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Prodigal
by Jayne Leitch
Rating: Gen
Spoilers: All of season one
Disclaimers: Not mine, no infringement intended. I wouldn't mind if they *were* mine, but...alas.
Notes: Thanks to Ms MaryKate for providing beta services. Thanks of a different sort to Celli, for whom this story exists.
PRODIGAL by Jayne Leitch
"...so when you're writing up this case for your notes, remember to include lots of thinly-veiled slanders of the soft drink industry."
House underlined "slanders" three times, then turned away from the whiteboard to catch his audience's reactions. Cameron was wearing the little half-smirk that meant she found him more entertaining than she thought she should; Foreman was shaking his head like House was a three-year-old he'd caught scribbling on the wall with crayon; and Chase--
--Chase was still staring at the newspaper folded neatly on the table in front of him, just as he'd been staring at it since House arrived fifteen minutes ago. The fingers of his right hand riffled the edges of the paper, and his expression was one of weirdly fixated distraction. While House had no doubt that, if quizzed, Chase would be capable of recounting the important parts of the meeting verbatim, he also had no doubt that all the jokes he'd made--including the one about aspartame and _Six Feet Under_, which had come out racier than it had sounded in his head--had completely failed to register. Craning his neck a little, House peered at the paper, trying to read the upside-down section title.
"Is that it?"
House glanced up, but Chase hadn't moved; the only indication that he had spoken at all was in the looks Cameron and Foreman were now giving him, all raised eyebrows and perplexity at the sharpness of his tone. "I am the soul of brevity," he replied evenly after a moment's consideration. "That's it. Get out."
Predictably, Chase was first out the door; somewhat more unpredictably, he left the newspaper where it was. When Cameron tried to pick it up, House batted her hand away with the end of his cane. "You don't want that section," he told her, limping to the table and folding the paper under his arm before heading for his office. "It's mine."
*****
An old woman with a fresh blue rinse was leaving Chase's building just as House reached the door. She gave him a syrupy look as she held it open for him, the same syrupy look he always received from blue-rinsed old women who held doors for him all over the city; he made sure he was fully inside before he turned and said, "Before the leg, I used this cane to beat kittens."
Chase lived on the seventh floor. House took in the hallway's bland, family-hotel-like decor with a detached eye, and wondered briefly--not for the first time--at Chase's sense of style. As he drew up to the door he also wondered at himself: this was now the second time he'd taken it upon himself to trespass--physically--on the private life of one of his doctors. While he considered meddling in their lives fair game at the hospital, which was indisputably *his* turf and made *them* the trespassers, meddling in their homes was...different. It changed the entire dynamic.
He couldn't entirely let himself believe he had a right to meddle in their homes.
Nevertheless, Chase's rapid departure from the meeting that afternoon hadn't given him the option of doing this in his office, the way he'd wanted to. And leaving Chase alone wasn't much of an option, either. Shelving his discomfort, House knocked briskly and waited.
The look Chase gave him when he opened the door gave few clues as to whether he'd checked the peephole first; he looked tired and a little cross, but more defiant than surprised. He said nothing.
After a second, House held up the folded newspaper he'd brought from the hospital. "I should write an angry letter to GoogleAlerts. I haven't received any birthday notifications lately, either."
Chase stared at him--then, abruptly, turned and walked away, leaving the door open behind him. Raising his eyebrows, House followed him into the apartment and closed the door. He lingered for a moment in the small entrance area, staring briefly at a generic wooden coat stand that sprouted jackets from its top and was surrounded at its base with a neat arrangement of running shoes, sandals and rollerblades; then, he continued around a corner into a narrow, spotless, dimly-lit kitchen.
Chase was waiting, perched against the edge of the counter, his arms crossed. Dressed as he was in a fraying, long-sleeved t-shirt and ancient, faded jeans, he looked about fifteen years old; the petulant flash in his eyes made him look like he expected House to ground him for staying out too late. "You knew, didn't you," he said, clipping his words as if trying to negate the natural drawl of his accent. "About my dad, when he was here. You knew."
House dropped the paper onto the counter, meeting Chase's stare with one of his own. "I knew your dad wasn't in town to attend a conference," he allowed.
"You knew he was sick."
"Yes."
Chase's bare toes curled on the white tiles. "You were going to tell me. In your office, after he left."
"Yes."
"You *lied* to me."
House didn't even blink. "Yes."
"Why? Why didn't you tell me?" Uncrossing his arms, Chase reached out and snatched up the paper, opened it to the page with his father's obituary splashed across the middle third, and turned it around for House to see. "Why didn't you at least *warn* me?"
House sighed, his gaze falling to the picture of Rowan Chase accompanying the article: it had been taken at an awards ceremony five years ago, and the smile on Rowan's face was suffused with decorous pride. "It wasn't my place--"
"Don't." His hands clenched, crumpling the paper. "Don't say it was his decision. I've been making decisions that should've been his for more than a decade--"
"Oh, now I get it!" House snapped his fingers in mock-epiphany. "Instead of talking to your father, I should've gone straight to you. 'Hey Chase, I just found out your dad's dying. Do you want to hear about it from me now, or do you want to wait and see if he ever realizes you need to know?' My mistake."
The wrinkled paper hit the counter and slid, stopping just short of the sink. Chase took an angry step forward and faced House straight-on, one hand raised, two fingers pointing at him accusingly. "You *live* for that kind of situation, where you know something somebody else doesn't, but should, but *can't* unless *you* tell them. But hey, as long as you *know*, everything else is superfluous, right?"
House shrugged. "Knowledge is power. I know you know that; otherwise, we wouldn't have had that nasty business with Vogler."
"That's not the point--"
"Of course it's the point! All doctors play God with knowledge!" His leg was aching; distractedly, House shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out his pills, fumbling with the cap while he spoke. "It's the nature of the job: we know something they don't know, and we have to share what we know, because if we don't, people will die. And everybody gets that, which is why it's called a health-care *system*." He swallowed a pill in the space of a breath and kept going. "You go to work: people tell you what they know, you tell them what you know; they get better, you get paid. You went to Vogler: you told him what he wanted to know about me, he protected your job. You went to your dad before he left, I bet, which told him that you loved him, and I'm guessing he made some token gesture in return, because you weren't angry until you discovered that he was dying and, whoops, didn't tell you. The system broke down; *that's* why you're so pissed off."
Chase shook his head; House was a little amazed at the way his hair falling over his forehead made him look even younger. "You are *unbelievable*. You come to my apartment--you come into my *home*, and start blaming me for being upset about my dad's *death*?"
"Who said anything about blame?" Chase set his jaw and curled his lip; House pressed on before he could interrupt. "I'm not blaming you. Not for being upset, not even for yelling at me. You can't yell at him; dead people are notoriously bad listeners."
"Oh! Now you're analysing my *pathology*." Reassuming his perch against the counter, Chase spread his hands in contemptuous invitation. "Tell me, Doctor House: am I *really* transferring my anger at him onto you? Or am I yelling because you're a nosy bastard who pries into other people's lives because he's too afraid of taking a close look at his own?"
House blinked, all exaggerated innocence. "Wow. You *are* mad."
Without moving any other muscles in his face, Chase smiled. "How *is* Mrs Warner?"
"I'm not sure." His reply was immediate, flippantly nonchalant, a determined attempt to keep Chase from noticing the white-knuckled grip he suddenly had on his cane. "But she might be mad at me. I didn't tell her about your dad, either."
Chase laughed, a quick, utterly humourless chuckle that ended in a harsh sigh. His hands went to the edge of the counter and he squeezed it; leaning back a little, he watched House through narrowed, glittering eyes. "Why are you here?"
House met his gaze. "I wanted to see your place. It's nice; pretty much what I expected. Smaller, though." Shifting his weight from his good leg to his cane and back, idly encouraging the flare in his thigh, he nodded toward the table at the far end of the room. "I like the 'See No Evil, Hear No Evil' salt and pepper shakers."
"They were a gift."
"What happened to Speak No Evil?"
"Why didn't you tell me?"
House furrowed his brow. "Was that a coincidence, or did I just fall into a painstakingly-constructed trap?" Chase just looked at him; after a moment, House sighed. "He didn't want you to know. I..." As he trailed off, he tilted his head back and squinted up at the ceiling, his entire being fighting against the conclusion of the sentence. Finally, as occasionally happened, manners won. "...shouldn't have meddled."
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Chase jolt a little, as if caught unprepared--but when he glanced down at him, Chase was simply nodding, his gaze averted. "Do you know how much of my life has been dictated by the things he wanted?" Slowly, almost distractedly, he began to smile. "This may be the only thing he ever wanted and *didn't* get," he said, and looked up at House without a trace of anger.
House thought it was funny that triumphing over his father made Chase look older; in House's experience, the conquering of parents usually hurtled adult children backwards into all the immaturity of youthful glee. "How long have you known?"
"Since before he left." The little smile faded slightly; Chase crossed his arms as he went on, watching House as if waiting for him to interrupt with reprimands and disapproval. "When I saw the mark on his throat, I thought it was a pen smudge. I didn't think anything of it until I got a call from the lab--they'd misread his file, or mislabelled it or something, and contacted me instead of Doctor Wilson. It was actually a pretty inevitable mistake; I thought Dad might've taken something like that into consideration before deciding to be treated at the hospital where I work, but..."
"He had cancer, and we had Wilson."
"And he's never been good at understanding that sometimes, things just won't go according to his plans." Chase cleared his throat, shifted his weight against the counter. "I didn't know for sure during our conversation in your office. After, though, I pulled his file, all of it. And before he left, I knew everything."
House watched him appraisingly. "You hid it well."
Chase shrugged. "Once he was gone, nobody ever mentioned him again." His smile hardened for an instant. "All I had to do was wait."
"Speak no evil." House was gratified to see the look of confusion cross Chase's face; he didn't think he wanted to live in a world where he'd hired somebody *that* invested in petty symbolism. "You could have picked this fight with me at any time over the last three months," he observed, playing absently with the handle of his cane.
"I probably could have." Chase pushed himself off the counter and reached for the row of glasses on a shelf over the sink; he took one, then sent House an inquiring glance. When House declined with a shake of his head, he busied himself with pouring water. "I definitely wanted to, more than once. But pretty soon, I figured I'd done enough to piss you off. And waiting just seemed...easier."
Watching carefully for his response, House asked, "And was it?"
Chase swallowed a mouthful of water, watching him back. "Why are you *really* here?"
House held his gaze for a moment--then laughed, a wry breath, ducking his head. "You forgot your father's obituary at the office," he said, nodding to the rumpled newspaper still on the counter.
Chase's glass made a dull thud as he set it down on top of the paper. "I didn't forget it. And I didn't need it; one of my aunts called yesterday morning." When House glanced up, Chase's expression was decidedly neutral. "I didn't think you'd heard yet."
House considered this and found himself nodding, something that felt very much like a smirk twitching at the corners of his mouth. "I didn't think you had it in you," he said, aiming for indifference.
Chase leaned his hip on the counter again, the fingers of his right hand just touching the edges of the newspaper. "Yeah," he agreed, a note of sad satisfaction in his voice. "Neither did he."
End.
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of Fox Television, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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