Work Text:
Not
by xmarisolx
Once, they had sat around at lunch and imagined what it would be like—to do the unthinkable, to forsake all rational thought, to surrender all dignity, to completely succumb to decadent carnality.
To sleep with House.
Thirteen swore it would be the worst day of her life. She pictured lots of booze—no, coke—and waking up with scratch marks and swimming in a haze of regret and brainache. Chase conceded that only House could screw with him mind enough to get him to actually sleep with a man. Taub—too married and repressed to play—still bristled with the notion. Kutner mostly just laughed. But Cameron...
Cameron thought that on the darkest of days, while swirling in a cocktail of death and failure and guilt, she might be consoled with House’s particular brand of witty cynicism, and she might be persuaded to...
The other had fallen silent, waiting for her to finish the sentence, with Chase especially fixed on her, anticipating her response.
“Of course, never, ever, would I, ugh, no!” she had assured them… assured herself. It would be gross. Unthinkable. Like, permanently damaging.
Except that it wouldn’t be. It hadn’t been.
So when lunch was over, and her shift was over, and the rush hour traffic was over, and she was home, in bed, under a million covers—she let her mind go back there, like she had many times before. Back to that simultaneously excruciating and exhilarating three-year period that would probably color the rest of her existence, when Cameron had had an especially excruciating and not-so-exhilarating day. A day where somehow giving House a ride home had turned into them, at 2 AM, on a Tuesday, kissing, rising and nakedly coursing towards the only satisfaction they would ever really give each other. He’d been surprisingly slow and methodical, though predictably dominant and unrelenting. But most of all, he’d been silent—and Cameron had let the moment wash over her, blow through her—like a stiff wind at the edge of the world—and she came in her bones, in her teeth, and in the tips of her fingers. When it was all over, Cameron remembered lying against House’s bare chest, her head rising up and down as his lungs inhaled and exhaled one ragged breath after another. Even now, she could still hear the radiator purring as the strains of a blues song cried to them from the living room. But they didn’t talk. Not a word passed between them afterwards, and when she woke in the morning, he was already gone.
Sometimes she couldn’t believe that it had ever happened. That she had experienced House, at home, silent, at his most vulnerable. That, for all the ways they had all seen him when he was “House”, only she had seen him when he was not.
For all that he had taken from her, that’s the part of House she took for herself; that’s the part she would never give away.
Endnote: I appreciate all feedback :)