[fic][House/Silent Hill] Dis-Ease
So, er, dracothelizard told rionaleonhart that James Sunderland of Silent Hill 2 looked a bit like an older Chase of House, and rionaleonhart made several references to Chase turning into Sunderland as a Fic She Should Not Write, and because I'm apparently incapable of seing something I could possibly write in a fandom I'm interested in that's not being written, I drabbled it (clips from the following do show up in my comment thread), and then, because I have no willpower, rionaleonhart convinced me to write the actual fic. So I did. I did a narratorial SOC over the course of maybe fourteen hours working off and on.
So here it is. Roughly 6800 words. I make absolutely no guarantees as to quality of style, narration, plot, medical speak, characterization, voice, font, spelling, format, or anything else for that matter. It references several things from both canons, and you should probably have a working knowledge of each in order to understand it, but I don't think it's actually spoilery.
Um, enjoy?
House has Chase making phone calls and breaking into apartments for an hour before Cuddy drops by with the news. Dr. Allison Cameron had made it halfway to work that morning before pulling over just before she passed out at the wheel, and when someone had finally noticed and called an ambulance they'd found her barely responsive. House leaves her in the ICU until she starts coughing up blood, at which point something only he sees or only he knows proves too great a mystery and he brings her in as one of his cases instead.
Cuddy protests, because Cuddy will always protest no matter what House does, but even before she caves he has Chase and Foreman running tests on everything at once. He stops by Cameron's room twice: once to see if she has any theories, and once to see if she has any other theories. He leaves Chase with what he calls the Big Book Of All The Cool Diseases, and scribbles on the whiteboard as if she's any other patient to come in off the street.
Two days later she's only gotten worse, with weakness/fatigue/too few white blood cells/too many red, and Chase has gone through the book A-Z and Z-A and cross-indexed symptoms and hasn't found a thing. No matter how hard he tries, no matter how many reference books he reads or how many whiteboards he goes through, he can't seem to identify the disease, and he can't seem to fix it.
In a way, it would be easier if she just died. Dying has finality to it, and even if he'd failed it would have been easier to tear himself away from this case and move on to the next one. But she keeps lingering, as if she's trying to give him one more chance, and the gap between what she needs and what he knows is driving him insane.
-
Day Three opens with pericarditis and dacryoadenitis, and House gets to the meeting after Chase and Foreman are already there. "Inflammation," he announces. "Usually caused by infection. It's a pity we don't have an immunologist in the room," he continues, limping over to the coffee pot. "Cameron is certainly late today. Oh! Wait!" He turns back to his fellows, eyes wide and mocking. "She's sick, and it's our job to make sure she doesn't become 'late!' Differential diagnosis, people, tell me what we've got."
Chase throws out every idea he has in alphabetical order, because the worst that can happen is he'll be wrong and House will mock him. The same usually happens when he's right. House shoots them down one by one, orders more tests and treatments, and limps off on his way.
Taking another vial of blood, Chase small-talks with Cameron, goes through the motions. He doesn't like seeing her like this; he's uncomfortable, but for once she doesn't press the fact. She's just asking after House when her throat closes up and Chase calls for help to intubate, and before he knows it Foreman is pushing him aside because his hands are shaking too much to do his job.
In the hallway he clenches his fist, tries to maintain enough composure not to hit a wall and keep hitting until fist or wall breaks apart. Because no matter what they do or don't do, Cameron gets inexorably worse.
Foreman walks out past him, giving him a look like he knows everything that's going on, and disappears down the hall toward the elevators. Chase lets himself back into Cameron's room--she's unconscious, and they've started a morphine drip along with the latest batch of medicines doing nothing. He gets the feeling House is throwing everything at her now, like throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what will stick.
He hates seeing her like this, but he can't look away.
-
She's broken out into a rash--erythema multiforme--when they decide to move her to a clean room. It covers most of her torso and stretches down onto her right hip, but leaves her face pristine. It doesn't fit any of their theories, but she's still having trouble breathing and complains of constant pain. House points out, with trademark callousness, that they're losing her if they don't act quickly.
Chase and Foreman and Wilson pour over everything, prescribe treatments that make her neither better nor worse, and try to figure what could make a body just ignore all medicine and intervention as it slowly takes itself apart. At one point Chase throws his coffeecup across the room, narrowly missing House's skull and fracturing the window behind him. There's silence for maybe nine seconds before House calls him back to his office.
"You're off the case," he says.
Chase can't believe it, but has no defense beyond the typical "What?"
"Go home. Get some sleep. Come in tomorrow." House's eyes are gentle, and his eyes are never gentle. It's like watching the world end.
"She might be dead, tomorrow," Chase argues. "You think you and Foreman can solve this without me?"
House's eyes track over the floor and the desk as he pretends to consider the question. They have the usual tinge of deadpan arrogance when they meet Chase's again. "Yeah."
"This is the most bugged case we've ever looked at, and you want to get rid of half your staff!"
"Actually, I'm only getting rid of one third of my staff," House says. Chase is about to yell something back but the argument is cut short when House lifts his cane, planting the rubber base at his sternum and pushing him away. "Go. Sleep. Hell, hit the bars, for all I care. But you're off the case, goodbye."
-
That night Chase comes back, lies to the nurses, scrubs up and lets himself into Cameron's room. He stares at her like House stares at his whiteboard, trying to find the answer. It's nowhere to be found.
He's checking her vitals--less promising than the last set--when she wakes up, and at first he doesn't even notice. It's not until he looks down and sees her eyes open that he can tell.
"Hello," he says.
She tries to smile in answer, but he can tell its hard. She's got a mask over her mouth and nose, forcing oxygen into her lungs--the clipboard at the foot of her bed says she's responding "positively" to some cocktail House has whipped up, and House's distinctive scrawl notes that it's "positive" in that she hasn't suffered total organ failure yet.
"How are you feeling?" he asks, but he can tell the answer by the way she looks. She's dying, and she knows she's dying, and even the haze of painkillers can't take that away. He puts a gloved hand on her shoulder, and wishes he could make it stop.
She's shaking beneath his fingers.
He tries to smile down at her. "We spend all our time around sick people, and we still expect to be the picture of health. Now, is that stupid, or--?"
"Chase," she manages, and it's barely a whimper the way she makes it sound. He tries not to imagine the air in her lungs, tries not to think about what makes the words so weak, what's infected her voice and bled the life out of it, too. He flashes her a grin--the kind he gives patients who are probably dying or maybe not, trying to convince them that a smile and a glib remark are as good as solid diagnoses anyday.
"Aw, don't worry," he tells her. "You are in the hands of the best team at the best hospital in North America, and even we don't know what the bloody hell is wrong with you." A small plastic wheel moves easily beneath his thumb. He's stopped the IV.
"What are you--" she mouths. He looks at the machines.
"Look," he says, and is surprised to hear his voice crack. "There comes a point when medical science just has to give up. You are in an incredible amount of--" he stumbles on the word pain and says "discomfort" instead. "We've done everything a group of three sane men and one mad-scientist doctor can, and you won't get better. So do you think you're terminal, or do you think this is a test of your faith? Given you're an atheist, I'd think you'd know the answer."
It's not until he stops her air that she realizes something is wrong, too wrong, and tries to raise a hand to stop him. He catches her wrist and holds it down, tight enough that he can feel the pulse laboring beneath his fingers. He can't hear her breathing above his own; his is ragged and shallow.
"Look, calm down," he says, and can't fight the rising panic in his voice. She's struggling, lungs for air and arms for leverage and chest for strength and body to hold on. "You're not thinking clearly. This is a simple procedure. Lie down. Count down from ten."
He pulls his hand from her wrist and puts it on her chest, holding her down before he remembers that she can't get up, before he realizes that she's no longer fighting against him. Now her eyes won't focus. Now she's choking, her throat is closing, and he realizes he's watching her die.
"Cameron!" he yells, and his hand finds hers. She seems stronger, almost, until he remembers the term deathgrip and everything it means. For a second he convinces himself that he did all he could, that this isn't his fault, and then she crashes.
He's holding her hand hard enough to bruise it now, and he starts the IV and air before calling for help. But when the nurses rush in, when they help him check her over and shock her again and again, he realizes what he's done is what they've really been trying to do since the beginning. He's ended the illness. He's ended the pain.
At home, he kneels over his toilet for longer than he'd care to admit before realizing he won't throw up. He walks to his bedroom, leaves, takes his car to the nearest liquor store and buys one of everything his mother used to drink, takes it home, drinks none of it, and eventually tosses and turns himself to sleep.
The next day he wakes before the alarm, and he's starting his car before the events of the night wash over him. For a moment he thinks this time, this time he's definitely going to vomit, but he doesn't, and drives in without incident.
At the hospital House yells at him for the better part of a half-hour, in the hall outside his office because he couldn't be bothered to step inside. The lecture covers all the familiar points--mistakes personal and medical and careful diagnosis and the importance of a quick response to all new symptoms. Chase points out that sometimes people just die, in spite of all medicine, and House gives him a week off to get his head on straight while replacements for Cameron are interviewed. It doesn't escape Chase's notice that he's taken more Vicodin than usual, that his limp is more pronounced--his fingers are so tight on his cane that his knuckles are white and his forearm is shaking. He leaves the hospital with a sick posessive joy that he stumped the great master, that because of him there was a case House hadn't solved and would never get to. He thinks, viciously, vindictively, that it must be tearing him up inside.
-
A week later there's a woman named Petra Gilmar working Cameron's job. She's too outgoing, smiles too much, and even House seems to enjoy trading barbs with her. She boasts that he made two days of phone calls to extract her from her other job, and Chase hates her more than he thought he could hate anyone outside his own family.
House chases him down and doesn't apologize for anything. They've got a new case--a thirty-year-old woman with myoclonic seizures and a tendency to go tachycardic for no reason. He dispatches Chase to "take a real good listen" at her heart, see if his "trained cardiologist ears" can hear something wrong. For a moment before he finds the room he's terrified she'll be a slender, beautiful brunette with accusing eyes, but the woman is an average American woman who would fade into a crowd if he'd been looking for her.
Since he's gotten back Foreman has been watching him, and he can't remember whether they've exchanged five words that weren't about diagnostics or treatments. House keeps showing up where Chase needs to be, asking questions that aren't relevant to anything and not mentioning Cameron at all. It gets so bad that when House shows up when he's running tox screens he yells "What is your problem?" so loud half of the floor can hear him. "With Cameron," he says when House plays ignorant three sentences too long, and as soon as he says it he can hear the tumblers clicking in House's brain.
House leaves him alone for two hours after that, but Foreman's looks have gotten downright knowing and Gilmar won't stop ribbing him about one damn thing or another. At one point she mentions it's been twice, now, she's been looked at for Cameron's job, and he walks out of the room without finishing anything. He takes the elevator to House's office, and throws open the door without prelude.
"I quit," he says.
House stops twirling his cane, glances up from his portable video set, and looks him over. "No you don't," he says.
"Yes, I do," Chase says.
"Nuh-uh," House shoots back, as if this is all a game to him--and hell, it probably is.
"You can't stop me," Chase says, and is about to argue further when he realizes it won't do any good.
He walks out of the office and to the elevators again, and House makes it to the hallway in time to yell "Chase!" before the doors close.
He goes to Cuddy and tells her he can't work here any more, that House is insufferable, that the atmosphere is too uncomfortable, that he thinks he's learned all he can under House's tutelage, that he needs a change, that he needs to get out, that he's leaving as soon as he can. Cuddy tells him it'll be a shame to see him go, but that she completely understands. He lets her think she does.
-
House shows up at his home even before he's gotten there, and follows him in despite Chase's best efforts to close the door in his face. "What I can't figure out," he says, "is that you wanted this job so badly you used to try to sell me out to keep it. But now all of a sudden, you can't get away fast enough. What's up?"
"You really need me to tell you?" Chase asks, and points to the sidewalk.
House takes the hint and ignores it. "If you can't cope with people dying, wow! Are you in the wrong line of work," he says. "Try burger-flipping. At least that's at one remove."
"I don't need to explain myself to you," Chase tells him, as if that has ever deterred Dr. Gregory House or ever will.
"What, was it because she was pretty? Because you knew her?" He catches himself, acts like he's realized something and isn't it enlightening. "Did you two have a thing?" he asks, mock-sly.
"Bug off," Chase says, and would have spit in his face if his mouth hadn't been so dry.
"Come back," House says, serious for once.
"No," Chase says, and closes the door. House lets him. This time.
-
The next day House is at his door again, telling him the details of their newest case as soon as he opens it. Chase reminds him that he's breaking all sorts of doctor-patient confidentiality laws, and House acts as if he doesn't hear. Two days later he drags Foreman and Gilmar along with him; Foreman looks as if he'd rather be anywhere else, and Gilmar is enjoying the hell out of herself and doing nothing to hide it. He applies for and starts a job at a hospital across town as soon as possible, working the worst hours at the Emergency Room he can get.
While he's there he saves several lives. Certainly, it's faster-paced than his job in Diagnostic Medicine. It's almost enough to take his mind off things until a teenager pried from a car wreck reaches out to him, trying to find his hand to hold on to something as they try to stop the bleeding.
House has a formidible counterintelligence network--even if he has to borrow it from Wilson, who makes friends more easily than he does. On Chase's first day off he's at his house again, bright and early, with another new theory. He's getting closer, even if he can't know for certain.
"What do I have to do to get you to leave me alone?" Chase asks, and is willing to pay him off, poison him, anything to make him go away. "Move back to Flinders? Change my name?"
"Well, those would probably work," House admits. "Or I guess you could just learn to live with me."
Chase knows he's probably shooting his career in the foot when he submits his two-weeks' notice, but he can't be here much longer. He needs to get away. The weeks give him enough time to get everything in order that can be put in order, and then he piles suitcases full of clothes and journals and books into his car and drives off, trying and failing not to look back.
He leaves without telling anyone. He likes to imagine House showing up at his door one day, pounding until the new residents come out and perplex him, leaving him without a forwarding address or a clue or an answer. He likes to imagine that if he drives far enough the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital will evaporate like mist, leaving a line on his CV and a letter of recommendation from Cuddy as its only legacy. He likes to imagine that one day, none of this will matter.
-
House is no fool, and finds him sooner or later. Chase finds out when his supervisor pulls him aside and mentions that a certain brilliant diagnostician had called in and asked after him, and asks why he didn't bother to get a letter of recommendation from him because that letter would secure him a place just about anywhere. Chase works very hard at not shaking until he gets into the bathroom, where he can't help himself--because he knows as well as anyone when House is on a case. And House will solve the mystery. House always does.
Right when he's thinking it might be easier just to kill himself he gets a letter from a clinic in Houston that wants to start its own Department of Diagnostic Medicine, and he jumps at the job they're begging him to take before he has a chance to read the letter all the way through. By the end of the month he's off again, and won't tell anyone what he's running from or what he's running to.
It's not a bright move. House figures it out by following the headlines, and the Dean of the Houston clinic welcomes the chance to correspond with the man who inspired so much. Chase starts feeling like he's driving across a glass world, naked and exposed, and the microscope is closing in.
He makes convenient friends with a short Hispanic doctor named Antonio Hernandez who's written a book on the dark side of the hospital world--hospitals so underfunded or incompetently run that they're barely better than no health care at all, places so provincial where anyone with a CNA is hired on as a full nurse, places that the government hasn't found, hasn't regulated, hasn't cared enough to shut down yet. Places that fall off a map. Chase gets a copy--autographed, even--flips to the index, and finds directions to the first name he sees.
He's running, and he knows it, and it's getting easier. Every time he moves he learns a bit more--how to sink under the radar, how to hide. It takes House longer to find him these days, longer to pin him down. Not that he's stopped trying. Not that either of them will.
-
Brookhaven Hospital is a small general hospital with no reputation and no accolades to speak of, and Chase is ludicrously overqualified. The Dean spends ten minutes grilling him on his employment history, trying to find out why a brilliant man such as himself has left a string of good jobs to interview for a hospital in a town barely large enough to support one, until Chase reminds him that he'd been published twice in the New England Journal of Medicine and once in the Journal of the American Medical Association before he'd finished his fellowship and even if he turns out to be a world-class git with an avoidant personality and agoraphobia severe enough to drive him out to the middle of medical nowhere, are they really going to decide they're too good to take him? He signs his contract by the end of the day.
Obscurity suits him better than he thinks it will. He gains local notoriety as the best doctor for three hundred miles, earns or otherwise gains the admiration of his coworkers and the regional fame is enough to take the edge off things. He's making less than he ever has but the cost of living is low, and he gets raises every review period and bonuses every Christmas. People ask about his past, but he deters them with dry facts--Years in Australia, years in New Jersey, articles written, cases solved. As far as anyone knows he's here because he likes the quiet life, because he's a very private man.
No one gets too close. No one can figure him, and he likes it that way.
-
Across the continent Foreman is making headlines for great steps forward in the treatment of cerebral palsy. Chase is telling the thousandth patient to cut back on the salt and red meat, wondering if he knew the famous doctor, if the famous doctor knew him. For a second it seems ridiculous that he could be here if that was the case, and when he tries to figure out what drove him out so far he can't think of anything except a little blue wheel on a clear plastic tube that ended his world. He stops reading the journals until the hubub dies down.
One day there's a woman at the hospital he's never seen before. She's a pediatrician who introduces herself as Mary Sunderland, and she's staying in the hotel until her apartment lease begins. He invites her out for dinner because she's new, because she doesn't have a kitchen and doesn't know her way around, and because she looks like she's run from something, once, and he can always use a few solid recommendations just in case he needs to run again. He's gotten good at cultivating networks who don't know they're networking for him--people who will tell him the best places to vanish when they think they're talking about up-and-coming towns, people who will drop the name of a great doctor they'd worked with who might retire soon, or would have loved working with him and who knows, still might. He learns a lot from Mary, and when she says "We should do this again," he agrees. "It's been lovely," she says, and he agrees again. Everybody lies.
He doesn't see her much at the hospital until she makes a point of seeing him, wheeling in a child who until yesterday just seemed to have the flu. Chase takes one look and one set of readings and diagnoses something she's never heard of before, prescribes something it's lucky the hospital has on hand, and the kid is better and out of the hospital in two days. He hates the way she looks at him after that--as if he's a saviour, as if he could save the world.
-
The first time she kisses him--a peck on the cheek, and he can never remember what prompted her--he doesn't respond at all. Mary thinks he's "being cool," but she's guessing several degrees too warm. Chase doesn't need to care about her, or anyone else, for that matter--he's learned from the master, and the master taught him well.
But that doesn't stop him.
She's the only one who initiates anything, but he never rebuffs her and apparently that's enough. The closer she comes the more he can pry out of her with the time-honored combination of drinks and green eyes, and tidbits designed to make her think he's telling his secrets.
He's leading her out of a bar one night (she doesn't notice that he's stuck to tea and water the whole time) and she's smiling and laughing (she doesn't notice that his smile doesn't make it up into his eyes and never has) and continuing the conversation he hasn't been sharing. She calls him Robert for the first time, and looks at him as if to see if that's all right.
"I never liked the name Robert," Chase says. "Never suited me. I much prefer my middle name."
Mary leans into him, eyes glistening half with the cold and half with the alcohol. "So what is that?"
"James," Chase tells her. "Robert James Chase."
"Robert James," Mary says, just before stumbling on the curb. Chase catches her arm--he's had years of watching people fall down--and sets her to rights again, with a perverse little thrill at being able to. He's spent too much of his life with people who won't fall down, even when they've got all the reason to.
She's obviously drunk, but something about the way she keeps saying James--like she's washed away Robert Chase and found someone else inside--draws him in, and when she asks "Should we go somewhere?" he takes her home without compunction. When she stumbles and nearly collapses--too much to drink, and it's getting too late--he helps her to his bed, and stands for a while wondering what about her eyes looks so familiar when she looks up to see him watching. As the night wears on he finds different things to wonder, and then stops wondering altogether.
-
One day, sitting in the Brookhaven Hospital's cafeteria, she tells him the sob story of her previous marriage. He'd been an architect--Kevin Sunderland--and designed wonderful things before he smoked his way into lung cancer and died. "Maybe that's why I'm attracted to doctors," she jokes, leaning across the table. If they'd been elsewhere, sitting in the sun, perhaps, her sun dress would have looked radiant, and maybe her hair would have fluttered in her eyes. "You know how to take care of yourselves."
Chase laughs at that, a short, bitter exclamation he barely manages to catch and disguise. "Right," he says, "because who ever heard of a sick doctor. Everyone I've worked with has been the bloody picture of health," and tries not to think of Cameron's hand in his.
Mary reaches across the table and slides her hands into his, smiling over paper cups and thin napkins. "You know what I mean," she scolds, and he scoots forward despite himself. "Even when you do get sick, at least you know what to do."
He pulls his hands away like she's contagious. "Excuse me," he says, picking up his tray and already turning toward the trash. "I've got reports to finish, patients to see--"
Mary doesn't know how she's offended him, but she never mentions it again. And Chase hates her for having even that much of a handle on him, already.
-
House gets ahold of his email address one day and sends him a forward about the Thirty Dumbest Medical Cases In History, like they're still friends, like nothing has changed. Chase finds the Hospital webmaster and has him ape a Mailbox Disabled or Discontinued message in reply. That evening, in a fit of pique, he corners Mary and asks her to marry him.
He's expecting rejection. He's expecting that she'll laugh in his face or stare like he's an idiot or or jerk him around or just walk out of his life and never look back because that would fit the pattern, and he's spent his life following patterns. There's a comfortable familiarity there. Instead she gasps and splutters and acts by all accounts blown away, and when she says yes he has to remind himself to smile.
-
They're sitting in Rosewater Park, watching ducks on the lake and sharing a weekend lunch of sanwiches and beers, when they discuss the wedding for the first time. Mary wants a white wedding--the dresses, the decorations, the cake, the chapel, everything. Chase steadfastly refuses.
Mary is excited, enthusiastic, and looks at him as if she wants to see him every day when she opens her eyes. "Mary Chase," she says, testing it out. "I dunno. It sounds a bit--it sounds like a phrase, really. 'We'll go on a merry chase tonight.'" She edges a light elbow into his ribs, smiles at the joke. "...I guess I'll get used to it, won't I?"
"Actually," Chase says, "I was thinking of taking your name."
Mary is floored by this, and goes on intermittently for weeks at how it's such a generous offer, such an unusual one. Chase never tells her that it's just one more kind of camoflague, one more way of hiding. She doesn't need to know.
-
At the wedding he can't help sneering at "in sickness or in health," but thinks he disguises it well. When instructed, he grabs Mary and kisses hard, and doesn't notice until that night the line of fingertip-shaped bruises marching down the back of her neck. She never mentions them, and after a few days he forgets.
-
Months wear on into years. His accent is washing out along with his ambition; he's taking things slower, and he doesn't mind. They've got him teaching a batch of Fellows, now, and he's taking them to the whiteboard with the relentless stream of questions and prods he was raised on. He's no kinder to them than anyone was to him. Despite similarities life is getting better, and at times he can even forget why he's here.
He's walking through the park--a minor detour before returning to the home he's owned since before the marriage, the wife he doesn't love but doesn't hate, another long evening of the unimportance he's come to need. He's watching a duck bathe when footsteps approach him, and don't immediately set him off because it's not the distinctive limp of a man with a cane.
"Dr. Robert," a cheerful voice calls, and he turns and wishes he had a mask or a gun or an Ebola culture or just a good thick board with a nail through it. Sure enough, it's Dr. Wilson, looking old and out of place in a sweater and jeans and hair that's now speckled with grey.
"What are you doing here?" Chase asks, turning away and continuing his walk.
"A certain Dr. Feldspar, Dean of the Brookhaven Hospital, wants to put his institution on the map," Wilson says, and follows him. Soon he falls into step, half a pace behind. "He's organized a small conference. One, I admit, no one would pay any attention to if not for one retired Dr. Gregory House who's coming out of obscurity to deliver a guest lecture--"
"No," Chase says.
"Deny it all you want, he's going to be here in three days," Wilson says. Chase damns him for looking smug about the fact. "He figured you weren't going to be able to get your two-weeks notice in or take an unscheduled vacation before he landed."
"I'm not denying anything," Chase says, rounding on him again. "You know, I should have seen this coming. It's exactly like him."
"Lecturing?" Wilson asks, pausing to jab a finger at him. "Hang on. You are the same Dr. Chase who used to work at Princeton-Plainsboro, aren't you? Because the resemblance is striking--"
"Following me out here," Chase says, indicating the tiny, unimpressive town in the middle of Nowhere, USA. "Like I'm one more mystery waiting to be Rubixed out."
Wilson shrugs, smiling in deference to the old joke. "Well, you know him."
"Yes. I do. And I don't want to." Chase desperately wants to become violent. "I've had enough of him jerking me around. I'm through."
"Robert." Wilson's voice is annoyingly sincere.
"Does he have cancer?"
Wilson is so taken aback by the question that he goes ten seconds without responding. "What?"
"Does he have cancer?" Chase asks, enunciating every word.
"No!" Wilson says, finding the question ridiculous or unexpected or too expected or who the hell knows. Chase watches him, disgust and annoyance pooling in his lungs and making it hard to breathe.
"Or would you tell me if he did," he says.
"Of course I'd tell you!" Wilson protests. "Look, he's totally grey by now, he's still on Vicodin, and he hasn't gotten any more charming, but he's in fine health. What--"
"What makes him think," Chase says, "that he can come down here and worm his way back into my life? Like he hasn't screwed things up for me enough?"
Wilson's mouth forms a "Wh--", but Chase has turned on his heel and stalked off before it can go any further. He doesn't run any of the errands he'd intended to. He goes straight home to find Mary.
-
"Let's leave," he says.
Mary looks shocked. "What?"
"Let's leave," Chase says, and turns from the clock as if it's counting down. "Tomorrow. Tonight. Now. Just hop in the car and start driving."
"What's gotten into you?" Mary says.
Chase steps in and grabs her arms, staring into her eyes as if he's trying to get lost there. "Do you love me?"
"What?"
"Do you love me," he asks again, not because he cares about the answer. "Because I will take you anywhere you want to go. Anywhere in the world, as long as it's not this blasted place."
Mary looks out the window, then back at him, and stammers. "This place is special to me," she said. "This town. This house."
"We can come back here. I promise we'll come back here," he says, pushing it on her with a persuasive skill he learned in another special place--a teaching hospital in New Jersey, where the choices were matters of life and death and still couldn't be more urgent than this. "Anywhere, Mary. London, Rome, Sydney. Let's get on the first plane out and not look behind us."
She stares at him.
"...please," he says, at last, at length.
She disengages herself, patting him on the arm. "All right," she says. "Let's go."
He does two things before he steps out the door and closes it, never to open it again. First he loads all the clothes he can fit into a suitcase. Then he sends a single email to Dr. Feldspar. It has no subject. The message is "I quit."
-
Mary thinks it's a lovely trip, and when they settle down again in a new city neither one goes back to medicine. Chase says he needs some time off, Mary wants to expand her horizons--she talks about going into teaching, counseling, a dozen other ideas Chase doesn't really hear her say.
They live on their savings as Chase hunts down every medical journal, every newspaper article, every magazine clipping he can about a teaching hospital with a drug-addict doctor, tries to follow the lines from a distance, tries to know what House knows and why he's still following. His time in New Jersey has felt like a dream for a decade now, and he doesn't understand.
One night he has a flashback so vivid (blue eyes, brown hair, pink lips gasping) that Mary finds him in the bathroom, throwing up until his stomach is empty and following it with dry heaves. She holds him and rubs his back and whispers things she whispers to her patients, things like "hush" and "you're alright" and "it's okay." He tells her it's a stomach bug, and quarantines himself for three days.
It was never this bad. It shouldn't be getting worse.
One day Mary falls into a chair and starts coughing, and doesn't stop. She tries to stifle the noise in a handkerchief, but it doesn't work. Chase watches her, and feels sick again.
"Are you all right?" he asks.
She smiles at him over the handkerchief. "Probably just a cold."
He reaches over, feeling her forehead, feeling her lymph nodes, taking her pulse. She's hot and flushed and weak, and he tells her he's taking her to the best doctor he knows. He doesn't tell her that the best doctor he knows has been retired for God knows how long now, or that he once maybe-did-but-probably-didn't fall in love with a woman Chase killed. They get in the car--Chase watches her in quick side glances every step of the way--and start driving, like he used to, except that this time he's coming home.
-
House looks old. Chase had him frozen in his mind as perpetually the same man he'd known, unremarkable brown hair and face that showed creases but not wrinkles--primarily around the frown lines and across the forehead. But House looks old now, grey and slightly bent and with a cane that seems to suit him more than ever. The one thing that hasn't changed is his eyes--they still look over him as if he's diagnosing, as if he's stripping away the clothes and skin and muscle and organs all the way down to the bones.
"Well if it isn't the prodigal son," he says, and for a second Chase thinks he's going to push him away. Then he steps back, holding the door open. "Come in."
-
They don't talk about the old days. House has never liked small talk and says he has no time for it now. They talk about familiar subjects--symptoms and treatments and stats and vitals and test results--and halfway through, House is nodding like he's heard this one before. Something sparks in his eyes when Chase tells him it's his wife they're talking about, the tumblers click to rest, and he almost looks at peace.
House's final analysis is brilliant (as always), verifiably certain, and utterly without hope. When he tells Chase it's fatal--maybe a year, probably a few months--Chase gets up and leaves without another word. House doesn't stop him, doesn't follow. He's figured something out, and now will never follow him again.
Chase gets a second opinion from the first doctor he finds, not because he thinks House will be wrong but because he needs a reason to look Mary in the eye. The doctor defers to House's diagnosis--"Three years at most, perhaps six months." He says it's impossible to tell.
Chase goes home.
He's smoothing out the sheets when he notices a triangle of red dots on the pillow where Mary's slept. He has to take himself out to compose himself, because he knows this story, and knows how it ends.
When he comes back in Mary is sitting on the bed, hands in her lap, trying not to cry. He's seen it before--it's the worst part of his profession. He kneels down before her, gathering up her hands, and meets her eyes.
"I love you," he lies, or thinks he lies--he's really not sure any more. Suddenly all he wants to do is prove it, to her if not to himself. He doesn't know what to do--thinks there's something about chocolate and flowers, something about honesty--and he doesn't know how to find out. So he says "I love you" again, and again, and again, until Mary coughs up blood over his hands and holds on as tight as she can.
Chase can't think. Somewhere in the back of his head 1 Peter 1:7 is repeating itself, over and over, and he doesn't believe it and can't remember if he ever did.
He tells her it's all right. They'll do all they can. He knows the best hospitals in America, the best teams, and he'll be beside her every step of the way. She looks at him and trusts him, and he can't meet her eyes.
Across the room the clock is ticking, moving forward, moving in circles, moving on. And although he doesn't realize it, Chase is counting down.
So here it is. Roughly 6800 words. I make absolutely no guarantees as to quality of style, narration, plot, medical speak, characterization, voice, font, spelling, format, or anything else for that matter. It references several things from both canons, and you should probably have a working knowledge of each in order to understand it, but I don't think it's actually spoilery.
Um, enjoy?
House has Chase making phone calls and breaking into apartments for an hour before Cuddy drops by with the news. Dr. Allison Cameron had made it halfway to work that morning before pulling over just before she passed out at the wheel, and when someone had finally noticed and called an ambulance they'd found her barely responsive. House leaves her in the ICU until she starts coughing up blood, at which point something only he sees or only he knows proves too great a mystery and he brings her in as one of his cases instead.
Cuddy protests, because Cuddy will always protest no matter what House does, but even before she caves he has Chase and Foreman running tests on everything at once. He stops by Cameron's room twice: once to see if she has any theories, and once to see if she has any other theories. He leaves Chase with what he calls the Big Book Of All The Cool Diseases, and scribbles on the whiteboard as if she's any other patient to come in off the street.
Two days later she's only gotten worse, with weakness/fatigue/too few white blood cells/too many red, and Chase has gone through the book A-Z and Z-A and cross-indexed symptoms and hasn't found a thing. No matter how hard he tries, no matter how many reference books he reads or how many whiteboards he goes through, he can't seem to identify the disease, and he can't seem to fix it.
In a way, it would be easier if she just died. Dying has finality to it, and even if he'd failed it would have been easier to tear himself away from this case and move on to the next one. But she keeps lingering, as if she's trying to give him one more chance, and the gap between what she needs and what he knows is driving him insane.
-
Day Three opens with pericarditis and dacryoadenitis, and House gets to the meeting after Chase and Foreman are already there. "Inflammation," he announces. "Usually caused by infection. It's a pity we don't have an immunologist in the room," he continues, limping over to the coffee pot. "Cameron is certainly late today. Oh! Wait!" He turns back to his fellows, eyes wide and mocking. "She's sick, and it's our job to make sure she doesn't become 'late!' Differential diagnosis, people, tell me what we've got."
Chase throws out every idea he has in alphabetical order, because the worst that can happen is he'll be wrong and House will mock him. The same usually happens when he's right. House shoots them down one by one, orders more tests and treatments, and limps off on his way.
Taking another vial of blood, Chase small-talks with Cameron, goes through the motions. He doesn't like seeing her like this; he's uncomfortable, but for once she doesn't press the fact. She's just asking after House when her throat closes up and Chase calls for help to intubate, and before he knows it Foreman is pushing him aside because his hands are shaking too much to do his job.
In the hallway he clenches his fist, tries to maintain enough composure not to hit a wall and keep hitting until fist or wall breaks apart. Because no matter what they do or don't do, Cameron gets inexorably worse.
Foreman walks out past him, giving him a look like he knows everything that's going on, and disappears down the hall toward the elevators. Chase lets himself back into Cameron's room--she's unconscious, and they've started a morphine drip along with the latest batch of medicines doing nothing. He gets the feeling House is throwing everything at her now, like throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what will stick.
He hates seeing her like this, but he can't look away.
-
She's broken out into a rash--erythema multiforme--when they decide to move her to a clean room. It covers most of her torso and stretches down onto her right hip, but leaves her face pristine. It doesn't fit any of their theories, but she's still having trouble breathing and complains of constant pain. House points out, with trademark callousness, that they're losing her if they don't act quickly.
Chase and Foreman and Wilson pour over everything, prescribe treatments that make her neither better nor worse, and try to figure what could make a body just ignore all medicine and intervention as it slowly takes itself apart. At one point Chase throws his coffeecup across the room, narrowly missing House's skull and fracturing the window behind him. There's silence for maybe nine seconds before House calls him back to his office.
"You're off the case," he says.
Chase can't believe it, but has no defense beyond the typical "What?"
"Go home. Get some sleep. Come in tomorrow." House's eyes are gentle, and his eyes are never gentle. It's like watching the world end.
"She might be dead, tomorrow," Chase argues. "You think you and Foreman can solve this without me?"
House's eyes track over the floor and the desk as he pretends to consider the question. They have the usual tinge of deadpan arrogance when they meet Chase's again. "Yeah."
"This is the most bugged case we've ever looked at, and you want to get rid of half your staff!"
"Actually, I'm only getting rid of one third of my staff," House says. Chase is about to yell something back but the argument is cut short when House lifts his cane, planting the rubber base at his sternum and pushing him away. "Go. Sleep. Hell, hit the bars, for all I care. But you're off the case, goodbye."
-
That night Chase comes back, lies to the nurses, scrubs up and lets himself into Cameron's room. He stares at her like House stares at his whiteboard, trying to find the answer. It's nowhere to be found.
He's checking her vitals--less promising than the last set--when she wakes up, and at first he doesn't even notice. It's not until he looks down and sees her eyes open that he can tell.
"Hello," he says.
She tries to smile in answer, but he can tell its hard. She's got a mask over her mouth and nose, forcing oxygen into her lungs--the clipboard at the foot of her bed says she's responding "positively" to some cocktail House has whipped up, and House's distinctive scrawl notes that it's "positive" in that she hasn't suffered total organ failure yet.
"How are you feeling?" he asks, but he can tell the answer by the way she looks. She's dying, and she knows she's dying, and even the haze of painkillers can't take that away. He puts a gloved hand on her shoulder, and wishes he could make it stop.
She's shaking beneath his fingers.
He tries to smile down at her. "We spend all our time around sick people, and we still expect to be the picture of health. Now, is that stupid, or--?"
"Chase," she manages, and it's barely a whimper the way she makes it sound. He tries not to imagine the air in her lungs, tries not to think about what makes the words so weak, what's infected her voice and bled the life out of it, too. He flashes her a grin--the kind he gives patients who are probably dying or maybe not, trying to convince them that a smile and a glib remark are as good as solid diagnoses anyday.
"Aw, don't worry," he tells her. "You are in the hands of the best team at the best hospital in North America, and even we don't know what the bloody hell is wrong with you." A small plastic wheel moves easily beneath his thumb. He's stopped the IV.
"What are you--" she mouths. He looks at the machines.
"Look," he says, and is surprised to hear his voice crack. "There comes a point when medical science just has to give up. You are in an incredible amount of--" he stumbles on the word pain and says "discomfort" instead. "We've done everything a group of three sane men and one mad-scientist doctor can, and you won't get better. So do you think you're terminal, or do you think this is a test of your faith? Given you're an atheist, I'd think you'd know the answer."
It's not until he stops her air that she realizes something is wrong, too wrong, and tries to raise a hand to stop him. He catches her wrist and holds it down, tight enough that he can feel the pulse laboring beneath his fingers. He can't hear her breathing above his own; his is ragged and shallow.
"Look, calm down," he says, and can't fight the rising panic in his voice. She's struggling, lungs for air and arms for leverage and chest for strength and body to hold on. "You're not thinking clearly. This is a simple procedure. Lie down. Count down from ten."
He pulls his hand from her wrist and puts it on her chest, holding her down before he remembers that she can't get up, before he realizes that she's no longer fighting against him. Now her eyes won't focus. Now she's choking, her throat is closing, and he realizes he's watching her die.
"Cameron!" he yells, and his hand finds hers. She seems stronger, almost, until he remembers the term deathgrip and everything it means. For a second he convinces himself that he did all he could, that this isn't his fault, and then she crashes.
He's holding her hand hard enough to bruise it now, and he starts the IV and air before calling for help. But when the nurses rush in, when they help him check her over and shock her again and again, he realizes what he's done is what they've really been trying to do since the beginning. He's ended the illness. He's ended the pain.
At home, he kneels over his toilet for longer than he'd care to admit before realizing he won't throw up. He walks to his bedroom, leaves, takes his car to the nearest liquor store and buys one of everything his mother used to drink, takes it home, drinks none of it, and eventually tosses and turns himself to sleep.
The next day he wakes before the alarm, and he's starting his car before the events of the night wash over him. For a moment he thinks this time, this time he's definitely going to vomit, but he doesn't, and drives in without incident.
At the hospital House yells at him for the better part of a half-hour, in the hall outside his office because he couldn't be bothered to step inside. The lecture covers all the familiar points--mistakes personal and medical and careful diagnosis and the importance of a quick response to all new symptoms. Chase points out that sometimes people just die, in spite of all medicine, and House gives him a week off to get his head on straight while replacements for Cameron are interviewed. It doesn't escape Chase's notice that he's taken more Vicodin than usual, that his limp is more pronounced--his fingers are so tight on his cane that his knuckles are white and his forearm is shaking. He leaves the hospital with a sick posessive joy that he stumped the great master, that because of him there was a case House hadn't solved and would never get to. He thinks, viciously, vindictively, that it must be tearing him up inside.
-
A week later there's a woman named Petra Gilmar working Cameron's job. She's too outgoing, smiles too much, and even House seems to enjoy trading barbs with her. She boasts that he made two days of phone calls to extract her from her other job, and Chase hates her more than he thought he could hate anyone outside his own family.
House chases him down and doesn't apologize for anything. They've got a new case--a thirty-year-old woman with myoclonic seizures and a tendency to go tachycardic for no reason. He dispatches Chase to "take a real good listen" at her heart, see if his "trained cardiologist ears" can hear something wrong. For a moment before he finds the room he's terrified she'll be a slender, beautiful brunette with accusing eyes, but the woman is an average American woman who would fade into a crowd if he'd been looking for her.
Since he's gotten back Foreman has been watching him, and he can't remember whether they've exchanged five words that weren't about diagnostics or treatments. House keeps showing up where Chase needs to be, asking questions that aren't relevant to anything and not mentioning Cameron at all. It gets so bad that when House shows up when he's running tox screens he yells "What is your problem?" so loud half of the floor can hear him. "With Cameron," he says when House plays ignorant three sentences too long, and as soon as he says it he can hear the tumblers clicking in House's brain.
House leaves him alone for two hours after that, but Foreman's looks have gotten downright knowing and Gilmar won't stop ribbing him about one damn thing or another. At one point she mentions it's been twice, now, she's been looked at for Cameron's job, and he walks out of the room without finishing anything. He takes the elevator to House's office, and throws open the door without prelude.
"I quit," he says.
House stops twirling his cane, glances up from his portable video set, and looks him over. "No you don't," he says.
"Yes, I do," Chase says.
"Nuh-uh," House shoots back, as if this is all a game to him--and hell, it probably is.
"You can't stop me," Chase says, and is about to argue further when he realizes it won't do any good.
He walks out of the office and to the elevators again, and House makes it to the hallway in time to yell "Chase!" before the doors close.
He goes to Cuddy and tells her he can't work here any more, that House is insufferable, that the atmosphere is too uncomfortable, that he thinks he's learned all he can under House's tutelage, that he needs a change, that he needs to get out, that he's leaving as soon as he can. Cuddy tells him it'll be a shame to see him go, but that she completely understands. He lets her think she does.
-
House shows up at his home even before he's gotten there, and follows him in despite Chase's best efforts to close the door in his face. "What I can't figure out," he says, "is that you wanted this job so badly you used to try to sell me out to keep it. But now all of a sudden, you can't get away fast enough. What's up?"
"You really need me to tell you?" Chase asks, and points to the sidewalk.
House takes the hint and ignores it. "If you can't cope with people dying, wow! Are you in the wrong line of work," he says. "Try burger-flipping. At least that's at one remove."
"I don't need to explain myself to you," Chase tells him, as if that has ever deterred Dr. Gregory House or ever will.
"What, was it because she was pretty? Because you knew her?" He catches himself, acts like he's realized something and isn't it enlightening. "Did you two have a thing?" he asks, mock-sly.
"Bug off," Chase says, and would have spit in his face if his mouth hadn't been so dry.
"Come back," House says, serious for once.
"No," Chase says, and closes the door. House lets him. This time.
-
The next day House is at his door again, telling him the details of their newest case as soon as he opens it. Chase reminds him that he's breaking all sorts of doctor-patient confidentiality laws, and House acts as if he doesn't hear. Two days later he drags Foreman and Gilmar along with him; Foreman looks as if he'd rather be anywhere else, and Gilmar is enjoying the hell out of herself and doing nothing to hide it. He applies for and starts a job at a hospital across town as soon as possible, working the worst hours at the Emergency Room he can get.
While he's there he saves several lives. Certainly, it's faster-paced than his job in Diagnostic Medicine. It's almost enough to take his mind off things until a teenager pried from a car wreck reaches out to him, trying to find his hand to hold on to something as they try to stop the bleeding.
House has a formidible counterintelligence network--even if he has to borrow it from Wilson, who makes friends more easily than he does. On Chase's first day off he's at his house again, bright and early, with another new theory. He's getting closer, even if he can't know for certain.
"What do I have to do to get you to leave me alone?" Chase asks, and is willing to pay him off, poison him, anything to make him go away. "Move back to Flinders? Change my name?"
"Well, those would probably work," House admits. "Or I guess you could just learn to live with me."
Chase knows he's probably shooting his career in the foot when he submits his two-weeks' notice, but he can't be here much longer. He needs to get away. The weeks give him enough time to get everything in order that can be put in order, and then he piles suitcases full of clothes and journals and books into his car and drives off, trying and failing not to look back.
He leaves without telling anyone. He likes to imagine House showing up at his door one day, pounding until the new residents come out and perplex him, leaving him without a forwarding address or a clue or an answer. He likes to imagine that if he drives far enough the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital will evaporate like mist, leaving a line on his CV and a letter of recommendation from Cuddy as its only legacy. He likes to imagine that one day, none of this will matter.
-
House is no fool, and finds him sooner or later. Chase finds out when his supervisor pulls him aside and mentions that a certain brilliant diagnostician had called in and asked after him, and asks why he didn't bother to get a letter of recommendation from him because that letter would secure him a place just about anywhere. Chase works very hard at not shaking until he gets into the bathroom, where he can't help himself--because he knows as well as anyone when House is on a case. And House will solve the mystery. House always does.
Right when he's thinking it might be easier just to kill himself he gets a letter from a clinic in Houston that wants to start its own Department of Diagnostic Medicine, and he jumps at the job they're begging him to take before he has a chance to read the letter all the way through. By the end of the month he's off again, and won't tell anyone what he's running from or what he's running to.
It's not a bright move. House figures it out by following the headlines, and the Dean of the Houston clinic welcomes the chance to correspond with the man who inspired so much. Chase starts feeling like he's driving across a glass world, naked and exposed, and the microscope is closing in.
He makes convenient friends with a short Hispanic doctor named Antonio Hernandez who's written a book on the dark side of the hospital world--hospitals so underfunded or incompetently run that they're barely better than no health care at all, places so provincial where anyone with a CNA is hired on as a full nurse, places that the government hasn't found, hasn't regulated, hasn't cared enough to shut down yet. Places that fall off a map. Chase gets a copy--autographed, even--flips to the index, and finds directions to the first name he sees.
He's running, and he knows it, and it's getting easier. Every time he moves he learns a bit more--how to sink under the radar, how to hide. It takes House longer to find him these days, longer to pin him down. Not that he's stopped trying. Not that either of them will.
-
Brookhaven Hospital is a small general hospital with no reputation and no accolades to speak of, and Chase is ludicrously overqualified. The Dean spends ten minutes grilling him on his employment history, trying to find out why a brilliant man such as himself has left a string of good jobs to interview for a hospital in a town barely large enough to support one, until Chase reminds him that he'd been published twice in the New England Journal of Medicine and once in the Journal of the American Medical Association before he'd finished his fellowship and even if he turns out to be a world-class git with an avoidant personality and agoraphobia severe enough to drive him out to the middle of medical nowhere, are they really going to decide they're too good to take him? He signs his contract by the end of the day.
Obscurity suits him better than he thinks it will. He gains local notoriety as the best doctor for three hundred miles, earns or otherwise gains the admiration of his coworkers and the regional fame is enough to take the edge off things. He's making less than he ever has but the cost of living is low, and he gets raises every review period and bonuses every Christmas. People ask about his past, but he deters them with dry facts--Years in Australia, years in New Jersey, articles written, cases solved. As far as anyone knows he's here because he likes the quiet life, because he's a very private man.
No one gets too close. No one can figure him, and he likes it that way.
-
Across the continent Foreman is making headlines for great steps forward in the treatment of cerebral palsy. Chase is telling the thousandth patient to cut back on the salt and red meat, wondering if he knew the famous doctor, if the famous doctor knew him. For a second it seems ridiculous that he could be here if that was the case, and when he tries to figure out what drove him out so far he can't think of anything except a little blue wheel on a clear plastic tube that ended his world. He stops reading the journals until the hubub dies down.
One day there's a woman at the hospital he's never seen before. She's a pediatrician who introduces herself as Mary Sunderland, and she's staying in the hotel until her apartment lease begins. He invites her out for dinner because she's new, because she doesn't have a kitchen and doesn't know her way around, and because she looks like she's run from something, once, and he can always use a few solid recommendations just in case he needs to run again. He's gotten good at cultivating networks who don't know they're networking for him--people who will tell him the best places to vanish when they think they're talking about up-and-coming towns, people who will drop the name of a great doctor they'd worked with who might retire soon, or would have loved working with him and who knows, still might. He learns a lot from Mary, and when she says "We should do this again," he agrees. "It's been lovely," she says, and he agrees again. Everybody lies.
He doesn't see her much at the hospital until she makes a point of seeing him, wheeling in a child who until yesterday just seemed to have the flu. Chase takes one look and one set of readings and diagnoses something she's never heard of before, prescribes something it's lucky the hospital has on hand, and the kid is better and out of the hospital in two days. He hates the way she looks at him after that--as if he's a saviour, as if he could save the world.
-
The first time she kisses him--a peck on the cheek, and he can never remember what prompted her--he doesn't respond at all. Mary thinks he's "being cool," but she's guessing several degrees too warm. Chase doesn't need to care about her, or anyone else, for that matter--he's learned from the master, and the master taught him well.
But that doesn't stop him.
She's the only one who initiates anything, but he never rebuffs her and apparently that's enough. The closer she comes the more he can pry out of her with the time-honored combination of drinks and green eyes, and tidbits designed to make her think he's telling his secrets.
He's leading her out of a bar one night (she doesn't notice that he's stuck to tea and water the whole time) and she's smiling and laughing (she doesn't notice that his smile doesn't make it up into his eyes and never has) and continuing the conversation he hasn't been sharing. She calls him Robert for the first time, and looks at him as if to see if that's all right.
"I never liked the name Robert," Chase says. "Never suited me. I much prefer my middle name."
Mary leans into him, eyes glistening half with the cold and half with the alcohol. "So what is that?"
"James," Chase tells her. "Robert James Chase."
"Robert James," Mary says, just before stumbling on the curb. Chase catches her arm--he's had years of watching people fall down--and sets her to rights again, with a perverse little thrill at being able to. He's spent too much of his life with people who won't fall down, even when they've got all the reason to.
She's obviously drunk, but something about the way she keeps saying James--like she's washed away Robert Chase and found someone else inside--draws him in, and when she asks "Should we go somewhere?" he takes her home without compunction. When she stumbles and nearly collapses--too much to drink, and it's getting too late--he helps her to his bed, and stands for a while wondering what about her eyes looks so familiar when she looks up to see him watching. As the night wears on he finds different things to wonder, and then stops wondering altogether.
-
One day, sitting in the Brookhaven Hospital's cafeteria, she tells him the sob story of her previous marriage. He'd been an architect--Kevin Sunderland--and designed wonderful things before he smoked his way into lung cancer and died. "Maybe that's why I'm attracted to doctors," she jokes, leaning across the table. If they'd been elsewhere, sitting in the sun, perhaps, her sun dress would have looked radiant, and maybe her hair would have fluttered in her eyes. "You know how to take care of yourselves."
Chase laughs at that, a short, bitter exclamation he barely manages to catch and disguise. "Right," he says, "because who ever heard of a sick doctor. Everyone I've worked with has been the bloody picture of health," and tries not to think of Cameron's hand in his.
Mary reaches across the table and slides her hands into his, smiling over paper cups and thin napkins. "You know what I mean," she scolds, and he scoots forward despite himself. "Even when you do get sick, at least you know what to do."
He pulls his hands away like she's contagious. "Excuse me," he says, picking up his tray and already turning toward the trash. "I've got reports to finish, patients to see--"
Mary doesn't know how she's offended him, but she never mentions it again. And Chase hates her for having even that much of a handle on him, already.
-
House gets ahold of his email address one day and sends him a forward about the Thirty Dumbest Medical Cases In History, like they're still friends, like nothing has changed. Chase finds the Hospital webmaster and has him ape a Mailbox Disabled or Discontinued message in reply. That evening, in a fit of pique, he corners Mary and asks her to marry him.
He's expecting rejection. He's expecting that she'll laugh in his face or stare like he's an idiot or or jerk him around or just walk out of his life and never look back because that would fit the pattern, and he's spent his life following patterns. There's a comfortable familiarity there. Instead she gasps and splutters and acts by all accounts blown away, and when she says yes he has to remind himself to smile.
-
They're sitting in Rosewater Park, watching ducks on the lake and sharing a weekend lunch of sanwiches and beers, when they discuss the wedding for the first time. Mary wants a white wedding--the dresses, the decorations, the cake, the chapel, everything. Chase steadfastly refuses.
Mary is excited, enthusiastic, and looks at him as if she wants to see him every day when she opens her eyes. "Mary Chase," she says, testing it out. "I dunno. It sounds a bit--it sounds like a phrase, really. 'We'll go on a merry chase tonight.'" She edges a light elbow into his ribs, smiles at the joke. "...I guess I'll get used to it, won't I?"
"Actually," Chase says, "I was thinking of taking your name."
Mary is floored by this, and goes on intermittently for weeks at how it's such a generous offer, such an unusual one. Chase never tells her that it's just one more kind of camoflague, one more way of hiding. She doesn't need to know.
-
At the wedding he can't help sneering at "in sickness or in health," but thinks he disguises it well. When instructed, he grabs Mary and kisses hard, and doesn't notice until that night the line of fingertip-shaped bruises marching down the back of her neck. She never mentions them, and after a few days he forgets.
-
Months wear on into years. His accent is washing out along with his ambition; he's taking things slower, and he doesn't mind. They've got him teaching a batch of Fellows, now, and he's taking them to the whiteboard with the relentless stream of questions and prods he was raised on. He's no kinder to them than anyone was to him. Despite similarities life is getting better, and at times he can even forget why he's here.
He's walking through the park--a minor detour before returning to the home he's owned since before the marriage, the wife he doesn't love but doesn't hate, another long evening of the unimportance he's come to need. He's watching a duck bathe when footsteps approach him, and don't immediately set him off because it's not the distinctive limp of a man with a cane.
"Dr. Robert," a cheerful voice calls, and he turns and wishes he had a mask or a gun or an Ebola culture or just a good thick board with a nail through it. Sure enough, it's Dr. Wilson, looking old and out of place in a sweater and jeans and hair that's now speckled with grey.
"What are you doing here?" Chase asks, turning away and continuing his walk.
"A certain Dr. Feldspar, Dean of the Brookhaven Hospital, wants to put his institution on the map," Wilson says, and follows him. Soon he falls into step, half a pace behind. "He's organized a small conference. One, I admit, no one would pay any attention to if not for one retired Dr. Gregory House who's coming out of obscurity to deliver a guest lecture--"
"No," Chase says.
"Deny it all you want, he's going to be here in three days," Wilson says. Chase damns him for looking smug about the fact. "He figured you weren't going to be able to get your two-weeks notice in or take an unscheduled vacation before he landed."
"I'm not denying anything," Chase says, rounding on him again. "You know, I should have seen this coming. It's exactly like him."
"Lecturing?" Wilson asks, pausing to jab a finger at him. "Hang on. You are the same Dr. Chase who used to work at Princeton-Plainsboro, aren't you? Because the resemblance is striking--"
"Following me out here," Chase says, indicating the tiny, unimpressive town in the middle of Nowhere, USA. "Like I'm one more mystery waiting to be Rubixed out."
Wilson shrugs, smiling in deference to the old joke. "Well, you know him."
"Yes. I do. And I don't want to." Chase desperately wants to become violent. "I've had enough of him jerking me around. I'm through."
"Robert." Wilson's voice is annoyingly sincere.
"Does he have cancer?"
Wilson is so taken aback by the question that he goes ten seconds without responding. "What?"
"Does he have cancer?" Chase asks, enunciating every word.
"No!" Wilson says, finding the question ridiculous or unexpected or too expected or who the hell knows. Chase watches him, disgust and annoyance pooling in his lungs and making it hard to breathe.
"Or would you tell me if he did," he says.
"Of course I'd tell you!" Wilson protests. "Look, he's totally grey by now, he's still on Vicodin, and he hasn't gotten any more charming, but he's in fine health. What--"
"What makes him think," Chase says, "that he can come down here and worm his way back into my life? Like he hasn't screwed things up for me enough?"
Wilson's mouth forms a "Wh--", but Chase has turned on his heel and stalked off before it can go any further. He doesn't run any of the errands he'd intended to. He goes straight home to find Mary.
-
"Let's leave," he says.
Mary looks shocked. "What?"
"Let's leave," Chase says, and turns from the clock as if it's counting down. "Tomorrow. Tonight. Now. Just hop in the car and start driving."
"What's gotten into you?" Mary says.
Chase steps in and grabs her arms, staring into her eyes as if he's trying to get lost there. "Do you love me?"
"What?"
"Do you love me," he asks again, not because he cares about the answer. "Because I will take you anywhere you want to go. Anywhere in the world, as long as it's not this blasted place."
Mary looks out the window, then back at him, and stammers. "This place is special to me," she said. "This town. This house."
"We can come back here. I promise we'll come back here," he says, pushing it on her with a persuasive skill he learned in another special place--a teaching hospital in New Jersey, where the choices were matters of life and death and still couldn't be more urgent than this. "Anywhere, Mary. London, Rome, Sydney. Let's get on the first plane out and not look behind us."
She stares at him.
"...please," he says, at last, at length.
She disengages herself, patting him on the arm. "All right," she says. "Let's go."
He does two things before he steps out the door and closes it, never to open it again. First he loads all the clothes he can fit into a suitcase. Then he sends a single email to Dr. Feldspar. It has no subject. The message is "I quit."
-
Mary thinks it's a lovely trip, and when they settle down again in a new city neither one goes back to medicine. Chase says he needs some time off, Mary wants to expand her horizons--she talks about going into teaching, counseling, a dozen other ideas Chase doesn't really hear her say.
They live on their savings as Chase hunts down every medical journal, every newspaper article, every magazine clipping he can about a teaching hospital with a drug-addict doctor, tries to follow the lines from a distance, tries to know what House knows and why he's still following. His time in New Jersey has felt like a dream for a decade now, and he doesn't understand.
One night he has a flashback so vivid (blue eyes, brown hair, pink lips gasping) that Mary finds him in the bathroom, throwing up until his stomach is empty and following it with dry heaves. She holds him and rubs his back and whispers things she whispers to her patients, things like "hush" and "you're alright" and "it's okay." He tells her it's a stomach bug, and quarantines himself for three days.
It was never this bad. It shouldn't be getting worse.
One day Mary falls into a chair and starts coughing, and doesn't stop. She tries to stifle the noise in a handkerchief, but it doesn't work. Chase watches her, and feels sick again.
"Are you all right?" he asks.
She smiles at him over the handkerchief. "Probably just a cold."
He reaches over, feeling her forehead, feeling her lymph nodes, taking her pulse. She's hot and flushed and weak, and he tells her he's taking her to the best doctor he knows. He doesn't tell her that the best doctor he knows has been retired for God knows how long now, or that he once maybe-did-but-probably-didn't fall in love with a woman Chase killed. They get in the car--Chase watches her in quick side glances every step of the way--and start driving, like he used to, except that this time he's coming home.
-
House looks old. Chase had him frozen in his mind as perpetually the same man he'd known, unremarkable brown hair and face that showed creases but not wrinkles--primarily around the frown lines and across the forehead. But House looks old now, grey and slightly bent and with a cane that seems to suit him more than ever. The one thing that hasn't changed is his eyes--they still look over him as if he's diagnosing, as if he's stripping away the clothes and skin and muscle and organs all the way down to the bones.
"Well if it isn't the prodigal son," he says, and for a second Chase thinks he's going to push him away. Then he steps back, holding the door open. "Come in."
-
They don't talk about the old days. House has never liked small talk and says he has no time for it now. They talk about familiar subjects--symptoms and treatments and stats and vitals and test results--and halfway through, House is nodding like he's heard this one before. Something sparks in his eyes when Chase tells him it's his wife they're talking about, the tumblers click to rest, and he almost looks at peace.
House's final analysis is brilliant (as always), verifiably certain, and utterly without hope. When he tells Chase it's fatal--maybe a year, probably a few months--Chase gets up and leaves without another word. House doesn't stop him, doesn't follow. He's figured something out, and now will never follow him again.
Chase gets a second opinion from the first doctor he finds, not because he thinks House will be wrong but because he needs a reason to look Mary in the eye. The doctor defers to House's diagnosis--"Three years at most, perhaps six months." He says it's impossible to tell.
Chase goes home.
He's smoothing out the sheets when he notices a triangle of red dots on the pillow where Mary's slept. He has to take himself out to compose himself, because he knows this story, and knows how it ends.
When he comes back in Mary is sitting on the bed, hands in her lap, trying not to cry. He's seen it before--it's the worst part of his profession. He kneels down before her, gathering up her hands, and meets her eyes.
"I love you," he lies, or thinks he lies--he's really not sure any more. Suddenly all he wants to do is prove it, to her if not to himself. He doesn't know what to do--thinks there's something about chocolate and flowers, something about honesty--and he doesn't know how to find out. So he says "I love you" again, and again, and again, until Mary coughs up blood over his hands and holds on as tight as she can.
Chase can't think. Somewhere in the back of his head 1 Peter 1:7 is repeating itself, over and over, and he doesn't believe it and can't remember if he ever did.
He tells her it's all right. They'll do all they can. He knows the best hospitals in America, the best teams, and he'll be beside her every step of the way. She looks at him and trusts him, and he can't meet her eyes.
Across the room the clock is ticking, moving forward, moving in circles, moving on. And although he doesn't realize it, Chase is counting down.