Author's Note: This has been posted on my livejournal for a a guilt-inspiring amount of time before I realized I hadn't posted it here. Sorry 'bout that.
Written for housefest.
x
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the torch was passed or if it was passed at all. It's more like Chase just picked it up off the ground, abandoned and dimming, his weight, his worry.
His father's responsibility.
His mother's life.
Rowan used to say that he had seen it all before, that taking care of someone in his wife's "condition" was like being drowned with the drowning and he wasn't about to put that cross on his shoulders to make her feel better about wasting away.
Chase was.
With the full understanding that it wasn't his burden, his torch, his cross to bear, Chase was.
He was well aware of the water.
He was well aware of the demise.
And Rowan was willing to watch him drown.
x
There's something to be said for silence. Sit in it too long and it seeps through your skin, calming, suffocating, euthanasia of the mind, the soul, the last hope of a broken man, child, creature caught awkwardly in between sitting beside his mother's casket two days after, wondering if his father forgot that he had to pick him up and when God was going to remember him again.
The answers were apparent even then.
Probably and never.
It didn't matter. Chase would wait anyways.
x
Sometimes he felt like he had slipped through the cracks and the times he didn't he felt like he could and no one would notice, care, spend their nights worrying where the warm body with a name and a number and some secrets had disappeared to.
At his mother's funeral, Chase sat in the back, honest-to-God just too tired to cry.
Wasn't this the finish line?
In the end, was there any other?
No mourner seems to think so.
She was a great lady, Robert.
Only the good die young, Robert.
It was inevitable, Robert...
Somehow, his father's voice is the only one that rings true and he wasn't even there to say it.
For someone like her.
Nobody notices that the son of the deceased was the one not to cry and pretends not notice when he ducks out the back because he suddenly couldn't breathe. That night they'd go back home to their plastic lives and talk about the flowers (Lovely, weren't they?) or the monotone of the minister (Make sure to warn so-and-so about him, dear. I think she's getting married in that church.) Nobody mentions that the sleeves of Chase's suit jacket were too short or that his hair was too long because that gives way to the recognition that maybe there was no one to tell him to get another or call a barber, and then maybe, just maybe you'd realize that there was no one there.
And that kind of truth's just ugly.
Rowan was always so good at teaching that kind of lesson.
Too bad Chase never quite learned.
x
Back in the seminary, everything was cold, the floor beneath his feet, the walls against his fingertips.
The unblinking stares of the self-proclaimed enlightened.
It was like being in the military. They made you cut your hair short; too short to look like anything other than a doe-eyed teenager and you spend most of your time praying for something just out of reach.
An answer.
An end.
Peace.
Chase learns quickly there's no patron saint for alcoholics, for adulterers, for their children, but there's one for the general addict (Kolbe for mum, for salvation) and one for doctors (Luke for dad, for healing) and a soft-staring metal statuette for lost causes that looks a little like him and a lot like dad with an expression he'd never seen in life, he'd wished he'd seen a million times before.
He borrows the Saint Jude figurine from Father Milton's office on his way out.
Salvation didn't come quickly and the nights were just too quiet, silent for Chase to wait out. Like a ghost he was gone, a whisper of what could have been, no traces of him left, just holes he hadn't filled.
Couldn't fill.
x
Going to med school in Melbourne with the name Chase is kind of like being the punchline to a joke only you understand. For a month he was second hand smoke, something everyone talked about, choked on, moved away from.
Chase? As in Rowan Chase, resident god of Rheumatology?
Wish my dad would pay for my A.
I didn't know Rowan Chase had a kid.
Not many did. Nobody ever really seemed to notice before and now they didn't see the kid who stayed on campus over holidays, who spent days reading Rilke and medical journals, whose birthday went unnoted year after year. All they saw was what they wanted.
Chase lived in the library, dark parties, the last rows of lecture halls, revealing himself to who he wanted when he wanted.
Here I am and here are my scars and this is my story, my neglect. Now shut up and let me study.
It didn't happen often.
x
The semester before graduation, Chase went home for Christmas with his roommate. Apparently, he had chosen the worst possible year to do so. Chris's step-dad went ballistic over his twenty-two daughter's new apparel (maternity clothes) and grandma's Alzheimer's was getting bad (in my day became today) and his mum decided that this was the day to start smoking again.
So did the turkey.
It was painful, loud, angry, nauseating, frustrating, confrontational and Chase was jealous out of his mind. This was what a family was. This was what he lacked.
That New Year's Eave was the first he ever got completely, absolutely drunk out of his mind.
It wasn't the last.
x
Chase interviewed with House his first day in New Jersey.
He entered the office, lights off; House leaned back in his chair, so still he thought he was asleep. Maybe dead. How inconvenient.
"You're a long way from home."
Chase can feel himself jump, looking around the room stupidly. No one else was there.
House opened his eyes tilting his head forward a few inches so a particular shaft of light slipping thought the shades illuminated him from behind, lighting up his ground-pepper hair like a dirty halo, an angel of another kind.
"Why?" House asks sharply, eyes subtracting IQ for seconds wasted thinking about a reply.
Why?
Chase shudders suddenly under the older man's appraising gaze. It's familiar.
Why try to save what's already lost?
"Because it's worth it."
House rolled his eyes. "For what? The experience, the resume, the privilege of working within a mile radius of that fine piece of ass that runs oncology? He's married and he's mine. Don't bother."
Chase smiled, relaxing slightly. "It's different," he explains slowly, "and it doesn't suck."
"Yes, it does." A pause. "Your dad called." Chase's muscles contract again. "I see that's not good news." House reaches in his suit jacket for what Chase assumes will be cigarettes and comes out with a bright orange pharmaceutical bottle. "Good. I hate backseat drivers. He told me not to hire you."
There are better opportunities, Robert, ones closer to home.
Chase shrugged.
What home?
House tilts his head back again, taking him in inch by inch for his worth and in that instant it was his father evaluating him not this odd middle-aged man about to pop a pill.
Chase thinks he's about to comment on this when instead he says simply "You're hired," and then "Now get out," and the moment passed. His father passed.
This moment anyway.
x
It was an annoying day.
The patient was annoying. The new nurse was annoying. House was stoned, which was usually hilarious, but today he was useless and inevitably aggravating.
Chase had drunken too much coffee and now his pulse was throbbing through his temples and he had a crick in the back of his neck that was starting to work its way down his spine and what did Nurse Previn want now?
"Phone," Brenda drones, cradling her own between her shoulder and neck, eyes caught like she had started to roll her eyes and never bothered to finish. "Take it in the clinic."
Fantastic.
"This is Robert," he chips, restraint flat-lining.
"You'redadisdead." What? "Oh sorry, you probably didn't catch that." He did. "Your dad died last night. He went to sleep and...well, it finally got the best of him. You know." He didn't want to. "This is Rebecca by the way."
His insane-under-pressure, young-enough-to-date stepmother? No way.
Chase turns slightly, away from the glass doors, clutching the phone a little tighter. His left side was going kind of numb and his ribs felt a few notches tighter. Was he having a heart attack?
Had he?
"Um," Chase mumbled, coherency escaping him, "What did he die of?"
He can feel a half dozen pairs of ease-dropping eyes bore into the back of his neck.
"Oh honey, I'm sorry." What for? "It was lung cancer."
"That's impossible." His tone is sharper than he intended, but it was impossible. He must have lied to her. His father was good at that, lying. "If he had lung cancer he would have-"
Told me.
The words die in his mouth.
Good at lying.
Fooling.
Breaking.
"Oh honey." Her tone is empty and for a moment the buzz of the long-distance connection fills the space of what was not, what would never be said.
I'm sorry you lost your husband.
I'm sorry you never had your dad.
Please hang up try your call again.
Chase pulls the phone from his ear, and stares at it. The pain in the back of his neck had dissolved, vaguely spreading through all his limbs. The phone, the light above the water's surface, was blurred by movement, his own tears.
"Doctor Chase?"
He turned slower than usual, aged. A woman stands in the doorway, fairly young, an imprecise sort of pretty. Chase tries to place her face. Patient. Ex-patient?
Kayla.
He looks down at the phone again in his hand as if trying to remember how it got there.
Burdens. Lies. Sons on crosses.
The spaces in-between.
Cancer.
He rotates it to fit back into the receiver and the world starts moving in real time again.
And everything that matter is set in motion.
x
His blood feels hot and fizzy and his lungs aren't working right.
What had he done?
What had he done?
x
The wall is cold against his back but she's warm and the wine almost covers the chalky taste of meth in her mouth against his mouth asking what went wrong.
"Are you high?"
It didn't sound like such a rhetorical question in his head, but this was not Cameron but for some reason that was okay because hell, he couldn't remember the last time he didn't feel like a stranger in his own skin and in this irrational state such a rational statement as Your pupils are dilated, seemed completely out of place even to him.
So when Cameron closes the space between then and quietly demands that he not turn into the good guy on her now, he doesn't. He leans in and breathes her breath breathing his, hoping he won't choke on stagnant air and static souls.
An answer.
An end.
Peace.
They weren't so different, he and she, aching in ways they didn't understand. This was his rosary, Rosa repeat, plead, penance.
He wakes up the next morning the coppery taste of blood in his mouth and stares up at the dark ceiling wondering if anyone was looking down, listening to what he wasn't saying.
Cameron's alarm clock goes off, grainy strands of radio killing the silence.
When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me...
When Cameron turns over, feeling for warm arms to climb into instead finding is a soft imprint in the sheets and a sense of losing something she really never had.
Don't we all?
x
So maybe that torch really was passed.
Maybe it wasn't his father's to pass.
Maybe it hadn't gone out when mum died, just gone where he couldn't see. It burned him, burned in him, hollowed, charred him, left only sulfur beneath his skin, second-hand smoke with every whisper.
He was suspended. He should have been fired, lost his license, earned a place in hell, fuck, been recognized for that.
She had kids for God's sake. All those years of standing lost wait for the pieces of his family to glue themselves back together again and he had shattered another's.
He had no right to feel sorry for himself.
His liquor cabinet disagrees.
x
Cameron calls.
It was stupid for her to pretend to care, but apparently she didn't see it as such.
"Hey Cha-Robert," her voice quips into his answering machine, "I heard...Cuddy told...well, I'm sorry." She hesitates. "If you need somebody to talk to or..." fuck without consequences? Chase fills in the blank. "Call me, okay? I...I just...call me."
Chase decides to ignore this, curl up on his couch and watch a documentary about the Vietnam War on mute.
A few minutes later, his answering machine picks up another message.
"That was me before. Cameron."
A young man in combat gear running across the screen stops suddenly, grasps his chest and falls like a marionette whose strings have been cut.
"I wasn't sure if I said it before."
Chase disappears beneath his downy blanket.
x
"This is Foreman."
Stupid answering machine. Didn't it know he didn't like people right now?
"I heard your dad died."
Chase actually appreciates the bluntness.
"Like six months ago."
Scratch that.
"Why didn't you tell anyone?"
So he wouldn't have to face this?
"Whatever man. I know things weren't great with him, but you still..." a female voice is talking in the background. Cameron. She sounds pissed. The next time Foreman speaks, it's in monotone. "I'm sorry for your loss." Cameron talks again. Foreman says something not into the speaking sounding vaguely like what do you want me to say? but Chase isn't sure. The rest is muttled beyond comprehension.
The answering machine cuts him off.
Chase downs another glass of Absolut and turns off his TV. Without it, the room goes completely black.
x
Cuddy calls to remind him of the protocol for returning to work after a suspension. Her tone is expressionless, even. It doesn't comment on his murder of a patient or the death of his father. It's professional, cordial but not cold.
It's nice.
Chase doesn't take in the meaning of the words, just lets their sound lull him in his alcohol-induced daze.
The only time it breaks is at the end when she adds tightly, "House has agreed that you shouldn't lose your position after Doctor Foreman retires his post as supervisor over the department." There's a pause. He can hear the words she's dying to say.
If you had told me about your father this whole thing would have been over before it began. You still would have had the week off.
Just not as punishment.
"I'm sorry for your loss."
I'm sorry it had to end like this.
The beep at the end of the message doesn't do her justice.
x
House's message is four words.
"Go to the funeral."
Whose? His father's? That was months ago.
His own?
Chase closes his eyes and fakes sleep until the real kind takes its place.
x
Wednesday comes and marks the middle of his suspension and the end of his liquor supply. He vaguely remembers a bottle of whiskey shoved in a drawer somewhere. While he looks for it he finds a photograph of a woman, petit, blonde and very pregnant laughing, carefully intertwined in the arms of a man who looks too much like him.
Mum and dad.
And me.
On top of it the Saint Jude figurine from the seminary lies, a fallen soldier to a cause never his own.
Go to the funeral.
Two days later Chase is on a flight to Oz.
x
The gravesite doesn't have a headstone yet, just a little white flag with faded personal information printed on it and a dozen dying roses blown astray across the grass that didn't quite match the rest yet.
Chase places the figurine where the plague will someday lie and tries to think of something poetic to say.
When nothing comes, he sighs and sits down, the grass damp against his tired legs.
"I killed someone," he says before conversationally adding, "You wouldn't have liked it."
The wind blows, the grass whistles rhythmically in response.
"It was worth it." He says suddenly. "Not Kayla, I mean. Mum. She was worth it."
Not that you ever realized that.
The wind softens slightly, lifting a browning rose petal on to Chase's knotted hands.
He stands, brushing the dirt sticking to the backs of his legs.
"Goodbye dad."
I love you.
He turns, for the first and last time being the one to walk away.
Loved you.
Just as he reaches his car, rain begins to fall reminding him that he is above water, above drowning.
The torch at last goes out.
x
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