Written for Femgenficathon '08 on LJ.
Prompt: “Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you.” - E.L. Konigsburg.
Warnings: references to drug use, minor self-injury, slight language, spoilers for episode 2x07 “Hunting.”
Summary: Occurs in the aftermath of Cameron’s HIV scare in season two. She doesn’t think about dying anymore. She isn’t sure if she’s anyone’s doctor now. In a life defined by a relentless desire to save everyone around her, it was fitting, maybe, that it now came down to this: the need to save herself. Special thanks to aphrodite_mine for beta-reading.
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She doesn’t think about dying anymore. She isn’t sure if she’s anyone’s doctor now. In a life defined by a relentless desire to save everyone around her, it was fitting, maybe, that it now came down to this: the need to save herself.
She is told to wait: six weeks, three months, six months.
Just hours after having been exposed, she’s certain that it’s eating her alive. She can feel it: settling in, coursing through her veins and sucking out whatever dreams and aspirations that hadn’t already been shot to death by insensitive colleagues and drugged-up patients and a once—as recently as yesterday, which seems so distant now—rewarding job.
She takes the drugs because now there is nothing left to lose. Cameron wonders, though, how much she ever really had. She had spent the last several years working to make everything and everyone around her unbreakable, the past having been broken too many times. An entire life spent watching it all fall apart as she remained the solid force, unwavering, and only now willing to allow herself to break.
And the drugs work. They shatter her, rattling around, mauling her senses, fucking with her brain, erasing her ambitions and inhibitions. She had been so sick of trying to save everyone else with no one around to save her but this bit of pale pink powder in a grimy plastic bag, designed to help her unwind and unfind, to enable her to get lost and never be found.
The meth does just what she wants it to do. It makes her forget. It empowers her—or she thinks it empowers her. It allows her to take control, to achieve what she doesn’t even want, because to achieve what she does want has long been proven impossible. The drugs take her to a place completely unknown, far away, where she’s not Allison Cameron, M.D., where it’s not tomorrow or today or even sweet distant yesterday. It turns her eyes wild and blind.
Six weeks.
Her showers are now twice as long as they used to be, but she can only ever be half as clean.
She nicks herself in the morning as she shaves her legs and she lets the blood run, watching it swirl around the drain. It turns pink, then clear, then disappears, and she wonders if she can drain it all. Maybe try bloodletting. Why keep up with modern times, sterilize every surface, every syringe, every stretch of skin? Nothing here can be sterilized now. She’s learning that nothing can be stable. Nothing is safe or sacred.
She studies herself a little longer in the mirror, paying close attention to the whites around her eyes, staring and not blinking. She doesn’t understand how they can be so white. At first she washes them fastidiously, standing directly under the showerhead every morning with her eyes wide open, flushing them out with saline solution every night, as if it would make any difference.
Finally it dawns on her that she can’t clean out whatever may or may not be there, so she stops trying, and soon sees no point in making herself look good and healthy and alive every morning just to go to work and be surrounded by sick people, when she feels like the sickest of all.
Three months.
She tells herself be strong be strong but it’s impossible to be strong when she feels so weak. When, in spite of herself, she tells everyone that nothing’s wrong. She surprises everyone in the staffroom when an older doctor whom she has never even met—but everyone knows; they’ve been gossiping in the halls of the hospital because she’s famous now, practically a celebrity (“Did you hear about Allison Cameron?” they’ll ask, voices low), not knowing she can hear them everywhere, through office doors and walls, in the cafeteria, in line at the coffee shop four blocks away, in her dreams every night and still echoing in her mind when she wakes up, every morning—asks her pointedly how she feels, and she stares at him for a moment, then laughs. When they all look at her like she’s lost her mind, she laughs even harder.
Every day at work begins to feel a little easier. She understands now that no one is healthy. No one can be healthy. No amount of drugs will cure their diseases—that was a lesson she had learned firsthand. But every day seems to offer a new discovery, a new way to be or not to be. So she stops showering every day, lets her hair get a little greasy and stops caring if her clothes are a little rumpled or a little unwashed when she steps inside the hospital each morning. She stops being whom they expect, and whom she once expected too.
She keeps inspecting the whites of her eyes, amazed by how they can be so white still. She watches her pupils dilate and contract under the harsh bathroom light as she slowly flicks the switch on again, off again. On, off. On.
Six months.
She feels perfectly fine; better, actually, than ever before. And it’s not because today is the day that she finds out for sure.
She doesn’t really give much thought to what she’ll find inside that envelope. She realizes that it simply doesn’t matter.
And even though she no longer cares what her results will be, she feels different when she wakes up that morning and prepares for her day. She does not dread that piece of paper. It cannot define her. It will not change a thing. She isn’t about to let it tell her whether she will live or die, and it doesn’t make a difference anyway. She isn’t about to let a piece of paper tell her what is inside of her—not now, when she is only just starting to find out.
Before she steps outside, Cameron looks in the mirror one last time and notices how much brighter her eyes shine when she smiles.