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Cameron makes exactly one attempt at going back to work for her two week notice. It’s the right thing to do—Foreman did it—only it’s doomed to fail from the outset, because she spent the night at Chase’s and has nothing to wear. “I could’ve sworn I had a change of clothes here,” Cameron tells him, tucking in her shirt; the low neckline is less forgiving than it was yesterday, on account of the two new hickeys that keep threatening to peek out from the top of her breast. “Didn’t I leave my white blouse?”
Chase, watching her from where he’s still lounging in bed—he has nowhere to be, of course—flushes, the can’t-believe-his-own-luck smile that’s been glued to his face for the last twelve hours briefly dropping. He’s still shirtless, his dark sheets striking against all that light skin. “It’s in your work locker,” he says; when Cameron raises her eyebrows at him, he adds, guiltily, “I put it there when I went to hand in my ID yesterday.”
You dumped me, remember , he doesn’t say; Chase has always known how to smooth things over. Cameron runs her hands down her collar, and decides that the bruises aren’t her biggest problem. And she’s right, in the end; she gets to work ten minutes late, hair messy because when she went to kiss Chase goodbye it lasted for more than just a chaste few seconds, and it’s Wilson she sees first, who looks at her like he’s seen a ghost.
“Dr Cameron,” he greets, his face a picture of polite befuddlement, “I heard you’d quit.” Of course he has; even if he weren’t House’s best friend, word always gets around fast. Already, Wilson speaks to her like she’s a stranger, and not at all like they’d both spent the better part of yesterday trying to figure out just what, exactly, had triggered House into firing Chase. Like he hadn’t accused her of sabotaging Foreman’s job interview with a snide, you so would’ve fallen for that three years ago. Like none of it has ever meant anything.
Cameron shrugs it off. “I gave notice,” she begins, and Wilson’s own perfunctory smile takes on such a tinge of clear pity that it riles her enough to interrupt herself with—“What?”
“He’s taken the month off,” Wilson says. “Cuddy’s furious, but he does have the vacation time banked, so.” Wilson gives a funny little half-shrug, guileless, like he’s helpless to intervene. Cameron’s seen him do it so many times that she’s forgotten what it really means: that Wilson is never really on anyone’s side but House’s. He reaches out his hand for her to shake, and when she does, he says, genial, “Keep in touch, won’t you?"
When she clears out her locker, she finds not only her blouse, but a glossy black-and-white photograph of her bent deep in concentration, a fridge magnet of a koala she brought back for Chase almost three years ago when she first visited Central Park Zoo, simply because it reminded her of him. When she raises the blouse to her face, it smells like Chase’s detergent, and not her own. As if he couldn’t bear the scent of her, and it strikes Cameron just how close she was to losing him. To never seeing him again. She thinks of House, purposely booking time off for the first time in years just to avoid the truth—that she is the last man standing, that she won’t be for much longer—and it strikes her as pathetic, though she cannot help but pity him. She never could. Cameron starts to pack; within ten minutes, it’s like she never worked here at all.
Three weeks after Chase leaves Diagnostics, Cuddy calls asking him to come in for some final admin . Cameron, laughing, jokes about it merely being a pretense for a social call. “Make sure she knows you’re taken,” she warns on his way out, eyes bright with amusement; Chase learned months ago that Cameron is far better humoured outside of work than she is in it.
It’s strange, going back. It reminds him of the transition from high school to university, going back to school one last time for the Year 12 prizegiving to receive his Excellence in Sportsmanship award and realising just how meaningless the whole thing really was, just how little the Year 7s were. There’s a moment while Chase walks through the lobby where he half-expects to see Foreman, rushing out of the elevators with test results in hand, or Cameron, buzzing around the clinic with a well-intentioned smile and her shirt buttoned up to her throat, and the absence of them both throws him. He doesn’t expect to see House, of course. Even if Chase didn’t already know that he’d taken the week off, House has always avoided the lobby when possible: much easier to avoid Cuddy and/or clinic duty that way.
There's an air of that back-to-school nostalgia in the way Chase approaches Cuddy’s office, too; for a moment, he frets about his tie being too short, and then he remembers that he’s thirty-three years old, that he doesn’t work here anymore, and Cuddy pops her head around the door—frazzled-looking as ever—and says, “Dr Chase. Do come in.”
She’d called him Dr Chase on the phone, too, which had struck him as an odd formality: like being called his full name by a scolding parent. Chase’s mother had always been too drunk to ever do such a thing, and he doesn’t have a middle name besides, but Cameron has told him about the fights she had with her father about her skirt lengths as a teenager. Her middle name is Jane. Now Chase smiles, confused, as Cuddy motions for him to sit, and he says, “What can I do for you?”
Cuddy examines him through tightly-lined lashes. Makes a movement that might be a sigh. Says, at last, with great significance: “House shouldn’t have fired you.”
It’s no use telling her that she’s wrong. That maybe House should have fired Chase a long time ago, if things were going to shake out this way: Cameron walking around his apartment in his stretched-out University of Melbourne t-shirt and nothing else, recruiters from every hospital in the tristate area begging him to apply for positions with salaries that are easily double what he was making under House. There’s a weird kind of serenity that comes with being pushed into something, especially when Chase has spent so long running, creating enough momentum to keep him safe on the other side of the world. Chase affects a mulishness he doesn’t quite feel, and says, “It is what it is.”
“You’re a good doctor,” Cuddy continues like she hasn’t heard him speak. “Everyone spoke very highly of you when you did that rotation in the NICU. And I suspect that without Cameron to…distract you, or House to torture you, you’d be an even better one. That’s talent that should be here, not anywhere else.”
“Cameron and I are back together,” Chase retorts, defensive and thinking of Cameron’s giggly make sure she knows you’re taken, and then, “Wait, are you offering me a job?”
Cuddy tilts her head very slightly, the way she always does when she can’t bear the sight of the stupidity before her. “Yes,” she says. “Either in Surgery or NICU, you pick. House might get autonomy over who he hires in Diagnostics, but I want you to stay here in some capacity. If House is a problem, I’ll—do my best to deal with him.” She has the grace to look vaguely embarrassed by her lack of commitment on that last point, but then Cuddy is nothing if not self-aware.
There aren’t any jobs in Surgery. There haven’t been any jobs available in Surgery for years, because every resident wants to stay on and every intern is desperate to get matched there after graduation, which either means that Cuddy is bluffing—unlikely; she’d have nothing to gain—or that Chase has a lot more leverage than he might have ever dreamed of, had he known what he was walking into. He thinks of Cameron back at his apartment, flipping dispassionately between listings for immunology openings, and how awful it had been, those weeks where she’d been adamant she wanted nothing to do with him. Mostly because he knew she was lying, but a little bit because he’d been eating lunch with Cameron and getting drinks after work with her once a week for the better part of three years, and Chase hadn’t quite been sure how to fill the time without her.
He says, “You got anything in the ER?”
Foreman goes for New York Mercy, in the end, in spite of all House’s snide comments about it being clinic duty for the wealthy ringing in the back of his head while he signs the contract. It’s a utilitarian decision: Mercy is offering him the best pay, the best path to promotion, the most fleshed-out Diagnostics team. Cameron calls a week later to offer her congratulations, sounding bright and happy in a way that is almost foreign. It occurs to him for the first time that, for all her irritating optimism, he has always subconsciously associated her with a soft cloud of gloom. “Let me buy you a drink, for old times’ sake,” she says, and he wants to say no, but he’s never really disliked Cameron as much as he wishes he could. They’d be friends, he thinks, if they worked in an office and not a hospital, and that might as well be true now. He accepts with only minimal hedging.
It takes Foreman a moment to recognise her, when he gets there. Cameron is blonde and beautiful and casual in jeans and a heather-grey cardigan, her hair loose and wavy around her shoulders; next to her, Chase is fidgety and about a week overdue for a haircut. She hadn’t told him Chase would be here, but Foreman finds himself entirely unsurprised. They’re holding hands, though Cameron quickly breaks free to corral Foreman into a one-armed hug; creepy though it might sound, he is at least relieved to note that she still smells the same even without the sterile top notes of hospital antiseptic, all berry shampoo and lavender hand cream. “It’s good to see you,” she says effusively, letting him go. “How have you been?”
“Good,” Foreman says cautiously, letting her lead him to the bar. Chase trails behind, offering Foreman only a nod of greeting. “Nice hair.”
“She just got it done,” Chase volunteers, the information a distraction for his slipping past Cameron to put his credit card down for the tab before she can open her wallet. “It’s taking some getting used to. I keep losing her in crowds.”
“You’re not as funny as you think you are,” Cameron tells him with a pout, and Foreman is struck by the strange realisation that he’s well and truly on the outside for good, that he’s never going to be able to go back to when things were simple: Cameron, dark-haired and serious, brewing the worst batch of coffee known to man. Chase, lazy and indolent, zoning out during the first ten minutes of a differential as he chews on the cap of his pen and stares plaintively at the shadowed angles of Cameron’s jaw. Foreman knew how to deal with those people, how to bear their many annoyances and soft spots and almost enjoy them. It has been less than a month, and already they are not those people anymore. Foreman is not that person, anymore, either: the one who wrangled them like it was nothing, who rarely thought about anything beyond House’s latest act of insanity, the next case, the next batch of lies. Fresh start. Clean break. After this, he will never see either of them again, and it’s not quite a pang in his chest so much as it is a truth.
So he lets Cameron ply him with drinks like nothing has changed, politely looks away when Chase drops a kiss in her hair when he gets up to go to the bathroom. They don’t talk about the future, though Foreman gathers from the pager clipped to Chase’s belt that they both have new jobs already. Instead, they dig up the past, running through the greatest hits: Vogler. Tritter. Andie, and Sebastian Charles, and Rebecca Adler, Cameron’s finely-plucked eyebrows flying up in tipsy indignation when Foreman corrects her memory— we treated for vasculitis first, remember— and they talk around and around House, none of them quite plucking up the courage to say his name first, until eventually Chase cracks and says, “I’d never say anything to him about it, but I think I’m going to miss him.” And Foreman thinks of House, almost sympathetic, telling him, you’ve been like me since you were eight years old , and doesn’t say anything, even as Cameron concurs sleepily into her sixth vodka soda of the evening.
Growing up; moving on. It is summer, and still light outside when Foreman leaves them, Chase guiding Cameron into the cab with careful, tender hands. “Take care of yourself, man,” Chase says, easy and almost earnest, and for a moment Foreman almost walks away without replying.
“You too,” Foreman says at last. Cameron, loose-limbed in the backseat, waves goodbye through the cab window as it pulls away. Her newly-golden hair catches the dusk light. In two days time, Foreman will leave his apartment for his first shift at Mercy, and drive ten minutes in the wrong direction out of pure muscle memory. Nothing else, he'll insist to himself and it won’t matter if he’s lying; everybody does, in the end.