Title: Torment

Author: Angel Leviathan

Spoilers: General for Season 1 and 2, nothing specific.

Disclaimer: House, characters, concept, etc, aren’t mine.

Notes: Fic is made of 3, 100 word, drabbles.

I.

The pain is back. Not so much as back, but gnawing at him again. The pain is always there, it is ever present, inescapable. Sometimes he tries to tell himself there’s something misfiring in his brain, that pain is only the body’s way of telling the mind something is wrong. He knows something is wrong and it can’t be fixed. Why can’t his mind accept that the body’s signals are now forever useless? It drives him mad. He never was quite sane, but the agony forever threatens to send him over the edge. House knocks back yet another vicodin.

II.

She walks by his office just as he throws another pill into his mouth. Cameron knows he swallows vicodin like a child swallows candy and she wonders if he ever keeps track of how many he’s taken. Or if he’s too numb by that time to realise, or to care. He should stop. But the thought, and the idea, are both useless. Perhaps one day the painkillers will kill him, but otherwise the pain alone will do the job just as well. Just more slowly. She would stop at his door, but knows the pain would spread to her too.

III.

He eyes her as she walks by. She slows and almost stops, but continues on her way. Not before giving him a look that he reads somewhere between despair and hurt. She wouldn’t dare pity him. Maybe she wonders if its the pills that make him the bastard he is today. Cameron knows he can love. Just perhaps not her and definitely not himself. The pain is his world. It will always be there, which is more than he can say for a lot of the people in his life. He can just never get high enough to not care.

Fin