✑ application

[as_damaged]

[nick / name]: Alms
[personal LJ name]: gossamerrain
[other characters currently played]:
Brian Moser :: Dexter :: cold_dry_pieces
Patera Silk :: Book of the Long Sun :: silk_for_calde
Aziraphale :: Good Omens :: mr_phale
Fox Mulder :: The X-Files :: call_me_spooky
[e-mail]: [REDACTED]
[AIM / messenger]: [REDACTED]

[series]: House
[character]: Dr. Allison Cameron
[character history / background]: wiki and wiki
[character abilities]: MAD DOCTOR SKILLZ. um yeah, she's an immunologist, idk. nothing fancy. ♡
[character personality]: Pretty girls don't have to work hard to get far in life-- but rather than relying on her looks, taking the easiest path to success, Allison Cameron worked her stunning little ass off to become a doctor. This fact, more than her credentials or her intelligence, is what got Cameron hired-- she's an anomaly, because she didn't choose the path of least resistance in life. She is extremely hard-working, intent upon proving herself.
Cameron is reluctant to lie, and isn't very good at it when she tries. She's more likely to end up unwittingly playing the "good cop" than to bully patients into revealing their secrets.
The constant affirmation of House's motto-- everybody lies-- is exceedingly frustrating for her; Cameron wants to trust people, but is constantly presented with evidence for why she shouldn't. She's consistently disturbed by the dishonesty she encounters, not only in her patients, but in her colleagues' behavior.
Although Cameron is usually friendly and compassionate, she has a difficult time dealing with others when they don't meet her moral and ethical standards. After Wilson agrees to testify against House, she looks down on him-- not because of the element of betrayal, but because of the oncologist's insistence that he was doing it for House's sake, and his refusal to acknowledge the personal gains that testifying would bring him. She goes so far as to tell a patient's husband that he's a horrible person for not being certain he wants his wife to survive-- knowing that if she dies, it means she has been faithful to him, and that her survival implies that she has had an affair. Her compassion for the man's difficult position fails in the light of her respect for life, and her memory of her own bereavement after her husband's death.
On several occasions her desire to be honest comes into conflict with her professional responsibilities. For example, when she learns that a successful athlete has been doping, she wants to reveal this information to the press; when a man admits to having slept with his daughter, she calls social services, even though their investigation will interfere with the diagnosis. In the first case, she's (barely) dissuaded from trying to ruin the athlete's career, though she remains offended by the fact that he cheats and gets away with it. In the latter case, both parent and child deny the abuse, and the daughter reveals that she seduced her own father in order to further her career-- reminding Cameron that the world isn't as black and white as she might prefer to believe.
She doesn't like giving bad news; when dealing with patients, she will hold out hope for as long as possible, trying to avoid discussing the worst-case scenario until there's no other choice. Sometimes she takes this to extremes; performing tests for unusual and unlikely diseases rather than accepting that a patient might have terminal cancer, or finding herself incapable of delivering the news of a patient's death to the family.
Cameron values human life very highly; she believes that when a person dies, the world should be affected-- that no one should just disappear. She befriends dying patients who have no families, simply so they are not alone-- in spite of the effect it will have on her, emotionally. She's attracted to damaged people-- those she perceives as needing assistance, salvation. That's not to imply that all her relationships with others are unhealthy, based on the need to help them-- but she does empathize easily with those who are in some way wounded.

[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: During Act Your Age (3x19), shortly after getting smacked in the ass by an eight year old. >D

[journal post]:
[Accidental Voice]

uh...

[There's a long pause, before she begins speaking quietly to herself, unaware that she's being recorded.]

Okay, this is definitely... not happening. This isn’t where I’m supposed to be-- not even that, it doesn't even look familiar... it must be a hallucination. Did someone drug me? Actually that might explain a lot...

[Somewhat louder, and frustrated.]

Well, now what?


[third person / log sample]: [Set during One Day, One Room]

He’d come in with his death sentence in hand, a wrinkled yellow sheet of paper; come to ask not for aid, not for salvation, but only for a place to sleep for the night. The discharge slip from another hospital-- he had a six-centimeter mass in his lung, inoperable and untreatable— there was nothing anyone could do, besides try to make him comfortable while he died, and the old man had refused even that. Claiming he deserved to suffer, wanted it; that he’d screwed up his life and needed to pay for it in his death.
Homeless, jobless, friendless; he was alone in every sense of the word, reaching out for some final human connection. Cameron had never harbored the delusion that she could save everyone, but that knowledge never made losing a patient any easier. She didn’t believe that compassion was equivalent to naivety, either; and so when hope ran out, she tried to offer comfort instead.
This was the price you paid for this job; it had hurt at first, so badly that she’d grasped at straws to try and disprove a terminal diagnosis. That she couldn’t find the words to tell families, when there were no more chances. It got easier, but it never got easy—and she hoped it never would. No one should die alone; and no one should be forgotten.
I need to die knowing, he’d said, that something is different because I was here.
And he deserved that. Everyone did. You couldn’t save everyone, but you could at least offer them that solace in their final moments, in the face of their uncertainty. The assurance that even though the world would go on, it wouldn’t be the same. That someone would be aware of what had been lost.
Allison thought of her husband, as she often did in these moments. She had vowed to stay beside him, knowing he couldn't promise the same for her-- knowing it was only a matter of time before she lost him. She had loved him. Removed from the fact of his cancer, in spite of whatever House might say about her attraction to damaged people, she'd loved her husband deeply, and she had cherished what time they had. But she had to admit, she'd been glad she could offer him that assurance that he would be loved, missed, remembered. Without her, he would have been... alone. To drift slowly away from the living world, and vanish without a trace. She couldn't bear the thought; even if it was naive, if it didn't matter in the long run whether anyone mourned you or not.
This was all she could offer; awful for her, a thousand times worse for him. But it was the right thing to do.
The syringe of anesthetic lay where she’d left it, untouched. Cameron sat by his bedside, watching the ragged rise and fall of the old man’s ribs, only the methodical, electronic chirps of the equipment, the occasional soft gasp of pain, breaking the silence.
Would she remember him, if he slipped away calmly, painlessly? The answer didn’t really matter, although she’d like to think she would. He needed a sense of certainty that words couldn’t give him, and though she hated to see it come to this, she’d realized it wasn’t her choice to make. That without pain, he wouldn’t be able to die in peace. It wasn’t her choice to make.
She would remember.