I don't really know what this is, but it happened and I let it run free. It might not make sense, but I'm not sure it's entirely supposed to.

Title: Shalott (1/2)
Fandom: House M.D.
Character/Pairing: Cameron, implied House/Cameron, Chase/Cameron
Rating: R
Summary: If you want him, go and get him. If you need him, go and claim him.
Spoiler Warning: Theoretically "Airborne."
Notes: So this is incredibly and weirdly personal, evidenced by the fact that I didn't tell anyone I was writing it. It's actually one long fic, but I broke it into two parts for my own peace of mind. It's inspired by Emilie Autumn's "Shalott" (where the title came from, obviously), and the movie "Love Me If You Dare."




she says,
that man's gonna be my death,
'cause he's all I've ever wanted in my life


It's easy to say you don't want something, to tell yourself you don't when you absolutely do if lying makes it bearable, when you ache for it and at night you feel the places where it isn't filling up with dark and cravings.

If you want him, go and get him. If you need him, go and claim him.

It starts with a cataclysm, it always does, not the end of the world but the end of a day, a trip a stumble a fall, a large tennis ball casually tossed between two hands that fumbles and bounces and hits her in the leg so she sloshes coffee down her blouse and she glares.

"Mature."

"It slipped."

Paper towels weakly absorb some of the mess, but it's wet and warm-cold against her skin, down under her bra, her body is reacting to the sensation like it would to a lover and it makes her more angry. She wants to throw the ball at his head and knock out some teeth; you can do that with those clown faces at carnivals, if she took out the front two, would she get enough tickets for a stuffed cat?

Cameron picks the ball up and stalks past him to the other room, setting it into the dish on House's desk with more force than necessary.

"You shouldn't even have that in there. It's not yours."

"It's just a ball, Cameron. I was thinking."

"You need to play with balls while you're thinking? Freud would have something to say about that."

His face registers hurt, dismay, almost a hint of something she doesn't want to call loathing, all in a moment, all in the way he tilts his head slightly down and looks at the hands he's folded loosely in his lap.

"House does it all the time. You gonna say the same thing about him? Chalk it up to some kind of psychological need to...I dunno, masturbate to the correct answer?"

"That's not what I meant."

"It's what you said, isn't it?"

"Don't put words in my mouth."

They say that the silence can cut like a knife, they say "pregnant pause" as if birth was a decent metaphor for talking, but the truth is that it's just a visceral mess of tangled nerves that hang and sway in the air conditioner breeze.

And his eyes say clearly enough what he wants to put in her mouth if she'd let him, his tongue, his fingers, his cock, his heart, raw feelings and words. It makes her hungry, her lips are dry.

If you want him, take him.

"I'm going. See you tomorrow."

But if you don't, don't.

She has to say something else before he finishes his swoop out the door, she has to yank the reins because that is her nature and that is what she does. She prods the bruises until they spread, and then she diagnoses herself with disaffection.

"You're not House."

He stops and turns to her, mouth open and eyes squinted in sheer incredulity that she could say something so obvious, so blunt, so cruel in a way that only she could be to only him.

"I...never said I was."

"...the ball, I mean. It's his, you shouldn't...take what isn't yours."

A metaphor for something else, a warning, a plea.

"Thanks for the advice." His voice makes her think she might be speaking a different, utterly nonsensical language. "Any other pearls of wisdom?"

She wants to say yes; instead she says no. And he leaves.

She wants to follow him; instead she sits down behind House's desk and stares at the ball and thinks that's it's stupidly huge for any decent tennis game, and she was never good at tennis but apparently she's good at games. Just not at winning.

Denial is her religion inasmuch as it gets her through the evenings that he occupied so briefly, at the moments when she barely catches rumors of his cologne in her apartment.

Surely this is all she ever wanted, but it might not be hers.

But if you want him.

If you need him.

If it's the end of the world as you know it, but you don't feel fine, the mirror-image is suddenly changing and instead of yourself you see over your shoulder out a distant window, shadow-stained trees and ice from the sun, the illusion of chains and the weight of string.

Cameron puts her palms flat on the desk in front of her and concentrates on one deep breath. When it's over, she reaches for the ball, cradling it in both hands.

Then go and get him.

-

Chase's color is blue. His eyes are blue. He looks good in blue. Blue like cliches, oceans and sad songs and rain. Blue, and then gold and then purple, swirled together like an outback flower she's never seen, the remains of an impact so brutal it breaks flesh into vivid pools.

Cameron picks up an acid green ball and turns it around in her hands. If she had a color? It would be bleeding heart red on hospital scrub pink. It would be feminine and caring and bright and deadly. It would shout "STOP" from forty yards.

House's ball is gray and red, the one she buys is red and blue. It makes her sneer slightly at her own sentimentality, at the things she can never shake from her psyche and the weakness in her that calls out for damage.

-

There's this reflex that your body offers up when it thinks you're dying instead of falling asleep.

"Myoclonic jerk, her foot slides off the brake, she hits the other car too fast to do anything about it."

She watches his hand as he taps a pencil against his pretty mouth. He used to wear a silver ring on his right hand and now he doesn't, and she's always wondered what it meant and why it stopped meaning that. Cameron took her wedding ring off three days after her husband died. Sometimes she thinks that instead of keeping it in a drawer she should tape it to the album of her wedding pictures, like making a scrapbook, "and this is what I have from when I got married to an idea."

What do you do when your muscles spasm but you don't wake up?

How long does it take to get something right, how many tries does your body make before it gives up and the last motions are rigor mortis and rotting?

If you want him, she thinks, and watches his teeth close around the pencil, finger still fidgeting restlessly against the eraser end. He needs to do something with his hands; she remembers them twisting in her hair and labeling her spine and branding every cell with his impenetrable sweetness like eucalyptus oil in warm light.

Cameron plays word association as her boss (and that's how she thinks of him now, promise, really, this time I mean it) writes on the whiteboard. She remembers the feel of the ball in her hands and pictures Chase holding the one she has in her pocket, peering at it like some curiosity. It reminds her of the chinchilla her brother used to babysit for school on the weekends, the way it would hold raisins in cupped paws and nibble at them, focus on them with a reverence reserved for the center of the world.

She liked to poke it while it slept and it would peer at her with sleepy eyes and curl up tighter. It was so soft, and so was his hair in the mornings when he'd tangled himself in her bedsheets and he'd mumble Melbourne slang at her, vowels slurred together. When he held her she was the absolute middle of his slanted universe, and she almost laughs out loud at the thought of Chase as a furry rodent with a fluffy tail. Would that make her a raisin? Was she his favorite treat? What does he eat now that she's gone?

What do you need to be happy?

If you need him.

"What are you smiling about?"

House is a myoclonic jerk unto himself, she wakes up when his cane hits the table in front of her.

"Nothing, I-"

He gives her the even look of a stoned philosopher-king and turns back to her colleagues.

"Chase, go check out the house, find out if she imports ungulates from the UK. Foreman, get me a CT scan of her brain, see if it looks like someone's been pogo-sticking in a Cambodian minefield. Take Holly Golightly with you."

"We're looking for Mad Cow?" Cameron sputters, trying to regain (or maybe just gain at all) her footing on the theory. "But the jerks would be a late-stage symptom, if she had this she'd have been exhibiting lots of other symptoms for-"

"No you can't have fifty bucks for the powder room." House's expression is the visual equivalent of the stutter "buh-dur." "Now go!"

They walk out the door single file, Foreman, her, Chase, and when they're in the hall she turns, there's something she needs to tell him, and it's not that she's been envisioning him running bouncy-flop on a wheel.

If you want him.

She catches the extra elbow-fabric of his labcoat and he's startled. They stand at a stalemate for a moment, and she's glad she wore lifts today so they can almost be eye-to-eye.

"Here," Cameron says without any other explanation, to him or to herself, and holds out the ball.

Chase cocks his head, invisible whiskers twitching, and then he reaches for it tentatively.

"Thank you," he says, holding it, trying to sense its meaning by touch alone.

There's a reflex in your body that's unintentional, it happens when you don't want or intend it to. They say when you shudder it's because someone walked over your grave, but what if you don't die on land?

"You don't have to take his anymore, but it doesn't work for you anyway. You can't just become like House or get him to like you more because you try to solve problems the way he does."

Chase's expression falls ten stories before it catches on an awning and hangs there helplessly.

"Is this a new way to fuck with someone? Giving them a tennis ball and then telling them they're a suck up and a...what?"

Myoclonic. Unintentional.

If you need him, go and claim him.

"Maybe it's like tennis. Maybe it's a game."

She turns on her hard heels, joining Foreman at the end of the hall, and wonders if this is falling into waking sleep at the wheel.

-

Once she taunted him with the idea of an hour-long orgasm, and now Cameron finds herself flat on her back, staring at the slow blades of her ceiling fan, suffering from a two-hour failure to come, batteries drained, all sensations numbed.

And it is frustrating, because if she needs him for this, maybe she needs him for more, and if she needs him for more, maybe she needs him at all, altogether.

Maybe she was spoiled. Maybe she was poisoned.

After all, a huge fraction of the world's poisonous animals live in Australia. Maybe she was bitten by the most dangerous at all, or she swallowed something toxic and dangerous instead of swallowing when she gave him head, something more deadly and lingering, settling in her bones like a cancer.

Poetic, like Tolstoy. "It was the best of sex, it was the worst of sex, it was the last sex you'll ever have."

She hopes Chase finds himself in the same inescapable gulf of tactile need. It would only be fitting if she'd pulled him headfirst into that, too, or is it that she can't stand the thought of bearing this alone?

Perhaps she's poisonous too, and they cross-contaminated.

Misery loves company, and offers its wrist. It's only when you're fangs deep in marrow and dead tissue that you realize you've been paralyzed too.

-

There's a collision blocking traffic on her way to work.

I wish you were a car crash, she thinks, then I could say you were an accident, and it wasn't my fault.

-

If you want him, go and get him. He's not coming this time.

Cameron feels apprehensive as she approaches the office; she can already see him standing at the coffee maker, blond hair like a beacon, dressed in scrubs and pouring more sugar than could ever be necessary into his coffee.

And that's his little secret, that he has a terrible sweet tooth, that he loves coffee and tea with sugar and cream and winces when he has to drink either straight. She watches him stir it in, and he's beautiful, he's really beautiful, he is in fact the most gorgeous thing she's ever seen this morning.

He looks soft, the chinchilla imagery from yesterday coming back and she wants to hold him in cupped hands, trace the fine edges of his ears to see if he twitches.

It was easy not to touch him when she was already in his bed - it seemed extraneous, she was already saturated. And it's always been easy to deny what she wants the most when she shouldn't (when she thinks she shouldn't) want it at all. It was enough to let out her interest in House because it made sense at the time, because she wanted it in a different way, a kind of urgency like a window closing fast that she had to catch, dive through, or stay trapped behind. House was damaged and wild, the older man with hidden spells. Chase was bruised but still usable, and he would conform like air to the shape of her palm.

Or would he still?

Cameron notices the blue and red tennis ball on the table as she pushes open the door. He turns at the sound and looks at her, follows her gaze to the ball, then turns back away, tapping his coffee spoon against the sink before dropping it in.

"Good morning." he says, withdrawn.

"You're pouting already? It's not even nine."

He snorts, half-smiles, half-sneers and shakes his head to shift his hair away from his eyes.

"If I didn't know any better, I'd say that you're passing all these judgments because you like me." He slinks and slumps into a chair, raising the coffee to his lips. "Since you have to tear someone apart before you can admit they interest you."

She can feel her mouth slightly open, her tongue ready against the roof of her mouth, the back of her teeth, to say something.

If you need him.

Nothing comes.

"I've been thinking about your 'game,'" he sets the mug down, picking up a pencil between his index and middle finger and wiggling it slightly. "I decided it's like the conch."

It sounds like an awkward version of "cock," and she blinks in alarm.

"What?"

"The conch, from Lord of the Flies."

And she sighs in relief that they're talking far away from sex (for now).

"What about it?"

"Well the one who has the conch has the power of speech. They're the one that gets to talk, and everyone has to listen. I think that's the game you want to play."

"Wow, that makes an awful lot of sense." Cameron pulls her hair back to put it in a ponytail, anything to not meet his eyes.

He shrugs, "You don't tend to make a lot of sense in general."

"Fine, we'll play it your way." Her way. "It's your turn then, what do you want to say?"

There's a long, drawn out pause, and she thinks he must be enjoying it, toying with it and with her, turning it around in his hands to find the best place to bite.

"You said that I shouldn't take what isn't mine."

"It's a pretty easy concept, recognized around the world."

"I think it's more, though, that you like denying me anything that I want. Maybe even anything that makes me happy."

A bitter laugh forced from her lungs.

"Oh right, the twisted bitch who only wants to emasculate you."

"No, it's not that." Chase leans forward and takes the ball, tracing the white line that separates hers from his. "It's what I said before. You have to tear someone apart. You have to find someone who has nothing left so you can fill the void with all your caring. It's gotta be someone with so much damage that everyone else has given up."

She wishes Foreman would come in. She wishes House would come in. She wishes she would be paged by someone, anyone, to do anything.

"And I was a rich kid, right. You've seen my apartment, and my nice things, and my nice education and obviously I've never been wanting" (wanting you) "so I'm not worth your efforts."

"You're making this too personal."

"How is this not personal? It's been too personal all along." He stands up and walks over to her, he's not tall but he towers. "But not personal enough because you've never seen and you've never tried to see. You think I just want to be like House, especially to you. Even bought me my own thinking ball." His voice and eyes drop, he's suddenly tentative. He licks his lips, she wants him quite suddenly to lick hers, to open her mouth wide and- "I'm not damaged like House. But I've been broken for a long time."

He sets the ball down in front of her.

"If I can't take what's mine? Maybe you should take what's yours."

He leaves a wake behind him, trails like headlights at night, sparks like when the meth was at its highest and she bit his lip bloody.

If you want him, go and get him.

She remembers the car crash, both of them, all of them. There's no sound of an impact, but she knows the glass is starting to break.


Part 2