Title: Meaningless
Rating: very lite R, heavy R on the occasion of a second part
Pairing: House/Cameron
Warnings: Rehab conjecture, my departure from canon post "No Reason"
Summary: Because meaning is not built upon facts and her voice feels like her kiss.
What You Need to Know: Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled. Originally written for the HouseCameron LJ community.
Meaningless
No one will ever guess but it is music he misses the most when he's taking the pills. No one will ever guess because they'll never think to ask the right question.
It's not a secret that he appreciates music.
The bass drum beats against his spine more regularly than the rhythm of his heart.
He's never been terribly good at keeping secrets. He likes knowing the answers too much (he likes people to know that he knows the answers too much). It was a fact of the human condition that the question was more interesting than the answer. People could build their entire lives around questions of their own existence. They could throw off a thousand plausible answers just to keep the question alive.
That was the thing about other people; they asked so many questions. Some of them even asked the right questions. But they never really looked for the answers. They didn't really want to know.
Because meaning is not built upon facts. No one has ever found meaning in the facts that Mt. Everest is 8,848 meters high. But there are those whose lives will only be complete if they can stand on the elusive roof of the world. No one has ever found meaning in the fact that the chemicals passed to an infant in a woman's breast milk provide antibodies and stimulate the formation of a bond between mother and offspring. But there are women who swear there were holes in their hearts before their children were born.
The bass comes in, pulsing from each joint down the length of every bone in his body. He feels the deep pulse tie and bind the music together even when it's so far in the background that most people wouldn't know it was there.
It's called synesthesia, this thing he has. This thing he had.
There is no meaning in the fact that his senses didn't divide the way that everyone else's did. If anything it only serves to expose meaning for the fraud that it is. It's not that on some profound level he understands life better than everyone else and thus doesn't care what anyone thinks of him, doesn't care that they can't understand him. It just that he's so very used to it.
No one has ever answered in the affirmative to the most basic of human questions. Do you see what I see? Do you feel what I feel?
There is no meaning in the fact that middle C produces a flash of brilliant green behind his eyes, or that A is red and E flat a mustard yellow. No meaning, just perfect pitch. There is no meaning in the fact that he feels every pull of a violin bow race down his forearm or the sounds of the clarinet drift across his stomach. There is no meaning in the fact that he stopped going to symphonies after that first one because the overwhelming sensations left him utterly exhausted.
Those are just the facts. Facts that he collected and stored by listening to anything he could get his hands on.
It doesn't mean anything either that the sensations vannished when the pills started. It was just another sense after all, another way to gather data. And opiates dulled the senses. That was their job. It was like watching television in black and white. What did it matter if he missed the colors?
And finally the piano. Not a keyboard or a practical upright. A baby grand. The notes skip up his spine and shimmer down the nerves to his fingertips. His hands dance on the arms of his chair of their own accord. He remembers now what it would feel like to play those notes, to feel every keystroke simultaneously as he felt the note. It was the meeting of opposite charges. Electricity.
It didn't return to him in the dreams because the dreams were his mind showing him the answers. That's something the constant questioners would say. It just returned because his mind was in shock and going back to old patterns.
When she stopped him in the hallway he was distracted by the influx of new data. He barely heard her tell him he was going to rip his stitches out. He had forgotten after such a long romance with the pills that some voices meant he'd have to work so much harder to pay attention. Her voice was a soft pressure on his skin, warm and constant.
Before he could stop himself he was challenging her. He was challenging her to touch him, to prove what her voice promised.
Do you feel what I feel?
And then there was that pressure on his arms, just like her voice told him it would be, stopping him where he stood. And it was just right, Goldilocks' porridge, sex in the morning, just right. And so he snapped at her, threatening her, making her let go before he couldn't help finding out if her skin was just right warm and her lips just right soft.
And when the ketamine worked its magic and the pain was gone and the drugs flushed from his body, he was distracted enough. He ran for miles everyday and the beat of the music matched the beat of his steps matched the beat of his heart. His piano was an electrical storm and his old records were rehab, tingling muscles and reverberating through bones.
He could walk next to her and listen to her as she rattled off her medical opinion and her voice was just one more bit of sensory information that he'd previously been unable to notice. He didn't wonder if she could combine sensations for him the way that nothing but his piano could approach.
He didn't ask questions like everybody else. He didn't ask if he didn't really want to know. And for the first time in his life he came across a puzzle he didn't want to solve and a question he didn't want answered, so she talked and he listened but he didn't ask. He was (almost) distracted enough.
And then came the pain again and the pills and he couldn't ask if he wanted to.
Sparks fall from his fingertips. Violet F's buzz against yellow E's and leap over the crimson that is the exact shade of the high C. He's never been more glad that ivory doesn't burn but he thinks soon, so soon, it might just melt.
He plays his piano now as a means of survival. And maybe survival is the greatest meaning there is when you know that you can know everything but only at the risk of insanity.
He has two meetings a day for thirty days until he can go back to work. People with flat, dull voices that talk of seeking and never finding. That speak of a want for change that never comes. And those hours are the worst, the worst he has ever known. Voices that suck and leech at him trying to pull him into their patterns. They are giant black holes, dead stars that nothing can detect except, maybe, for the light that they trap.
He ignored the knock at the door for a long time. It was just a knock, after all, and had nothing on Chopin. But then she said, "House? I know you're home." And a note in the middle of the second movement became the last, ending the song before it was finished.
Then he opened the door and she was standing there, all concern and absolution. "You're back," she said and he couldn't close the door on her.
He stood aside and she stepped into his home. "I brought you dinner." She said, her voice rising at the end like a question, like she wasn't sure why she'd done that. "I figured your food would've gone bad while you were in rehab."
"Canned soup and peanut butter?" He replied. "I think Skippy packages with the apocalypse in mind."
"Right," she said laughing a little and the sound wrapped around him like a glove. She handed him a paper bag from a deli in town. "Well the world hasn't ended but I don't know anyone else who will eat this."
"It hasn't ended," he agreed. He told himself that he was only talking to stop that distracting voice of hers not because her sentence had ended with a note of goodbye. He looked around the room, still real and solid even without a pocket full of vicodin to hold it up. "It's still here." He thought that if he cared to try he could build worlds on her voice.
"So did it work at all?" She asked. "The rehab, I mean?"
"I'm clean," he said. "New meds. New…" he rolled his eyes and his expression twisted on its own, "answers."
"Answers?" She smiled. "Answers are good."
"Yeah."
"Well… I…." Her voice hung in the air and pressed on his skin, an unresolved chord that echoed off the walls waiting for the final note.
"There was a question I never asked." He said abruptly.
"What was it?"
He looked at her silently. If he asked he would need an answer, he'd need that note that resolved the dissonance.
He looked at her silently. And she sighed and said, "Goodbye." And there was resignation in her eyes, eyes blue as a low G.
And then he had to know.
He stepped forward before she could move to the door. When he forced his way into her space she put a hand against his chest to keep him back. "House…." And it was all happening, a chromatic scale climbing inevitably towards no discernible end. Her voice was the pressure of the hand on his chest.
"I have a question," he said quietly.
And when his thumb brushed a line down her jaw, her skin was as warm as her voice that said, "I don't have the answer."
And when finally he kissed her, slow and long and deep, her lips were as soft as they had promised. The world right then was exactly as he experienced it. And he wanted more answers. What did it feel like when she shouted, what did it feel like when she moaned? He had to know. He had to know if this is how it would really feel to be inside her, to be surrounded by her.
Because the fact was, he felt music. And her voice felt like her kiss. And that felt nothing like goodbye.
And that felt something like meaning.