as_damaged | ☎ voicemail

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☎ voicemail

❝You've reached Allison Cameron, please leave a message.❞

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[ooc: you know the drill, if you need her and there's no recent post &c &c. whatever. ♥♥♥]

"You'd have every reason to be," he tells her, not arguing that she should have been but aware of the curious ways grief can change you. "Most people medicate sadness somehow. Drugs, chocolate, alcohol. Those terrible Hallmark movies. You just waited to come out the other side?"

It's a genuine curiosity. He's only known her as a bright if try-too-hard fellow Fellow, someone with a history that started when she walked into the diagnostic's office to find him slightly put out at the thought that he couldn't cope with House on his own. The fragments of who she used to be came later, like being handed the symptoms with a diagnosis already on file. He knew what she was, just not how she'd gotten there.

Bright. Try-too-hard. Way too ready to sign herself up for things that are going to hurt.

"I had people. Family. Friends." And when that failed to help, she had an escape route. Distance helped, a little, though not as much as she'd hoped. When the support of others failed, she'd turned to solitude. Self-reliance. The side effects were more subtle than the other treatments; she didn't get fat, wreck her liver, drown her braincells in bad, sappy writing. Slowly but surely, though, she shut herself off from others, caring passionately but with an odd detachment. Falling in love with anyone who couldn't threaten her by loving her in return.

"Time helped, more than anything. I think... maybe I was better prepared, because we knew ahead of time. Not that it didn't..." She pauses, swallows. "Hurt. But it wasn't a shock."

She can't help but think it would have been harder, having him taken away without warning. At least as things were, she knew to treasure what time she did have.

Maybe that makes the difference. Family, friends. When his mother died Chase had flown back from England, with no friends on either side of the globe solid enough to risk leaning on. His father had sent a card, money, a referral letter. He took the second two and used them to build his own support, alone. When his father died Chase drank something bitter and kept it quiet. Solitude less of a choice than an expectation, a habit formed.

Expectation also changes things from someone ripped away in their prime. Wilson's patients, their families, talk about the relief of the end coming. Chase doesn't operate like that. Giving up is impossible, faith implausible. Medicine has been his last resort.

His mouth twitches at the corners, the beginnings of a tremble or a grimace, and he shakes his head, shakes off whatever is coming. "Sorry, not much of a holiday conversation."

It might; leaving didn't mean she lost that support, only that she wasn't constantly reminded of how much she needed it. After a while, knowing she could call home for a shoulder to cry on was more comforting than being at home had been, and not being surrounded by sympathy and markers of loss made it easier to believe that her life wasn't over. She couldn't have gotten to the point where she was able to live alone without her family. But it was being alone that really pushed her past the raw edge of her grieving.

More or less.

Sometimes it still catches up with her.

"It's all right. I don't mind talking about it," she replies quietly, with the slightest of smiles. It's a distant expression, not really meant for him.

"It's not something I need to hear about," he says simply, discounting the idea that she might want, or need to. In his experience the people who want to talk about their loss will do it regardless, and the people who need to stumble over their attempts far more than she has. Not that he isn't interested; it feels like a more intimate conversation than whatever hangs between them currently allows.

Besides, listen too long and people expect you to talk.

Short work made of his food, he rubs crumbs from his hands back into the plastic food wrapper, tossing that back into the bag with a disinterested sweep of his gaze over the magazines he's brought along. There's a crossword puzzle in the back of one; he picks it out and flicks through. "God I hope everybody's sane again soon."

Cameron shrugs it off, giving him an odd glance before lapsing into silence. She hasn't needed to talk about it in years. But she can't shake the sense that it might help; that maybe the things she can't say are hidden just past the things she doesn't. Maybe there wouldn't have been so much hurt between them if she could have made herself comprehensible. But it's too late to change that.

"It can't last forever." Probably. It's difficult to feel hopeful under the circumstances, having drugged a colleague to keep him from going insane if he isn't already.

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☎ voicemail

☞ and they won't pretend that they're too busy or that they're not alone

☞ and they won't pretend that they're too busy or that they're not alone

☞ and they won't pretend that they're too busy or that they're not alone

☞ and they won't pretend that they're too busy or that they're not alone

☞ and they won't pretend that they're too busy or that they're not alone

☞ and they won't pretend that they're too busy or that they're not alone