Loss of Appetite

disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with House or FOX in any way. I write for fun, not profit.

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You skipped breakfast, and you skipped lunch, working six hours straight in the ICU, running on nothing but black coffee. It's like the days of your residency: spent on your feet, letting work beat you down until food was the last thing on your mind.

But now your hands are shaking and you're feeling a little light-headed. You know you're a hazard, and you know you should eat something, but all you can think about is the last patient—that last patient, and all six hundred pounds of him—and honestly, you never want to eat again.

Did you get beaten up by a gang of fat kids when you were in grade school? Foreman wanted to know. What's your problem?

But he didn't want a real answer, so you blew him off.

Everyone already thinks you hate fat people.

And you don't hate fat people, you just don't understand them. How does someone get to be six hundred pounds? How they look in a mirror, step on a scale, and keep on eating? And keep on living?

Medically, you're forced to realize, it can happen to anyone. So it can happen to you. So you're staring that down every time you take an extra donut, drink a beer, or put sugar in your coffee. And you don't think about it all the time, and it's really best when you don't, but when you're sticking electrodes on a man the size of a small elephant, and feeling around his doughy rolls, how can you avoid it?

You pass a vending machine in the hall and pause for a moment, but there's nothing behind the glass that you should be eating...

You remember your mother standing half-naked in front of the mirror, squeezing the flesh at her sides between her thumbs and index fingers. She would frown and say, "If you can pinch an inch..." and you thought that was something all adults did. "What passes through your lips, sticks to your hips." Something all adults said.

She raised you on prepackaged food with ingredient lists that went on for days, and the fat and calorie content pre-calculated and displayed, so you couldn't avoid it. She herself ate almost nothing, drowning instead in bottles and tumblers, "saving" her calories for gin and vodka, tonic and ginger ale.

And she was thin until the end.

And if she could do that, if your drunk, crazy mother could do it...

You could skip the vending machine. You close your eyes and convince yourself to wait. There's a half eaten tub of cottage cheese in your refrigerator and some saltines in plastic wrappers pilfered from the cafeteria. You haven't gained weight, but you haven't lost weight either. Your pants don't feel tight, but they could feel looser.

Sometimes you hate your mother.

You pass Wilson's office and pause by the glass wall. He's sitting at his desk sifting through papers with one hand and holding a sandwich in the other. Dr. Wilson, like everyone else you know, is too busy to take a proper lunch break. You knock on the glass and he looks up and motions you inside.

His lunch is laid out on his desk in a tidy formation: a salad, a bag of chips, a tangerine, and an array of plastic flatware.

You ask, "Have you seen Dr. House?" because what else would you ask?

"Not recently," he says, peeling the cellophane back from his sandwich. It looks like roast beef. He's about to take a bite, but then he pauses and looks at you. "Chase? Are you leering at my lunch?"

"Um. No."

He narrows his eyes. "You've been in the ICU all day, haven't you? Have you eaten anything?"

He sounds like somebody's mother, but not yours, so you don't have to answer him.

"I'm okay," you say, waiting for your stomach to betray you.

"Do you want change for the vending machine?"

You shake your head. "I'm going to go back to work."

"Wait," he says, and he grabs the tangerine from the table, "Take this. I've got a whole crate of them at home."

Then the fruit is hurling through the air.

You don't have a choice, so you catch it, and it feels cool and soft and juicy.

So you murmur a thank you and leave.

Standing over a trash can in an empty lounge, you turn the tangerine around in your hands. When you dig your thumbnail into the peel the sweet citrus scent wafts through the air and you realize you're famished.

But as you strip the peel away and the smell becomes pungent, you realize it's too soft, and too sweet, and you're holding the bloated, molded flesh of a rotten tangerine in your hand.

As you let it fall to the trash, you think of the six-hundred pound patient and Foreman asking How can you attach this much flesh to a human skeleton?

And now, you're really not hungry.

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A/N: When I wrote this, I didn't even know that giving Chase an eating disorder was a fandom cliché. I do hope this is a fresh take on that—it's not a huge thing, but it's there, and it's still a thorn in his side. Reviews appreciated!