Foreman's father at the funeral.
When Foreman was sick, that empty chair haunted all of them, and now there it sat again. Chase couldn't say it would never be filled - they'd need another fellow eventually, he supposed. Was there some sort of academic mourning protocol?
Not that he knew how to mourn anyone properly anyway. Mourning meant plowing on, working through pain and loss. Occasionally, screw something up royally, and while you're at it, sleep with somebody whose judgment isn't what it should be. He had a vague idea that it wasn't supposed to work that way.
Chase wondered, sometimes, if Foreman had known what was coming. Was he frightened, or just frustrated by the un-responding wheel? Would there have been enough time to say a prayer? Chase had always thought that if he were to die, he wouldn't want to know, but he wondered if it was even possible, if the possibility wouldn't dawn on you in that split second that this was really it.
He and Cameron had to work harder to make up for Foreman's absence, but that was fine because when they were working harder they didn't have time to think about why. Chase found that during the days following the day Foreman never showed up for work, his thoughts drifted to the morbid only when he wasn't elbow-deep in the patient's blood.
There was a space in the office that was swallowing up the room. They needed a third, he and Cameron, because they snapped together all wrong now, like a puzzle with a missing piece that some unseen hand was trying to force together.
Chase had once dated a new age-y woman who burned sage in his apartment to "clear the room," which Chase found absurd, because all it did was leave a weird smell in the air and soot marks over his bedroom door. He understood what she meant now, because in a conference room that might as well be empty for all that Cameron had to say, Chase could feel something hanging over them. Foreman's unending absence, in a way, was an even bigger presence than Foreman himself had ever been. He heard the door swish open behind him and Cameron look up, and for just an instant, Chase forgot that Foreman wasn't going to be joining them, and he knew his face fell a little when he saw Cuddy there instead.
"Your patient is stable. Go home," Cuddy said firmly. Cameron started to open her mouth to protest, and Cuddy added, "Now." Chase knew an order when he heard one. He glanced at Cameron and saw that she was on the move, too, closing her laptop and gathering papers into her bag. He almost wondered why Cameron was bothering to work so hard when the competition was clearly over. Cuddy watched them briefly, before moving on to House's office, where their boss was sitting with his feet up on the desk, probably doing three or four illegal things that didn't even involve the bottle of tequila on his desk.
In the locker room, they exchanged their lab coats for heavy wool. Chase watched Cameron wrap her scarf around her neck. Let's get a drink, he wanted to say, let's go sit in a booth at the back of the bar and talk about Foreman, so we can laugh and you'll cry and I'll give it a fair shot. Let's just take a minute, because I have a feeling that I've been doing this all wrong. He could picture it, and he understood that in some way, it was exactly what they needed, to figure out where Foreman had fit in between them, to create the most complete portrait that they could of what their colleague had meant to them from all their disparate bits and pieces. Even if Chase hadn't experienced it first-hand, he thought that would be the best possible course of action, painful, nostalgic, and celebratory all at once. Chase knew, however, that if he asked Cameron to get a drink, she could easily misinterpret what he meant, and maybe she wouldn't be misinterpreting at all, if he really examined his conscience.
So he let her walk past him, and when they parted ways in the parking lot, Chase decided it was for the best, until a new third arrived, and their proper geometry was restored.
*****
Cuddy strolled into the office like she owned the place, although House supposed that some people might have described it as politely slipping into the room, closing the door, and perching herself on the edge of the desk for a chat.
"How long are you going to do this?" she asked. House supposed she was referring to the way he'd pushed Chase and Cameron on this differential, forcing them to name every test, because he suddenly found himself hell-bent on making them recognize that the patient was in their hands.
"Gotta shove the baby birds out of the nest sometime. Can't keep feeding them while they lie around on the couch all day smoking weed." Cuddy raised an eyebrow that suggested that House's metaphor was a little suspicious. He remembered Cuddy sitting in the back of Wilson's Volvo after the funeral, twisted around in the seat so that her feet were up and her cheek was pressed to the upholstery. She'd managed to look guilty, as if it was somehow her fault that the road was slippery and the work day began at 8-ish.
"You're not being fair to them, and you know it." Cuddy sighed and leaned forward, causing House to curse whoever invented turtleneck sweaters. "They did a good job on this, but it was a struggle to keep everything on track."
House scowled at what he thought Cuddy was trying to tell him. "So what, you're going to tell me I need to get back up on the horse? Hire another fellow like we're getting a new puppy?"
"Oh, shut up, House," Cuddy snapped, "You've got two fellows left, and you're trying to run them into the ground, too - or is it just out the door?" She grabbed the tequila bottle out of his hand, examining the label as she walked around to the other side of the desk, dropping into the chair across from him. "God, House. You'd think when somebody died you could spring for the good stuff." She downed a slug of the cheap liquor anyway, shuddering as she returned the bottle to his hand.
"Guess you're really not pregnant," House mumbled.
Cuddy ignored the comment, although House thought he saw a glare flit across her face. "Where's Wilson?" she asked.
"Answering a page," House replied. He leaned back in his chair, wishing she would leave him alone and strangely glad for the company at the same time. "I'm not trying to make them leave. Scout's honor, Cuddy."
"Maybe you're not trying. But you'll pull it off before you know it," was her soft answer. For a moment, they were silent, and only the hum of House's computer and the buzz of a failing overhead light surrounded them.
Wilson walked in, and Cuddy smiled wanly in his direction. "I'll see you later," she told House as she rose from the chair. House wondered if her shift ended because Wilson came back, or if that was simply all she had to say.
The kids would be fine. Cuddy didn't know what she was talking about.
"Have a drink, Jimmy," House ordered. He poured a shot into a mug for himself and handed Wilson the bottle. They toasted Foreman without words, as the snow began to fall.
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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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