On summer nights, House thinks of her.
He remembers how when the nights would crackle with heat and electricity they would sit up and argue, because that's what they did best. Ice-cream was always a feature, because House wouldn't face the embarrassment of being drunk under the table for another night.
Now they're filled with dead air and oily Chinese food straight from the carton.
Andthe empty silence that stretches tight like hot skin.
He sits alone at his piano with a cane across his lap, playing rhapsodies and thinking of vanilla. A slip of the finger leaves a stain on the music, and he stops. But he can't face the silence.
He remembers the taste of it on her lips and sinks into Bach.
The clock strikes one, and he puts a pillow on the sofa for later.
Chase always hated daytime TV, but he's discovered at night it's much, much worse.
He hovers between channels, drowning in sudsy soaps with doctors whose hairstyles are depressingly similar to his own. Cameron mentioned this to him once, though she was too drugged out then to recall it now (He's glad and disappointed at the same time).
Tonight (or morning, its all the same at 1 am), a priest speaks of fire, blood and burning. Chase snorts in fearful contempt and flicks over to watch his counterfeit save a crashing woman. He thinks of Hell as she dies, and wonders what it will be like when he gets there. Then he remembers he doesn't believe in that anymore, and gets up. He falls on his face in bedand swears at the sweaty muffler of air.
Though he was born and raised in heat like this, he still hates it like he hates the priests of the world.
Robert Chase was dosed on God every Sunday, and he remembers it well. He remembers the joy of once feeling something inside, and rolls over onto his back.
They gave him too strong a dose once. Now he's allergic.
Perhaps it was the line of loving God as a father, but when the young Chase left church that day he did not come back.
Loss of a father is hard, and that day Chase had lost both of his.
Now he watches TV's ghosts and spends the dark hours in limbo, waiting for the light to come and the emptiness to fill.
At nights, Foreman wanders.
Wonders and wanders on empty streets while the world is silent and sleeping. But he knows better then that, and that half the darkened windows have a restless soul behind it.
Still he walks, but he hasn't yet worked out why.
Not all who wonder are lost. But Foreman's not so sure. He's lost something, but he's not certain what.
He read somewhere that for every nineteen black deaths in New York city, one was a murder. He wondered if it was the same in New Jersey, but all the people he see in the dark are the homeless.
He tries not to think about why he walks at night with them.
Every time he does, his mind will wander to the back of his closet, to the scrunched up coat with fabric like a velveteen rabbit. He wore that to every job interview once, when it was the only one he had. Med school and a hard life leave for little money. And a criminal record doesn't help either.
He never got a job while he wore that coat.
The day he borrowed a friends was the day he got work. He kept the coat for a long time, until he gave it to a homeless man. It looked better on him. He was surprised to find he wants it back, even now.
Maybe that's what he's looking for. But something tells him its not the jacket.
Lisa Cuddy hates Summer. And the feeling is mutual.
Heat had never been kind to her. Sun had stained her skin red, and body heat had burnt her.
Now, in the heavy dark, it just reminds her what it would have been like to have a body beside her in bed. She bares her teeth at the weakness of the though and gets up (Its a single anyway; she gave up ever needing a double). At least now she has an excuse for the cold showers.
She combs the cupboards for sleeping pills, even though she ran out weeks ago. At last she settles on Les Miserables because Misery loves company;
But she's just as lonely.
She tells herself its okay. She will forget the thoughts of tonight by tomorrow. The thoughts of night are forgotten by day, and she's forever grateful.
Shame the emotions stay.
Cameron walks at night.
Barefooted she wanders the rough skin of the treadmill, going nowhere. It alludes to something she recognises, but doesn't appreciate.
It's too hot for it tonight, really. She streaming in the moonlight and breathing hard. There's an allusion there too, but she chooses to ignore it.
She doesn't tire easily now. After all, practice makes perfect, and she's had plenty of that (and people wonder how she stays so thin).
Though it doesn't look like it, she's drowning.
She tried alcohol and drugs, but memories are her drug of choice. She sinks into what she's lost and it gets harder every night to climb back out. But junkies don't know when to stop, and she's just the same.
She walks to remember, pretending she's back to before her world came here. She's back when they always told her the job would be fulfilling; though they never said it was lonely.
Wait, they did.
But Cameron wasn't listening, because she was in love with the man who would be there the rest of her life. Though she didn't know till later that his brain was dying. In a way, she was right. Her life ended then, and this one began after he was gone. But she still lives in the old by night, drowning in memories.
The cancer returns like the bad memory it is, and she's forced to rewind again. She lived through his literal deathbed to many times, and it still hurts. Its hard to remember just the good times, she's found. The bad stain the rest like blood.
House stares at the ceiling, suffocating with heat and the sound of Wilson snoring.
With wives in plural, it's not hard to understand why Wilson spends so much time on his friends couch. House closes his eyes and thinks of the empty space beside him.
Through the night Wilson slept on; because unlike the rest, he understood something they didn't. Like Summer nights and insomnia, love and grief go hand in hand.