Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
-Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"
From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire
Cameron is fire, of course. Emotions for every hour of the day and all the seconds in between. Desire, sure, but happiness, sorrow, joy, excitement, confusion, determination – is stubbornness an emotion? Sometimes that too, along with empathy, the trait that makes her nearly everyone's favorite doctor – except for the ones who like to listen to Chase talk – but which will take her youth and her vitality, sink wrinkles at the corners of her sparkling eyes and curve down the smile of her full mouth. It will take her hope and her optimism and last it will take her energy, until everything she is resides within the four brick walls of a hospital, and if she doesn't die there they will find her quickly in her apartment or her car because it is so strikingly unusual for her to miss a day of work.
Cameron is the fire of love and longing and nostalgia and eager plans for the future. She is the kind that burns bright and burns fast, and when it is gone there will be ash to sweep away but no embers to rekindle.
Cuddy is fire too. A different kind of fire – carefully directed, a useful fire, tended by the strong bellows of ambition and purpose. It has almost gotten away from her, a handful of times. When she was a child, always in trouble for being too bossy. More recently, when her desire for a child of her own nearly overwhelmed her. Once, it is suspected, years ago at Johns Hopkins with a blue-eyed lacrosse player. Mostly though, she uses her fire for good, like forest fires replenish land. Those around her who are most frequently out of control cannot break too far out of their designated areas when she has already burned up the oxygen everywhere else; cannot compete with the sheet of flame that is her devotion to her job and her love of her hospital and the work in it. She has been burning a long time, she knows how to mete out her resources so she burns for a long time yet.
Cuddy is most comfortable with the others who burn as well – respects their passion as they respect hers, and she is pleased with the strength of her own flame. Fire is not as consistent as ice, but if she has less time, she is confident she will be a brighter light.
House, oddly enough, is also fire. Most people think him ice, but he is like the underground fires in Florida, where once years past a lightning strike fired a coal bed beneath the loamy soil. It has burned for decades, that fire, nearly always underground, with only plumes of acrid smoke escaping in forgotten fields to show where it turns useless sand to beautiful glass. Mostly House just smolders, touchy about anything and everything, his fondly-caressed excuse of leg pain the blanket of soil to hide the real flames. Every once in a while, though, he erupts, like the muck fires, blazing unannounced from the earth to place others in real danger of being consumed. No one knows what might ignite that fire, when or where it might show itself next. He has passion; the few who truly know him can't deny that, for all he tries to cloak it in cynicism and keep-out vibes. A passion subverted by being shackled to a cane, by being stared at for his disability and not his brilliance, by the agonizing blend of disdain for humanity and the desperate, human need for contact with his fellow man.
House has enough coal beneath the surface to keep him burning, like Cuddy. No one can extinguish a fire they cannot find, but by the same token people seldom see the energy of his burning. For the most part, those around him all live with the continual faint whiff of smoke, a reminder that the muck fire is still there, maybe not imminently dangerous, but a force of nature all the same.