Silence
A House/Sandman crossover
Gen, with passing mention of House/Wilson. The Sandman influence is pretty minimal, all you need to know is that on one night, thousands (millions?) of people went insane. This is how the staff of Princeton Plainsboro coped.
Princeton Plainsboro had never been so quiet. Even at night, the halls constantly rang with footsteps and late night emergencies. Not tonight. Tonight, Cuddy felt as though she was the only one moving in the whole complex. She probably was.
It was so quiet. She had never seen it so quiet. The lights were on, and the throb of the machines, usually so inaudible during the day, felt like drumbeats tonight. It was doubly strange that it would be like this tonight.
The hospital was full, full to the point that she'd been forced to send anyone without life-threatening injuries away. Call it mass hysteria, call it insanity, call it the apocalypse (and she was sure some were), it seemed as though everyone in the city had chosen tonight to slit their wrists or set themselves alight or jump out of a third-story window. In the end, she'd been forced to do the one thing she had never imagined, and shut the hospital doors. They simply couldn't take any more people. She vaguely remembered being in tears at the time, but quiet honestly, she couldn't be sure. The whole night had been a blur.
She remembered the first person to be admitted; a young girl, barely seven, who had been found hanging from her bedposts by her mother; having attempted to hang herself by her teddy-bear patterned pyjamas. She thought she remembered groaning to herself God, what a night. That had been the beginning.
She remembered when she'd made the decision to move all the night's victims to a separate ward, when they'd had their first casulty of the night, the thirty-five year old man who'd managed to swallow his tongue and who'd died thrashing. That had been the point when everything had started getting unreal, two suicides in the same night.
She remembered the call she'd recieved about the family. Their house was a gutted shell, the neighbor had said, the family barely-breathing effigies of their former selves, the canisters of gasoline, melted from the heat, scattered all around the charred backyard. The family had died before the ambulances could get to them.
She remembered making the call to get everyone to the hospital, never mind if they'd just got off sixteen hour shifts. They needed everyone, there were just too many people coming in. Cuddy thought she just about remembered House and Wilson coming in at half-past twelve, she could recall the look on House's face the clearest when he looked around the waiting room crowded with bleeding, crying people and for once, words failed him.
She remembered the feeling when the girl came up to her, eyes crusted and salty from tears, and said The calls won't stop, and God, we don't have any more ambulances.
She remembered hearing the news that their neighboring hospital was having to close due to a fire, a fire caused by one of the staff, and could they please send their patients- thoses who'd survived- to them? She remembered what it had cost her to fight past the lump of horror in her throat and refuse.
She remembered ordering the doors closed. Remembered having to order them barred. Remembered going with Eric Foreman and forcing them shut. Remembered the crowd of people outside clamouring to be let in. Remembered looking around blankly, unable to meet the eyes of those outside. She'd met House's instead, and for a split-second she expected him to say something sarcastic, probably a quip on how they may as well let the zombies in, since the hospital was already full of them. He'd said nothing, but the look of sheer helplessness in his eyes chilled her. It was in everyone's eyes, but seeing it come from House was just so much worse.
And finally, she remembered when the screaming stopped. The people outside went away, where to, even she couldn't bring herself to care. And the people in the hospital slept. Slept when before even morpine had had no affect. They needed none now.
It had been a miracle, even now, she couldn't describe it as anything else. Sleep had swept through the hospital like a wave, each ripple sending more patients to a peaceful rest. Even those who had been here before this terrible night slept, and with no-one needing to be watched, it hadn't been long before the exhausted staff of Princeton Plainsboro followed them.
The floors were clean, Cuddy absently noted. She wondered if the bloody streaks she remembered had ever been there, or if the patients hadn't been the only ones hallucinating. Yet even those memories seemed numbed, and somehow, she suspected that when she finally allowed herself to sleep, they would vanish entirely, like a bad dream.
But she couldn't sleep yet, no matter how tired she felt. She needed to make one last check, to convince herself that it really was alright. In her heart, Cuddy already knew it would be, but she needed to be sure.
It it was so unimaginably peaceful. Forget green fields and fluffy clouds, Cuddy knew that the next time she imagined peace, this would be what she'd see. The hospital, quiet and still, everyone inside asleep and lost to gentle dreams.
She passed one of the wards, the beds inside jumbled and packed so tightly there was barely enough room to move around them. One of the later wards then, she couldn't remember how many rooms they'd had to clear to serve as emergency wards. There was no emergency here now, the place was quiet, broken only by the rythmic breathing of its occupants. Cuddy could swear they were all breathing in unison.
The clinic was empty now, the lights turned down low when the last of the cases had left. She peered into one of the rooms and smiled when saw Eric Foreman slumped on the bed, one hand hanging off the side. The door was closed so she couldn't tell how loudly he was snoring, but he looked as though even the imminant collapse of the hospital couldn't wake him.
She found the next member of House's team in the TV lounge. Every seat was occupied by the slumbering staff, and Chase was in his usual place, his head hanging back in a way that promised a wicked neck ache when he woke. Cuddy noticed that some of the doctors had run out of seats and just stretched themselves out wherever there was floor space.
The Oncology department was dark, someone having had the sense to turn the lights off, but the blinds were open, and the first trickles of dawn light were creeping in. There was blood there, tonight's patients hadn't been the only ones struck by madness, but now they slept as soundly as the rest, and Cuddy suspected that this, like everything else, could wait until morning. Wilson would brief her on what happened tomorrow. Despite the fact that it technically was tomorrow and Wilson was, oddly, nowhere to be seen.
Cameron was in the library, slumped over a table with several books serving as a pillow. Her eyes were crusted shut and her hair traced strange patterns on the table, freed from the tie that lay on the table next to a pair of bloodied gloves she must have forgotten to throw away. Cuddy crept in quietly and took them, disposing of them in a nearby waste container. The bin was full of yesterday's rubbish, and Cuddy knew that she'd never wish for the past again, not if it meant going through this once more.
She found Wilson in House's office. The two of them were slumped against each other on the couch and dead to the world, House's head on Wilson's shoulder. She watched them sleep for a while, wondering. Was it her faulty memory that she remembered them coming in together? Cuddy shook her head and left.
Her office was the best thing Cuddy could imagine seeing, save, perhaps, her own bed. She closed the door tightly, and drew the blinds. The clock read 4.06, just ten hours since this madness first started. It felt like a year has gone by.
Cuddy collapsed in her chair with a sigh. She couldn't remember when she last sat down, she couldn't remember if she had sat down. Her legs ached in relief and it was all she could do to keep her eyes open. Her coat lay in a pile on the desk, where she'd left it when the third case was called in and it stopped being coincidence and became epidemic. Her hands were clumsy with an exhaustion even caffine couldn't cure as she dragged the soft pile in front of her, and the moment her head touched the pillow she couldn't have opened her eyes again, feeling the terrors of the night swept away on a wave of dreams.
Silence. At last.
Skull Bearer.