Not Entirely Human Error, Part 6

[parkermonster]

Yay, I'm back among the living again! Here's a big, fat update for what seems to be turning into an epic. I've gone back and put connecting links in all the previous chapters, so if you want to go back to Part 1, just start here and you'll be able to click through all the installments without searching. Without further ado....

TITLE:  Not Entirely Human Error - Part 6
AUTHOR:  parkermonster
PAIRING:  House/Chase. Yay!!
RATING:  PG-13 so far
NOTES:  Spoilers for Human Error, and everything that leads up to that
SUMMARY:  Chase is getting it together, and life will become more interesting, whether he likes it or not.

DISCLAIMER: You know it, I know it, doubt the lawyers will get confused about it either. I've borrowed a bit of dialogue from the show, which is inset and italicized. You know it by heart already.

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It was the end of his first week back at PPTH, this time as an attending in the ICU, and Chase was tired but reasonably satisfied as he headed to his locker. It was good to get back to intensivism full time; it seemed almost… soothing compared to the emotional chaos in Diagnostics. He had almost forgotten what it was like to be surrounded by colleagues who respected his medical abilities. Don’t miss being addressed as ‘you moron’ at all.
When he came around the corner of the locker room, he saw a small, brightly wrapped package in front of his locker. He slowed when he saw the tag addressed to ‘Dr. Chase’; he would know House’s handwriting anywhere. This can’t be good, he grimaced. He hadn’t talked to House all week, since the incident in the lobby. Wilson had sent him a short e-mail welcoming him back and inviting him to lunch next week. Chase wondered if that invitation included House; how rude would it be to tell Wilson to come alone? Being fired had been a truly miserable experience, and Chase just wasn’t in the mood to forgive and forget. Fake greetings and presents notwithstanding, House wasn’t getting off that easy.
Of course, this probably wasn’t going to be the kind of present that said, ‘Gee, I’m sorry I treated you like shit’. In fact, thinking back on all the pranks House had pulled over the years did nothing to ease Chase’s mind. He sat on the bench in front of his locker and gingerly picked up the box. It was rectangular, about 12 inches long, and several inches wide. The box was neatly wrapped (Bet Wilson did that) in festive red paper. Looking closer, he saw that the paper had little red hearts on it. Yeah, nothing says ‘House’ like little girlie-doodles. The box was fairly light and a tentative package shake suggested that there was a single object inside. This had better not be a sex toy. Chase unfolded the tag, which read, “Just in case you need someone special to run diagnoses with.”
Might as well get it over with. He carefully unwrapped the box and his eyes went wide when he saw what was inside. What the f…
It was all he could do to stop himself from laughing. Now I know I've been around House waaaay too long. If I think this is funny, I really AM going to go to hell.
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As Cuddy was walking back to her office, she saw Chase heading for the exit and allowed herself a little smile. Thank God things had worked out with the ICU job offer. PPTH couldn’t afford to lose a talented intensivist on the whim of an erratic egomaniac like House. House might be a great doctor, but he sucked at employee relations.
At first she had gone back and forth with House to rehire Chase, to no avail.
“Look, just call him and tell him you didn’t mean he was really fired.”
“I suppose you want me to tell Chase I’m sorry I hurt his itsy-bitsy widdle feelings, too.”
“That would be nice, yes, but I’m not expecting miracles, House. Just give him his job back.”
“No can do. Besides, if he accepted, I wouldn’t respect him in the morning.”
After three days of this, she had thrown up her hands, as had Wilson, and started arrangements for an ICU appointment for Chase. John Lawson, the department head, was thrilled at the opportunity to hire another doctor, and especially to hire Chase. John thought very highly of the young intensivist and had complained regularly about House arbitrarily pulling Chase off the floor despite the relative patient loads. Talk about a win-win hiring - John got to thumb his nose at House AND the ICU got an excellent attending.
And really, were there any department heads, besides Wilson, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to stick it to House?
Face it, the man had a gift for pleasing people.
The odd thing was, though, that after she had made almost all the arrangements to offer Chase the new position, House had come to see her with a counter-proposal, barging in as usual and making himself comfortable with his leg stretched out on the table.
“I think you should offer Chase a part-time appointment as an attending in Diagnostics.”
“I thought you didn’t want him back.”
“I never said that. I said I wasn’t going to hire him back. You’re going to.”
She shook her head in confusion. “Why would I hire him back for you, if you’re the one who fired him to begin with?”
“Oh, come on, Cuddy. They pay you the big bucks because you’re good at this kind of thing. Plus you look great in a tight skirt. Anyway, he wouldn’t be coming back to work for me; he’d be working with me.”
Cuddy had to laugh at that. “You don’t work with people, House. You try very hard to manipulate everyone around to work for you rather than with you. Chase knows that, so why on earth would he accept your suggested offer, under the circumstances?”
“‘Cause he loves working with me so much.”
“Odd, that’s not what he says.”
That had gotten House’s attention. An noticeable look of interest had crossed his face for a micro-second, to be replaced by a slightly predatory gleam in his eye.
“Ah, and what does the ever-delightful Dr. Chase say, exactly?”
“Given the current situation, I don’t know that that’s any of your business, House.”
House shifted into his ridiculous, fake-puppy-dog-eyes expression, along with the whiny, here-comes-the-emotional-blackmail voice, which didn’t fool anyone who knew him. “Come on, pretty please. Share! You know how much I worry about the happiness of my former employees.”
That was worth another laugh. “Yes I do, House, and that would be precisely my point. Let’s just say that I’ve spoken with Chase. He’s NOT waiting by the phone for your call begging him to come back, but he does hope that you’re waiting by your phone for his call groveling for his job, because you’d be waiting a long, long time.”
“Hmph. That’s rather rude of him, don’t you think?”
“If Robert Chase knows the meaning of rude, he learned it from you, House.”
“That’s probably true. Another feather in my heavily-laden cap! So, you’re going to offer him the Diagnostics appointment, right?”
“No, House. Right now, that would seem like an insult, and I’m not going to jeopardize his acceptance of the ICU job. I don’t know what plan you’ve cooked up, but you are not going to do ANYTHING that will scare him away from PPTH, or you’ll not only be doing extra clinic duty for eternity, but I’ll put Brenda in charge of assigning you your patients. You’d be amazed at the number of explosive diarrhea cases that we get each week. Oh, and it’s such a shame that you no longer have a team to cover for you and do your clinic hours, isn’t it?”
“I do believe you’re threatening me, Dr. Cuddy.”
“Damn right I am, Dr. House. After we get Chase back on staff in the ICU, and if he indicates to me that he has any interest, we can discuss your suggestion.”
House frowned but then shrugged his eyebrows. “OK, that will work, for now. You’ll be hearing from me again, though.”
“Oh, I never doubt that for a moment.”
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Wilson toed off his shoes and all but collapsed onto the bed in his hotel suite. Looked like it was going to be room service again; he didn’t have the energy to even go see what entertainments the TiVo had stored up for him. He’d dealt with too many patients with poor prognoses this week, and each one of those cases took a lot out of him. He took a certain pride in the fact that he had never gotten used to the idea that many of his patients would not survive long term. Some of his colleagues were able to adjust and go out and have a few laughs ten minutes after they delivered bad news, but Wilson didn’t think he would ever be able to advise patients and families to get their affairs in order without losing a bit of himself in the process. As far as he was concerned, that was a good thing. It just didn’t make life any easier. No wonder Julie accused me of being distant and exhausted every time I came home.
At times like this, he could think of at least two really good reasons why he put up with House, neither of which having anything to do with fun or admiration or his sense of responsibility. Those were true too, but maybe not quite enough to put up with all the bad personal shit that went down on a regular basis. No, House had two elements in his life that took some of hurt out of Wilson’s own unhappy concerns.
House had this ability to pull a diagnosis out of his ass at the most peculiar times. While Wilson had always been a bit jealous of this, he sure wouldn’t have traded lives with House for anything, so he was content to watch and admire from a moderately safe distance. Whenever Wilson was having a rough streak, with patient after patient he couldn’t save, and in some cases, couldn’t even make comfortable, it was somehow comforting to watch House fix the unfixable. It could happen. It did happen, with House.
But perhaps the most compelling reason to hang around with House was the constant drama. Nothing in Wilson’s life was as complicated or as fascinating, in an appalling way, as the situations that House managed to get himself into over and over again. Whenever things got unpleasant at home, Wilson could always distract himself with House’s problems. The emotional involvement with House’s train wrecks might have contributed to the collapse of his last two marriages (“You pay more attention to that drug-addicted schmuck than you do to me!”), but somehow Wilson could live with that.
Take the past few weeks, for instance. House had been and still was busy scheming himself into all kinds of mischief. No one else could manage to lose his entire department over the span of just three days. Of course, Foreman had given notice he was leaving, and that left time for House to grumble and plot. When Wilson found out that House had sabotaged one of Foreman’s interviews, he had been surprised that House would go to that length to force Foreman to stay. Unbelievably, at the last minute, House had actually humbled himself enough to ask Foreman to stay. But then, more believably, House had sabotaged the whole thing by ranting at Foreman and making the now-former Fellow glad to be on his way.
In many ways, Wilson was surprised that House had wanted to keep Foreman as much as he had. Foreman was a highly competent doctor, excellent with procedures and good at explaining illnesses to families. He was a good, methodical diagnostician, but Wilson had never seen that spark of brilliance that a diagnostic specialist needed for true excellence. Foreman would do well; he’d end up with his own department and save a lot of patients, but in the end, he’d be sending his toughest cases to House.
Wilson really wasn’t all that sorry to see Cameron go. Her resignation was a bit of a shock to House; he hadn’t seen that coming. House had recovered quickly, though. Cameron would make an excellent immunologist; she knew her autoimmune diseases, which were some of the toughest conditions to diagnose and treat in all of medicine. She had a lot of knowledge in other disease areas too, but her diagnoses always seemed to end up back at the autoimmune possibilities. Like Foreman, she was professionally solid, but not exceptional.
It was at the personal level that Wilson had problems with Cameron. She had started out her Fellowship as almost a caricature of what female doctors were unfairly rumored to be. She got overly emotional with her patients, to the extent of not being able to be entirely honest with patients and families. She wasn’t forceful enough professionally, and then she had developed a crush on her boss, made all the more ridiculous because her boss was House.
House was an acquired taste, someone who might grow on you with extended contact (or else you grew to hate his guts for even more reasons). He was not the kind of man you developed a crush on, unless you were an appallingly naïve schoolgirl. Wilson remembered a nurse a while back, who had commented, ‘Dr. House has gorgeous blue eyes. Too bad they’re attached to Dr. House’. That seemed to sum up the opinion of casual female observers after they met him.
For a short time, Wilson had even feared that House might get involved in something that couldn’t possibly end well. Who wouldn’t be flattered by that kind of attention from a beautiful woman? Turned out Wilson hadn’t needed to worry after all; House figured out for himself that Cameron didn’t like him for the right reasons.
Over the past three years, Cameron had for the most part lost her original squishy sentimentality and became more professional with patients. Unfortunately, in the past six months she had developed an increasingly unattractive cynicism. The way she had treated Chase was just plain mean; common wisdom on the floor had been that Chase would dump her after he’d had his fun, but it had turned out the other way around. Chase really did have a masochistic streak when he continued to pursue Cameron, albeit not in a very zealous way, after she unceremoniously kicked him to the curb. Wilson got the impression that Chase was hurt by the rejection, but certainly not crushed.
No, Cameron had needed to toughen up, but not this much. House was not a good influence on her personality, and it was probably best for everyone that she had moved on.
Chase’s firing was something Wilson didn’t quite have a handle on yet, although he was developing suspicions. Their relationship had been rocky for a while, but he had gained a lot of respect for Chase in the past few months. In an odd way, getting punched by House might have been a blessing in disguise (although there was no way Wilson would ever suggest that to Chase, or to House, for that matter).
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…Travel with us now in the way-back machine…
The day it happened, Wilson heard talk in the hallways about the incident, but since the gossip had escalated to the point where poor, innocent Chase was in intensive care and fighting for his life after a vicious beating by that monster House, Wilson had hoped that the whole story was unfounded. Chase’s angry entrance into the break room, sporting a swollen, purple jaw, made it clear that House really had done something that he needed to regret in the morning. Wilson had tried to lighten the mood a bit, but it just wasn’t happening.
“So… what’s new?”
“House missed one.”
“It’s happened before.”
“He nearly maimed a little girl. And I got it right. And I told him, and it didn’t matter.”
“Chase, you solved one. You saved a patient. That better be enough for you. Beckett was going to call his play, “Waiting for House’s Approval”, but decided it was too grim.”
“Trust me. I’m not waiting any more.”
Chase’s parting remark stayed with Wilson and bothered him more than he thought it should. Chase could have easily gotten House suspended on the spot and probably fired. Tritter was investigating fake prescriptions and drug stashes, but those were things that didn’t impact the ability of the hospital to function. Most of the hospital employees didn’t give a damn what House’s problems were. Physically assaulting an employee in front of at least a dozen witnesses, including doctors, staff, and the family members of patients? That wasn’t something that Cuddy could sweep under the rug and still maintain any authority within PPTH. If Chase gave the word, House was screwed.
That possibility didn’t strike Wilson as the most likely outcome of the incident. He also didn’t expect Chase to go to Tritter. In the break room, Chase had seemed more disgusted than angry, so he wasn’t likely to punish House with another hasty betrayal. Chase was too smart to get into that type of situation again, and really, what could he tell Tritter that wasn’t obvious? That House took a lot of Vicodin? That he asked Chase to write prescriptions for him frequently? That Chase felt a certain sense of obligation to comply? As far as Wilson knew, House had never involved Chase in anything illegal related to his drugs.
He expected Chase to simply quit, and that would not only create problems at the hospital (House beats his employees until they run away! Literally!), but it would also wound House personally. House had a definite fondness for Chase, even if that fondness expressed itself with insults, crappy work assignments, and occasional flying objects. Wilson knew from personal experience, and from watching House with Cuddy and Stacy, that when House liked you, he diligently covered it up with verbal abuse and sarcasm, except in rare and very private moments. Watching the interactions within the Diagnostics department, Wilson could clearly see that Chase was the favorite.
No, House would never have struck Chase if he was in control of his faculties. Thank God Chase had stood his ground on this occasion and insisted that House change his diagnosis, or a patient would have suffered terribly. The way things were going, House was not only going to destroy his own life and career, but injure everyone around him, physically or emotionally. Wilson couldn’t think of an instance when House had said or done anything crueler than his comments to Cuddy about her parenting skills. Inevitably House was going to kill a patient in his current state, and at this point, Wilson was convinced that Tritter could keep up the pressure longer than House could take it. Wilson knew that House couldn’t go on like this; something needed to be done, and there just weren’t that many people who would be willing to step in and try to save House from himself.
Damn.
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…Return to present in Wilson’s lonely hotel room…
Wilson hadn’t expected Chase to make a formal complaint against House for hitting him, and he didn’t. He had told Cuddy and anyone else who inquired, depending on his mood, that it was an accident, or House was in pain and not thinking straight, or Chase himself had provoked House, or it was no big deal, and several other rationalizations that Wilson couldn’t remember anymore. House had of course evaded Tritter, with a lot of help from his friends and without actually kicking his drug habit. Eventually, he had even started speaking to Wilson again and they were back on good terms.
Surprisingly, though, Chase hadn’t quit after House’s meltdown. But Wilson saw a change in Chase’s demeanor; he had a new confidence in his own diagnoses, and he had called several tough ones on his own. Apparently Chase really had turned away from seeking House’s approval, and was simply trusting his own judgment. At this point in his career, his judgment was sharp enough to solve cases that had Wilson and Cuddy stumped.
Ironically enough, Wilson thought, Foreman had said he was quitting because he didn’t want to turn into House. Wilson himself had gotten it right at the time when he told House,
“He’s not afraid to be you. He’s afraid to be…who he thinks you are.”
Foreman might have the right shoes, but he didn’t have the drive or personal demons that made House...House. The former Fellow focused on House’s faults, but ignored what made him a brilliant doctor - the things that were worth emulating. Those were the characteristics that seemed to come more naturally to Chase. Of the three Fellows, Chase was definitely the one who mirrored House’s better qualities. Foreman and Cameron were relatively linear in their thinking, but House and Chase could take logical leaps that weren’t always easy to follow. Chase was particularly good at coming up with unorthodox, low-tech treatment options that worked. He could think on his feet and change intellectual and conversational directions very quickly. He had always had the sort of dry sense of humor that worked well in House’s presence, and now that he had built up his confidence, Chase could match House snark for snark. Chase had become downright insightful about some of House’s behaviors, or maybe he always had been and simply kept his observations to himself until now.
So, with the new and improved Chase in place, why the hell had House suddenly fired him? Wilson knew it wasn’t because Chase was frequently talking back to House these days; House liked that. When pressed, House had provided a little song and dance about how Chase was all grown up now and didn’t need House to hold his hand anymore, and since he was afraid to leave the nest, House needed to gently prod him on his way.
Well, Wilson and Cuddy both called shenanigans on that explanation. There was no way House was getting away with the ‘it’s for his own good’ rationalization. Ironically, Chase had been fully capable of turning the situation to his own advantage, but that was to Chase’s credit, not House’s. No, House had ulterior motives in firing Chase, and they seemed to be focused on converting Chase from an employee to a colleague. Since House would be able to exploit Chase’s diagnostic abilities in either capacity, there had to be something about changing the power structure that interested House.
There had been other little clues in House’s behavior lately that were leading Wilson to a new hypothesis about what House was up to. If his suspicions were correct, he wondered what Chase’s reaction would be to the discovery that House’s interest in his future might extend beyond the professional.
This was going to be worthy of a telenovela.
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Hope you're glad you stuck with me on this. In the next installment, House will meet up with Chase, and with any luck, neither of them will get socked in the jaw.

Comments are motivating, as always!

And now Part 7!