Parallax: a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight
The days were long, and nights were short.
If you counted the hours, that was.
If you counted the minutes, the seconds even, like he did sometimes, they were endless.
And yet.
He welcomed the darkness.
Lights out signaled the end of having to be on constant high alert. Lights out meant he could stop watching his back. Lights out marked the end of unspoken rules, violence and noise.
Lights out was the start of those subtler sounds. Lights out announced the beginning of that short period where he didn't have to fake anymore. Lights out returned him to himself.
But after lights out he also had to deal with himself. With what was left.
And yet, he welcomed the darkness.
It was the whole point of why he was here.
Days kept him busy. The routine was fixed, rules were strict, and contact with others was dangerous; precarious at best. He had to be on his guard every minute of the day.
But at night all that fell away, and he was starkly exposed to his own mind again. There was no torture in prison – not here, not in this country – but nights held their own special form of torment for him.
Lights were turned off, distractions fell away, and he was alone in his head. Thoughts, memories, explanations – the wheels started turning the moment the switch was flipped and the vital signs of prison life began to fall away one by one.
But even in darkness, this place was never completely silent. Certain guards seemed to find a sadistic delight in banging the metal gates randomly during the night. In his first week, he had been startled out of exhausted sleep several times a night, his heart beating so hard in his throat his pulse would've been easily visible – every single time a throwback to a period long gone, fears long since thought buried and forgotten.
This place brought them back in more than one way during the day and, even more so, at night.
He welcomed the darkness. It had always been at his side, but now there was nowhere to escape, no distractions. The music on his iPod wasn't enough to keep it at bay. Even setting it to random didn't make a difference - there were only so many tracks on it, and he knew them all anyway. All it did was provide a background to his brain returning to itself to start tossing and turning the same things over and over, again and again.
The music did, however, drown out Asofa's snoring which, some nights, was the best to be said about it.
In the past, music had served as a counterpoint to his two constant companions; a brain unable to switch off and incessant pain. At times, music could be a distraction from either of them, and occasionally – if he was lucky - both. Other times, it played with both to create something new, something liveable.
Now, all it did was join forces with the darkness to provide the backdrop for his real reason to be here.
So he did the only thing left to him: he welcomed it with open arms.
"You'll end up alone."
Wilson had said this during some long-ago argument he'd tried, but failed, to forget. It had been an accusation, a punishment, for being what he was. Who he was.
He was alone now, as alone as he'd ever get. Locked up, away from normal people. Locked up, inside his own head.
"You don't belong here, House," Sykes had said to him on his second day when he set him up with his new med regimen. The one that wasn't enough. Never would be. The one that was just right.
"You are exactly where you belong," the voice in his head said.
It was the same voice which used to tell him that he didn't know how good he had it. The voice which, no matter how hard he'd tried over the years, had never expressed the slightest appreciation. That voice which, for once in his life, now he'd stopped trying, finally contained a shred of approval. The approval he'd craved for so long, but now that he had it, no longer needed or wanted.
Wanting, longing, all of it was suspended here. Life inside either consisted solely of longing for all the things you couldn't have or do, people you couldn't see or touch or talk to – or life was purged entirely of wanting because there was no point. What good was wanting if it was completely in vain? Life outside was over, and with it everything it contained. Normality was put on hold. To be resumed later, for some at least.
Darkness fell and with it, pain rolled over like clouds. He could watch it, feel it, moving silently across the bare floor, creeping closer and closer, inch by inch. Like an approaching thunderstorm, there was nothing he could do to stop it now. And there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Not even if he'd wanted to.
And he didn't.
He turned up the music one notch, knowing full well it could never drown out what was coming. But it would deliver the perfect soundtrack to what was the center of his being now, what was the point of everything.
Sykes was wrong.
Wilson was right.