Chapter 2 – Three Stories
T.V. Show: House MD
Pairing: Chase canon, Major Chase/Cameron
Author: Foxes' Dreams
Summary: Scars are reversible; the cure is always foreseeable for those who wait patiently. Chase has finally found a sure and defiant reason to start rebuilding a changed version of himself despite all the tormenting past secrets that haunt his capturing memory. But, his newly-appeared daughter refused to let him brush near the macabre and somber visions without overcoming their effect. Sequel to "Ticking Clock".
Love is like an hourglass, heart filling up as the brain empties." - Jules Renard
The old, decayed log, long softened by rot and spotted with moss, seemed to mark the imminent appearance of autumn, frigid and dusk-darkened. The damp, the whizzing chirr of thunders and the syncope of obscure flashes were kept at a considerable distance by the cozy, comforting environment of the enclosed hospital.
"She's just amazing!" Chase exclaimed forcefully, half-chocked by the paroxysm of adoration.
His high-pitched voice clearly disturbed the ultimate stillness of the cafeteria, bringing many pairs of eyes to judgmentally look in his direction. He, returned to Foreman, condensed into intimate speech, for minutes elaborating images of great significance.
"Man, I've never seen you so love struck before, let alone all the cases with babies in them," Foreman sneered laughingly, smiling with obvious acceptance. "I get you bonded with the kid really tightly?" He asked, giving the same civil rejoinder of ironic rebound.
"You kidding? She's practically my splitting image, interested in diagnosis and puzzles, and moreover, incredibly smart and kind," He only smiled with fatuous superiority, launching words naturally.
"Dude, I really need to say that it's the irony of fate, since you two look so alike. I bet that's why she wanted to meet you so badly," Foreman shambled away with speed the idea, pausing for a moment to be out-struck by the undeniable resemblance.
"It's okay if she comes to see some procedures on Career's Day?" Chase asked directly, changing the subject, so that he could avoid the vulgar prizes of life, mostly picturing Cameron.
"Yeah, sure. Keep an eye on her, though, not to get scared by your psych patient," The Dean of Medicine warned, discreetly silent, empty of further thought, only genuinely concerned.
"He'll have been discharged by then, if the treatment actually works. He's given us all headaches with constant complaining about heartburning or psychotic breaks," Chase admitted, clearly entangled in a paradox of caring and ignorance. "Ashley will be more than interested to see him since she resolved the case," He continued, rambling uncontrollably about the success of his daughter. His voice writhed in the grip of a definite apprehension and muffled by the constant chewing on an exotic salad.
"Come again?" Foreman inquired, losing the track of events and quaking on the verge of a bilious, contrary attack.
"Ashley found out the diagnosis for my patient. She pointed to pulmonary embolism and then the final diagnosis struck all of us," Chase said, his face obviously lit up by a glow of divine inspiration and resolve.
"How could she know that?" Foreman insisted on the matter, his stern gaze stiffening anew into gray, impersonal obstinacy.
"She is passionate about mysteries, both about computers or biological. And yes, her friends dragged her to watch countless medical shows," Chase clarified, his musing taking an anticipated and arbitrary twist.
"Man, she is the copy of you." The two adults bursted into iconic laughter, both of their minds becoming overfilled with past anecdotes. "Wait, friends or boyfriend?" Foreman teased, purposefully to create a basic, light atmosphere where his mate's paternal strength could be scattered into fits of agitation.
"She has two best friends, both guys known from the childhood, and they are just inseparable," Chase explained detailed, his masculine voice suddenly coaxing inflections of an immature being.
"Two?! She's playing her cards really well. I hope Cameron gave her 'the talk', otherwise it's all on you, bud," Foreman joked loudly, his conscience leaping to light and easiness, his brow growing knit and gloomy.
"Very funny, trying to scare me off with common things that other parents are afraid of. I'm off the hook for such duties since she's a teenager," Chase rectified, gloriously showing a matching grin while his ears sang with the vibrating intensity of the humor's secret existence.
Foreman just echoed his strong, extrovert attitude, his eyes reflecting a twinkle of reminiscent pleasantry, lost in the primrose path of old days.
"Speaking of it, Cameron's okay with her wandering nonstop around PPTH?" Foreman asked, sensitively touching a bundle of nerves, defective of any exterior, protective layer.
"Even if she has something to object, she hasn't said it out loud. I bet Ashley would have stayed either way, because she's so stubborn when she definitely wants something," Chase admitted, his gaze oddly full of unconquerably torn with inner conflict. Under the deep pressure, his small hands were trembling on the supported fork, looking vulnerably small and prehensible.
"That means she'll dedicate entirely to having an honest relationship with you and I feel you'll be soon wrapped around her little finger," Foreman replied, his impatient scorn expired as his heart rebuked him in front of such a thunderously tender appreciation.
Chase sipped one last overwhelmingly warm gulp of bittersweet coffee and his lips loosened in a furtively exultant and good-humored smile. "Gotta go, I have a surgery in thirty minutes," He announced promptly, receiving only an imperceptible nod in exchange, the fresh tides of intense thoughts hovering above both of their unsettled minds.
As Foreman watched him exit the over-saturated cafeteria, his shrewd gaze fixed appraisingly on his trace, his mood completely yielded and last illusions crumbled. He watched Chase metamorphosing into the incarnation of negativity, later reaching the self-destructive phase, and now he could only hope that the unexpected appearance would guarantee him self-esteem.
Ashley's soul was wrung with a sudden, wild homesickness since the moment she arrived at her shared place to be encountered by the transparent absence of her newly-found sibling.
Her torpid ideas awoke again, compressed by a single agony of prayer, until she would be granted freedom. Abominably humorous, her words became a jumble of syllables, all pleading and exquisitely languish.
"But, mom, please, I want to go, I've never been in the middle of a diagnostic department before," Ashley vainly tried to convince, her reasons growing stolid and unlashing.
"What happened to or tradition? You spent every Career's Day with me in the ER so far and you haven't ever complained," Cameron said, her voice insensibly becoming inquisitorial, and slightly accusing. She felt as though all her vagrant peace was trailing off brokenly after the big encounter. She had never planned such a glorious revelation, but destiny had decided contagiously opposite.
"Time changes. I have the opportunity to get to know my father better after long years when he was absent," The young girl proclaimed, rising warningly the tone, assenting in the precisely right terms.
"I still have the right as your mother to spend time with you as we used to," Cameron shot back, a crowning bitterness flowing in her veins while her lips pursued in defiant scorn.
"And we are spending time together. It's just one occasion, one skip, nothing that will affect us," Ashley pressed the issue further, herself disarming anger and rigid asperity.
"We're spending now, but in the years to come, maybe we won't have the chance to," Cameron almost shrieked in response, feeling the ground crumbling beneath her unsteady feet, ready to collapse in front of such an apocalyptic disclaim.
"We'll always find time to. We're mother and daughter and no one is going to change that and Chase knows how important my bond with you is," Ashley clarified, forcing a faint, quivering smile, filled with anxious incomprehension towards her mother's reluctance.
"Is he good with you?" Cameron asked suddenly, talking a good portion of oxygen in order to strangle a fierce tide of fear that welled up deep inside her. She had already anticipated the answer, speaking with sweet severity from the years when Chase's prompt and full attention was directed particularly to youngsters.
"He's brilliant, so attentive, he's truly fulfilling the image of a father I've long imagined," Ashley confessed, conscious of a tumultuous rush of sensations overwhelming her beating heart.
"Then that's all I'm asking for now," Cameron replied simply, bearing permanently the odds of co-parenting, clearly thriving sincerity.
"That means a yes?" Ashley asked eagerly, her pupils growing wide at the unconfirmed, but foreseen answer.
Cameron could only plaster a fragile nod before two girly, thin arms encircled her tightly, a posture demure and deeply appealing for their close relationship.
"Thank you so much! I promise nothing will drastically change," Ashley reassured, oppressed by an alive melancholy. "But it would be a good idea to talk to him again, maybe make an agreement to spend time together all three of us," She continued, planning a sheer superfluity of happiness, which would bring them in the symphony of family. Soar in the rosy space of contemplating, she could just let herself prey to that reverie.
"We'll see about that, too," Cameron replied simply, after a long pause.
Her arms were stilled around Ashley, enveloping her in a mantra of protectiveness. Softened by the solicitude of untiring love coming exactly from Chase, she virtually considered the option.
She suffered, she abolished normalcy, but the idea of recreating a united family was curiously engaging.
Outside, a metamorphosis was occurring; the lichen growth of the low-lying boulders and the moss encircling the trunk of the tress could easily be examined as though the nature was resurrecting itself. The damp air, the gigantic water-laden leaves that were constantly dripping, the storms coming with monotonous regularity, the very earth itself cloying after the shallowest shower, were all long disappeared.
Some exquisite refinement could be found in Ashley's architecture of the brain as she seized the moment, looking for an open gate to grant her access and freedom to speech.
All four of them were smitten, sorely solitary souls, standing in the very far and dimly lit corner of the amphitheater, where the images played seemed to be only an incoherent paraphernalia of flashes and vivid colors.
"She accepted!" Ashley whispered eagerly, breaking the solemn silence, threatening to pervade the settling monotony.
"Your mother is letting you to spend Career's Day with Chase?" Stefan asked rhetorically, feeling contradictory skirmishes and retreats of conscience. He scooted a little, to minimize the area separating their exhausted bodies, slowly engaging significance from the thicket of words.
"No way!" Adrian shrieked uncontrollably, feeling the anguish of sharp and palpable surprise.
"Pay the money, man!" The other masculine voice commanded promptly, as he stood calm, behind a mask of perfected, eternal dignity.
"Dammit, I should not have dealt with you!" Adrian said acidly, stilled by inward, succulent protest.
"Wait! Did bet on this?" The petite blonde asked, as she regarded sternly both of her amicable acquaintances out of her stonily flint-blue eyes.
"10 bucks, easy money for me," Stefan responded, seemingly wrapped in a veil of victory and undeniable triumph.
"She really surprised me. I mean I told her about spending time together, all three of us and she looked quite calm, almost accepted the proposal without blinking," Ashley clarified, pouring out the opulence of full recognition that didn't fail to amaze her entirely.
"That's weird! But, as we know your mom, she can be really oscillating," The sensitive, cracking masculine voice confessed, attributing the person in cause a portrait of meaningless, facile traits.
"It's not odd at all. Only one explanation makes sense and I know you're thinking about it," Stefan suggested as ultimate theory, nourishing a previously irresponsive dream.
Two pairs of casually arranged eyebrows shot up, lingering in that position for many leisure seconds as they restrained the pressure of unleashed fury and wild desire of knowledge.
"She still has feelings towards your father. And now, she has the opportunity to get him back," Stefan finalized, setting a new, refreshening perspective of the events.
"Are you hearing what you say? They don't even talk to each other!" The other teenager boy sustained, cataloging all the insanity as irrelevant with a defiant tone.
"Okay, slow down, guys. Stefan might be right. I mean, who keeps reminders of a person she desperately tries to avoid unless she has a different opinion?" Ashley jumped back into the conversation, sensing the scrupulous morality of conduct as light entered even the most remote parts of her brain.
"A masochist, maybe?" Adrian replied jokingly, taking advantage of the sensuous enjoyment of the outward show.
"This is not a coincidence," The irrevocably trustful, feminine person concluded, a seizing, serious lurked in the depth of her eyes as the plan repeated over and over in her head and catching a contour of pure sufficiency.
In the obscure lights and jumble of chaotic syllables, she could only plaster a timid smile that blurred into a wide grin, serenity dancing across her ardent lips.
Despite the steady dryness, the wind was carrying a scent of winter jasmine, which grew colder and colder, revealing the pastoral scene of awakening autumn. The deep shadow of a gigantic, imperial maple tree seemed to conquer the earthy surface, suppressing all the vital flashes of warmth and obscure light.
The nature seemed to be abstracted into a certain implication of sorrow and grief, misunderstood and capricious for every alive human being.
"Exactly as you ordered, pancakes with two pieces of butter, no honey," Chase proclaimed proudly, a calmness settling on his spirit as he joined his daughter at one isolated table. Some timid rays penetrated the closed blinds, providing a much needed camp of vision to all the occupants of the deserted cafeteria.
"You already know me too well," Ashley responded sincerely, suddenly aware of the affective implication her words had released. She clumsily arranged the wrinkles on her white blouse, letting a childish belief in its own impeccability enter her veins. "So, what's the plan for today? I really need to see something spectacular to brag about at school," She asked, a covertly eager voice lacing the words.
"You'll definitely see a lot of fascinating things for the school report and gossip," Chase answered, a satisfaction perfectly angelic coming into his features. "First of all, we are going to do some clinic rounds, finish a short laboratory biopsy, and finally move on to a concrete diagnosis," He scheduled tactfully, creating an air of vigor and vitality that would make this visit a memorable one.
"Sounds perfect!" Ashley exclaimed playfully, a constant stream of rhythmic images flashed before her eyes.
As they ate in silence, with completely no syllables mustered, they realized the magnitude of the bond, claiming utterance in their hearts.
The day passed at a regular, rigorous pace, leaving spaces for the scientific mysteries to entwine with the aphasic routine. A dandified figure of adoration overwhelmed Chase's smoothest features in every moment Ashley's excitement caught impressive measures.
After completing the dauntless campaign of easy platitudes, they were standing at the nurses' station, relaxing and reminiscing the oblivion of past actions.
"Can you imagine how many times people asked what does Australia look like?" Ashley asked comically, motivated to enlighten the colorless, passing moments.
"I assume that's because you pronounce most of the words with a deep accent," Chase responded, feeling a deliciously tantalizing sense of pride and an exuberant smirk marked his lips.
"Exactly. And it's so weird, since I have never heard someone speaking with accent around me," The young person added, truly exposing a detached segment of life.
"These things can be genetically transmitted. You're obviously my girl," Chase claimed possessively, tracing his palm around the middle section of her forearm as his cheshire grin widened.
"That doesn't change the fact that I want to see the whole country," Ashley proposed, a faint accent of reproach marking the sentence.
Chase meditated intensely and then let out a fiery exclamation of wrath. "Here's a deal. On your summer vacation, I'll take you to see the land of kangaroos, dingoes and surf."
"You're just amazing! Now I have something to be anxiously waiting for," Ashley shrieked, becoming a figure full of contentment and balanced stare. "When are we going to see the patient?" She inquired, continuously pacing and keeping a glassy expression of inattention.
"Right after I complete the whole paperwork," Her father answered, promptly conserving his collected demeanor.
"What does this guy have? I really can't read your handwriting," Ashley asked again, more amusingly and openly this time.
"Very wise for your age, aren't you?"He asked rhetorically, and pinched the side of her face, causing a flame of scarlet to spread swiftly, diagonally across her cheeks."The patient presented in the ER with hugely swollen feet, and jugular venous pressure, that meant he had a serious case of hepatomegaly," He explained in detail, measuring the ghastly whiteness overspreading on her face.
"Which means?" Ashley asked, feeling a sense of loss in front of the labyrinthine terms.
"The excessive swell of the liver. And because of you, we discovered the pulmonary edema and not the pulmonary embolism as we thought," Chase continued his speech, not ever ignoring the charming glamour when such difficult terms were spoken.
"So what does he have finally?" Ashley wanted to know ultimately, giving a glance of extraordinary meaning.
"He has cardiogenic pulmonary edema, but with continuous positive airway pressure he got healed," Chase presented pompously as if he was the generation of men lavishly endowed with geniality.
"So, what's the big enigma about him?" The petite blonde concealed, an exuberance of ambition marking her question.
"He is a certified psycho and barely let us touch him," The physician responded simply, impersonally. "He's restrained to bed now, so he shouldn't give us any headache," He clarified, as he witnessed Ashley's mask of calmness crumbling furiously into ashes.
They walked in distressing silence to the reserve where the patient was previously organized to stay. A golden haze of pensive light was illuminating the chamber which was oddly empty.
"Where's the patient?" Ashley inquired, a great pang of confusion gripping her heart.
"He ought to be here, since he isn't scheduled to undergo any procedure," Chase stated, a great process of searching and shifting erupting in his mind.
Just as a sudden, grim prophecy, a crowd of combined people, medical staff and innocent, ordinary citizens mingled in the same hysterical group, fatally threatened by one, single pointed weapon.
Chase moved Ashley behind his back and gripped her terribly shaking hand, as the exposed situation turned out to be a deprecating horror and unleashed incredulity.
"Everyone on the right wall, face me and don't even dare to say a word," The harassing attacker commanded, his gruesome voice startling compunction and anxiety of sorrow to rush in all the captives' bloodstream.
A harvest of barren regrets started in Chase's heart as he fought dearly to protect his closest sibling, feeling the haunting and murmuring insecurity taking over him completely. A helpless anger simmered in him as he reviewed the plot of past stabbing.
A heavy oppression was in the air, and seemingly, a hint of death in the icy tension sending a gush of salty water in the corner of Ashley's eyes.
Author's Note: I know, the cliffhanger! Keep in mind that this story has a happy ending! :)
Andreza, "the talk" and kangaroos both mentioned!