Cameron remembers.
It's what she does, through the long reaches of the night and when she's helping patients who are dying and when she kisses men in pubs with the taste of alcohol sweet in her mouth and when she drinks her coffee in the mornings.
She remembers.
She remembers his voice and his laughter, remembers that ever-present grin as he shakes dark hair out of his eyes, remembers waking up in the mornings with him beside her and pancakes clumsily flipped because they're neither of them any use at anything until they've had their coffee, long boat trips because he loves the sea and the wind in his face, the two of them arguing over his cashmere scarf which cost a small fortune from a shop in the middle of nowhere. He loves that scarf, wears it all the time, even though the rest of his clothes are so poorly chosen, so clearly I don't care that it makes her laugh. He wears his favourite hoodie and and in winter he lends it to her and then she gives it back when he starts shivering, and usually gives him her jacket too because his lips turn blue in the cold and it makes her cold just to look at him.
She remembers.
She remembers his soft, floppy hair falling out after the treatments that never worked, remembers him too tired to even raise his head, remembers sitting on the hospital bed and telling him stories as if he's a child, because he's tired and he wants to forget that he's dying, wants to imagine that he's just sick and he'll get better and tell these stories to their children someday, someday in the future that he knows he'll never have.
She remembers.
She remembers arguments, real ones, shouting and snarling at one another like beasts, one of them eventually walking out and crashing at a friend's house. They made up, of course, and she remembers that, too. But even the arguments are good memories now, because he was alive then, living and full of energy. They always argued about the little things, never about the things that mattered, but they both had tempers and they neither of them ever knew when to back down.
She remembers.
She remembers late nights in their bedroom together, touching and whispering and intimate in the darkness. She wonders if it's wrong that she stills dreams about kissing him, the smell of his shampoo and the feel of his arms warm around her. Sometimes she dreams about what it was like to have sex with him, touching and laughing and then harsher and passionate and oh, God that was what it was like to feel alive.
She remembers.
She remembers him dying. It's burnt into her memory as if branded there, and she knows that it will never fade, never die. He died instead, and the memory lives on. The irony when she realised that made her crumple to the floor, sobbing, the final paperwork for the funeral forgotten in that black-and-white pain in her black-and-white world, where white was then, when he was alive, and black is now, because he is dead and she can't see an end to this darkness.
She remembers.
Forgetting was the hardest thing. She wakes up one morning, gets out of bed, and doesn't think of him until she's halfway through her coffee. It feels awful, wrong, to leave him behind after so many days, weeks, months, years even of waking up and realising with that sudden shock that he's gone.
She remembers.
She sees his eyes in House's, that vivid blue, even though House is so different from him as to come from a different world. She sees his life-sapping exhaustion on the face of a patient and feels that sharp pain, the surprise of it. She sees herself written onto Wilson's face and thinks how utterly, terribly wrong it is that some people die and others are left behind to go on alone.
She remembers.
She remembers him while fucking Chase, hard and forceful and frightened because she can't be dying, she's seen death and she can't look it in the face. She knows distantly that she's high, lost, but it doesn't matter. Later, she sleeps with him because he's gentle and moves with a smooth grace, not with the wild energy she remembers as sex and love, and because she doesn't love Chase and so it's okay, she can do this, sometimes she can even forget him when she orgasms.
She remembers.
She remembers while kissing Chase, but only because the two of them are so different. Not different like him and House, but different in a different way. She can't imagine running alongside Chase, shoving him and getting flipped up-side-down and held shrieking in the air for her troubles, arguing with him about whether bread should be sliced or not and whether their DVD collection should be alphabetical, categorical or up-in-the-air random. But with Chase, she can curl up with her head on his lap as he sits quietly, immersed in a book or just carding his fingers through her hair, content to be silent. She's never sat like this with someone before, quiet but enjoying the togetherness.
She remembers.
Chase sees the tears in her eyes and slips his hand into hers, and she squeezes it gently and feels him squeeze back, the unique Chase handsqueeze that encompasses support and togetherness and sometimes just a touch of do you mind if I go back to my crossword now? She still remembers, the memories are a part of her that she could no more give up than she could give up breathing, but suddenly it doesn't hurt to breathe anymore, she can live again and the world is beautiful. She will never forget him, but she can go on.