#sorry this took me so long. seems i must be actively procrastinating an essay to get fic written around here

[eliotquillon]

Would you write any flirtatious chase-cameron banter? Preferably set at a late night in the hospital after everyone's gone home and they're stuck doing labs, looking after a patient and they're a teensy bit delirious so it's weirdly also very honest and vulnerable.

anon i bet you thought i forgot about this req didn't you. NEVER FEAR. this actually took me a while to figure out what to do with (i love writing banter but flirtatious banter is scary especially for a 'new' fandom) (i still consider myself new to this fandom) but here we go. set vaguely during a non-specific part of fwb era--if pressed i'll say between 3x15 and 3x16, but the details are not relevant lol:

House, of course, leaves PPTH at 5pm on the dot with strict orders to keep running lab stains and PCR tests on their latest patient until they get a positive result. “Not like you three have anything better to do,” he calls over his shoulder, while Foreman rolls his eyes and Chase tries to catch Cameron’s eye. She’s not paying attention–too busy adjusting her glasses tiredly while she peers into a microscope, hair ruffled in a way that reminds him of her rolling out of his bed that morning–and Chase tells himself he’s not disappointed. They’re not together. It’s just sex. It shouldn’t matter that they had half-formed plans to get Indian takeout and play a drinking game while watching old episodes of General Hospital together that was almost definitely going to lead to–

“Alright, I’m out,” Foreman declares at midnight. “This isn’t fair, I wore the beeper last night. One of us needs to be awake for the differential tomorrow.” “Nice excuse,” Chase mutters darkly. “You mind bringing us up some coffee from the cafeteria before you go, Judas?”

“That’d be great,” Cameron adds, all faux-earnest charm, and Foreman actually has the grace to look a little bit guilty at that. He leaves the coffees on the lab benches–definitely not best practice, but nor is making three overworked doctors run labs all night–and leaves with the promise to relieve them at 6am if they come up with no further answers. Chase, of course, doesn’t believe him for a second, but this seems to pacify Cameron; she shoots him a suspiciously sunny smile, and wishes him good night.

As soon as Foreman’s out the door, she says, “And then there were two.” “And then there were two,” Chase echoes, eyeing her warily from where he’s waiting for the centrifuge to recalibrate. “Not quite what I meant when I asked if you wanted to hang out tonight.” That’s usually how they put it, in public–do you want to hang out later? Wanna grab some dinner? It’s really more for Chase’s sanity than Cameron’s; she seems unusually blasé about the whole friends-with-benefits situation, which is fine, honestly, but is it so crazy to just want to keep things to themselves for a while? To not want the hospital gossip mill offering their opinion on what is, objectively, a private decision between two consenting adults? And it’s not like Chase knows how to phrase it any other way. Cameron, if she had her own way, would keep being forthright about it: want to have sex later? Cool. Collected. And it isn’t that Chase has an issue with it, exactly. It’s just as she said it would be, after all. No strings attached. Easy peasy. But there’s just something so clinical about it. It feels strange, especially from Cameron, who he always assumed would be the flowers-and-dinner type.

“We could,” Cameron says now, pushing back her chair and spinning to face him. “If you wanted.” “You don’t mean,” Chase starts, fighting his flush at the thought of Cameron and sex and the fucking pathology lab, and Cameron grins from ear to ear.

“Hang out,” she finishes, simple and guileless. “I guess we’re doing it anyway, right? No harm in taking a quick break to chat.”

“That is not what you meant,” Chase accuses. God, she would probably kill him for thinking it, but there really is something beautiful about Cameron in the lab. Even when she’s exhausted and frustrated there’s a part of her that just lights up when given a microscope and a set of slides, like she’s some overeager freshman biology major donning a lab coat for the first time. It’s lit up right now: in the slightly manic gleam in her eye, in her rolled-up sleeves, in her glasses set half-askew on the edge of her nose. “Anyway, we don’t have time to chat. Unless you’re planning on being trapped in here with me all night.”

“And that would be so terrible,” Cameron hums, dangling her legs invitingly. She’d kill him for thinking this, too, but at this precise moment she seems so…normal. Not normal as in ordinary, quotidian, but normal as in not a woman with dead-husband-levels of hang-ups around relationships; normal as in the kind of woman Chase thinks he knows how to flirt with. It’s an illusion, but it’s almost like he could step right between the open vee of her legs and grin down at her teasingly, and almost like she would let him. 

Not that he wants to. Not that she would let him. It’s just sex. Just convenience. Just…microwave pizza.

“So very terrible,” Chase agrees, turning back to the centrifuge so he doesn’t have to keep looking at her and thinking about it. “Good thing we’re not actually locked in together.” “That could probably be arranged,” Cameron says. He can’t see her anymore, but he imagines her smiling again, polishing her glasses on the edge of her coat and her bangs falling into her eyes, the way she looks at him sometimes when they’re walking out to her car together on the way out of work and their fingers accidentally brush together and Chase can pretend that she’s thinking about holding his hand. He thinks that’d be nice, sometime. Just holding Cameron’s hand–not out of any hidden romance, but just for the sake of it. He knows her hands so well, the cracked-dry knuckles and fingertips from scrubbing them multiple times a day and the faintly oily, lavender-scented sheen of her hand cream that always sticks to her palms, and she always holds his face, his shoulders, his hips, but never his hands. “Get someone to call in a bomb threat.” “Call in our own bomb threat,” Chase raises weakly.

“Pretend I’m holding you hostage.” “Hey, why are you holding me hostage?” Chase demands, glancing at her over his shoulder in an accusatory fashion. “I’m the man!”

“I’m a femme fatale,” Cameron smirks, “and you were the one who said we didn’t have time to chat.”

Their pagers go off then; their patient is coding. By the time she’s stable, House is harassing them via speakerphone about test results and his latest epiphany, and it’s like the hours in the lab never really happened. By the time Foreman slinks back in, arguably in a worse mood after two hours’ sleep than he’d be if he’d never slept in the first place, the silly lab banter has entirely slipped from Chase’s mind while Cameron gnaws frustratedly on her bottom lip, and he isn’t thinking about it at all.

Honestly. He isn’t.