Chapter Text
It had come from nowhere. A sudden and intense infatuation.
Well, that wasn’t strictly true. It was sudden and intense, but it hadn’t come from nowhere. Not exactly. In fact, given the opportunity, Allison Cameron was able to trace back the initial murmurs to two specific instances.
First, there had been that thing with the patient. She didn’t know him, hadn’t met him, couldn’t even remember his name. But he had made an impression, because he had told the truth. Could only tell the truth. Frontal lobe disinihibition. That’s what it was called. The only airtight excuse for allowing whichever words appeared in your head to topple straight out of your mouth.
‘Your tush is like the pistons in a ferrari’ he had said to her. Not to her – not to Cameron, that is. She hadn’t even been in the same room. Thank god. But to her.
Her with the low-cut tops, three-inch heels, and deep, soulful eyes. They changed colour, those eyes. On days when she was pleased with herself, Cameron had noticed, they would be light and blue and full of sparkle. At other times, when she was thoughtful, or perhaps a little sad, the blue would leak into green. And when it got worst of all, when the world was ending and everything was bad, then they became a dark and steely grey.
Lisa Cuddy. Cameron almost sighed out loud. Then she had to look around to make sure no one was about to see her making a fool of herself.
Windows into the soul. Someone had said that once about eyes. It seemed trite to apply it to ordinary people, with their ordinary eyes. A falsehood. But for Lisa Cuddy, it rang true
And, of course, she thought, refocusing her train of thought, the woman had pistons that might favourably be compared with those of a supercar.
Chase had told her about it – what the patient had said. At the time, she had laughed, but then, afterwards, she found herself drawn back to the words.
And not only that, she found that she agreed with them, because they made her feel weird in a good way.
‘I’d do her,’ he’d said, as well, following up on the initial blunder.
Cameron thought that maybe she agreed with that as well – though not, obviously, with the choice of phrasing. It was so degrading. Disrespectful, to a woman who had worked hard to become one of only a handful of female deans in the country. Of course those low-cut tops had probably helped, a less charitable part of her brain offered up. But still, it wasn’t right.
For one thing, it implied a merely physical attraction.
Cameron wasn’t sure if the fact that what she felt wasn’t merely a physical attraction made her situation better or worse, but it did make her feel better about herself. Yes, Cuddy was hot, any fool could see that. God she was hot. Not exactly in a conventional way, no, and yet there was just something... something about her that was spectacular.
It was an odd sort of perfection, wrought with flaws: a nose that bridged slightly outward, too many teeth. She wasn’t tall without her heels, and she was too curvy to be skinny (like that was a bad thing). But somehow it didn’t matter. She had presence. She was lean and athletic looking. She was hot.
Cameron shook her head. That wasn’t the point. She was being distracted again.
No, the point she had been trying to make, she reminded herself, was that Cuddy was more than just beautiful. She was... nice.
That was lame. For a moment Cameron felt embarrassed by her inability to pin down a word better suited to Cuddy's character.
And yet it was just that – her irrefutable niceness – that had drawn Cameron in, perhaps because it was something they had in common.
It was a good trait. Better than any she usually fell for. Intelligence, confidence, humour, a touch of brilliance. In essence, everything that was House. But he wasn’t nice. And, inevitably, he had hurt her. He hadn’t always meant to (although sometimes he had). And she knew, in part, that it had been her fault for getting involved, or trying to get involved. He’d warned her against it. Everyone had warned her against it. And then, when she’d wanted something different, she’d ended up with Chase. Chase, who she’d thought she could help, could work on, to make him better than House. Not cleverer, of course. That would be impossible. But closer to what she wanted. Closer to the sort of person she could imagine herself being with and being proud to be with.
But then, that very moment when her eyes had opened, and allowed her to see Cuddy for what she really was, she had known that this thing – whatever it was – that she had with Chase, was nothing and could never be anything.
At first, the realisation had made her sad, because she really did like Chase. Some of the time, at least. Those odd occasions when she caught a glimmer of the sort of man he could become.
But Cuddy didn’t need any help. She was already there. She was everything that was good about House (toned down to an appropriate level, of course), and everything that was good about Chase, and many of the things that Cameron liked about herself. She was good and kind, and other drippy words that people had used to describe Cameron for as long as she could remember.
Cuddy hid it better, of course. She had to. Hospitals didn’t run on good intentions. But every now and again the mask slipped, and that was when, to Cameron, Cuddy was most beautiful of all.
Like the time when she lost the baby.
That had been the second instance, the second trigger. It could only have been a few weeks ago, though it seemed like longer. Cuddy had been walking away from the woman who had promised her a baby, who had passed that baby into her arms, and then snatched her away at the last moment.
It had almost broken Cameron to see it happen. She could hardly even imagine what it must have done to Cuddy. As she’d passed her by in the corridor, Cameron had held out her arm – a loose attempt to convey something of the sorrow she felt for the loss – and Cuddy had turned to her, a look of shock on her face, as if surprised that other people could be up and walking around and living in this world that seemed to have ended.
And in that instant of raw emotion, Cameron felt herself drawn to Cuddy with a force that was frightening. Because in that instant, Cuddy was no longer just a boss: some distant figure of authority, she was a woman, capable of both love and the terrible pain that so often accompanied it.
It might seem strange, but that was when Cameron had known that what she felt for Cuddy was more than just a physical attraction. Because she had wanted so desperately to hold her. To tell her that it would be ok, that she, Cameron, would do anything that was needed to make it ok.
Back in the real world, Cameron shook her head. House used to joke that she was attracted to people who were broken. Perhaps it was true.
She looked at the clock. Three minutes to eleven. Almost time for their meeting. There was no cause to put it off any longer. She tore herself away from the notes she was pretending to scan at the information desk, and began the long walk down the corridor towards the clinic and her final destination: Cuddy’s office.