Title: This Is What She Does Not Say
Author: Faith V

Summary: Been there, done that, you were barely alive to tell the tale and you don’t think you can survive another round.
AN: It’s House/Cam, if you squint. Sort of like, what could drive her to feel things for him.

It’s one of those things no one ever asks, like they don’t think it makes a difference, like they can understand, from just a few spoken sentences, what those years were like for you. Like they know what happened when really, they have no idea and they never will. You loved him and that’s kind of it.

He wasn’t dying when you met him, not in a way that counts. He didn't know and you can't blame him for not knowing.

You know now that he probably was dying already – you researched his condition obsessively when you did your oncology rotation – but it doesn’t matter because the night you met him he was smiling and laughing and he bought you a drink after you were stood up by your date and he was so good to you, remember? The way he made you smile, made you laugh, made you love him more than you’d ever loved anyone in your life?

You were young and in love and oh so alone and when he asked you to marry him he was offering forever and a day and you kissed him while tears streamed down your face and it was the happiest moment of your life. You still miss him, sometimes, most times, all the time, and you’re still learning to live without him. [Funny how it took you so little time to get used to him, to need him, and it’s been almost ten years and you still don’t know how, don’t know why, don’t know what to do without him by your side.

Danny was a good kid [because you two were just kids and you can still choke up thinking about what a great man he would have been. He was going to be a pediatrician and you were going into obstetrics and you were going to open a practice together. You can’t remember what it felt like being this excited about anything.

You met him, you loved him, you got engaged to him and then he was dying.

People think they know it all, they look at you and they feel sorry, poor girl, so young and so strong and so damaged. You fell in love with a dying man, yes, but you didn’t know it and he didn’t know it and semantics really do matter. It’s not like it’d make a difference though because had you known he was sick you never would have left him. Not because you loved him but because he loved you and he needed someone, then. You were lucky enough to be that someone.

So no, people don’t get it, they don’t know, and you’ll never tell them, because this is yours, these are your memories and your short lived happily ever after. He was your husband and you loved him and he loved you and he was maybe, probably, the love of your life. Because no, the love of your life isn’t always your end all, be all but the one you’ll always love, no matter how much you wished you didn’t.

Danny was sweet and caring and so, so stubborn. He tried to push you away and you stayed, and the last time he looked at you, you saw all the love in the world on those beautiful brown eyes. And then he died, and you were alone, and you realized that you didn’t know how to be alone anymore, because Danny had given you the world, but he also took it away. And now you’re here, here where your insecurities live and where you’re nothing more than- you don’t even know what you are anymore.

You had a plan: med school, residency, a fellowship and all that follows. Love was not in the plan, marriage, especially at 21, was not in the plan, Danny was not in the plan and so, the plan was shot to hell. You don’t make plans anymore. You don’t think you could take it if they were to crumble and you were left drifting again. You take things as they come, you do the things you think are right and you do the best you can and really, that’s all anyone can do, right? Right? But you’re an immunologist and not an OB/GYN, because you couldn’t live that life, you couldn’t do all the things you thought you were going to do and not think of him every second of your life.

And you know, you do, that you not only lost your husband, your hypothetic children, your perfect life and perfect house with the picket fence and the Labrador dog, you know you also lost the chance to hate him, to find him boring, to realize that his habit of turning on his bedside lamp when you were trying to sleep was really fucking annoying. You lived together for three weeks, just three weeks before he was admitted into a hospital that he was never able to leave.

Then came Joe and you loved him for all the wrong reasons, because he was the last thing of Danny’s, because he was still there when Daniel was slowly slipping away. Joe, you did got around to hate, Joe who was alive and well and healthy and it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all and the one thing you regret the most is that he loved you too, and that scared the hell out of you, even then.

Danny broke you. It’s taken a lot of time – it’s taken a lot out of you – to admit this, but he did, he broke you in an unfixable way. You wish you could hate him for it, but you can’t, you just can’t. And so, this is what’s left, this is what happens after heartbreak. This, you, this person who’s emotional and emotionally stunted and so much more. Ten years down the line is what nobody ever talks about. You were young and you were beautiful and you could have had it all, but you were broken already and you couldn’t get yourself to pretend otherwise.

You missed out on a lot, you missed out on life because you were broken, yeah, but because of that crippling fear of losing someone. Been there, done that, you were barely alive to tell the tale and you don’t think you can survive another round. Which is why, you think on your most lucid moments, you go for guys you’re never actually going to have. You can’t lose someone that’s never yours to begin with, this is true is true is true is true is just the way things go. It’s logic at its most basic. You can’t stand another loss. And when you do have someone, when you see it in their eyes – never like Danny’s, but close – you run away. You’re a coward Allison, the worst kind too, hiding behind your scars.

That’s what kept with your nose in a book all through college post-Danny, all through med school when you’d rather stay in and memorize Gray’s Anatomy than go out and risk being happy even for a second. Happy and you just don’t mix well, everything goes to hell fast, in your experience. Maybe it’s wrong for you to think this way, maybe it’s a really idiotic thing to size up every relationship you’ll ever have to Danny and you, and maybe you know these things, but you’re also pretty sure that you don’t know any other way.

And you panic, still, often, you live in a constant state of fear because it’s not just that you won’t allow yourself to care for a man who hasn’t the ability to care back, it’s that you know that even if everything you believe in is true – that you can’t lose someone you don’t have – and even if there’s nothing faulty with that logic, you might get your heart broken anyway and that freezes you in place and turns you into this stupid, ineffectual girl, because you don’t go after things you want and you give up when there’s no reason and when you do stay and fight, you end up failing, falling, crashing down and it’s only the tears that won’t come out that keep you from burning.

You’re one messed up person, you know, everyone knows, and they’ve come to expect this from you. You’re the damaged girl and it’s all of your own making. Damaged goods, insecure, afraid of commitment, of confrontation, of life. You don’t like damaged people – you don’t like yourself – but you need to help, you need to show them that you care. It’s selfish, very, but helping them makes you think you’ve still got a chance. A chance at what, you don’t have a clue, but you’ll get there, someday, probably, hopefully.

There it is, hope, it’s the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn’t permanent and maybe that’s enough, that hope counts more than faith [because that you don’t have. Maybe and probably and hopefully and perhaps, those are the things you hang on to, those words of possibility, of could happen, of hope.

One day you’ll learn not to be scared anymore, one day, you’ll no longer fear your own heart and you’ll be able to move on. Contrary to popular belief, you want to be happy.

the end

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