Two days later, and Chase's stay in the hospital had officially been discovered by the whole hospital. Now somewhat more lucid and awake, Chase spent large portions of his day either putting on an appreciative face as hospital staff (notably female, of varying ages and questionable motives) dropped by to deliver grapes, cuddly toys and sympathy or, when he really couldn't hold the mask up any longer, pretending to be asleep, though it cost him his pride. These were his colleagues, people that he knew, and regardless of what his long term intentions were, he hated for them to see him vulnerable. He hated for anyone to see him vulnerable.
Though the publicity had brought him many more visitors, there was one notable absentee. Whilst House remained Chase's primary care giver, his visits to Chase's room were now limited to perfunctory, routine checks on Chase's health. Instead of his usual jibes, House remained largely silent during these visits, or carefully waited until Chase was asleep to check the charts.
Chase wasn't exactly upset by the lack of attention from House. His feelings towards the man were confused to say the least. In general, he was happier to live with the silence than expose anything else, anything that might be dangerous, threatening. So Chase complied obediently when House came to check up on him, equalling House's non-existent conversation.
Another advantage of the absent doctor was that Chase was now able to plan his imminent escape from the hospital. Although he knew that House would try and force him to stay in the hospital for at least another week, Chase had no such plans, and as a respected physician in the hospital, predicted that as long as he could avoid House, Cameron, and possibly Wilson, he should be able to convince the nurses that he was ready to go home, even if he did do it against hospital advice.
Chase's chance came the next day, and it couldn't have been more perfect. A new case had come in, an old friend of Cuddy's who she had forced House into taking on. As a result, Cameron, House, and Foreman, were all otherwise occupied. Chase didn't quite know what his plans were once he had escaped the hospital. Right now, all he knew was that he needed to escape. Over that last week or two, his freedom of choice had been entirely removed, first by House, and now by the steady stream of well wishers who poured through his door, leaving Chase with little to no time to think.
Hauling himself into a sitting position, with his legs dangling over the edge of the bed, Chase broke into a violent bout of coughing that aggravated the pain in his side. Had he been in a more reasonable frame of mind, Chase might have reconsidered his decision to run away, but as it was, Chase simply ignored the annoyance, removing the drip from the back of his hand, flinching just slightly as he did so, and then pulling himself onto legs unsteady from lack of use.
He reached for the sports bag on the floor which Wilson had used to bring him some stuff from his apartment. That was another issue that remnants of logic were screaming at Chase was going to cause him problems. As far as he knew, his apartment was still in much the same state of disarray as it had been when he had made his unconscious exit from it what felt like a lifetime ago. Chase couldn't quite remember the state that it was in, but he was sure it wouldn't be pretty. On top of that, there would be no food in the fridge. All in all, things were hardly set up for a man still suffering from pneumonia. But Chase refused to listen to the voice of reason. He felt stifled by the circumstances that had been forced upon him, as they had been his whole life. At least since his getaway to the states, he had felt like he had had some control over his life, control that had now been removed.
Chase wrapped a protective arm around his injured side as he bent down to retrieve a hoodie and a pair of sweats from his bag, though it did little to alleviate the pain, and once again his cough flared up. Forcing himself to get on with it, he sat in the chair beside the bed and pulled the sweats on over his boxers, before shakily undoing the string of the flimsy hospital gown and painfully manoeuvring the hoodie over his head. Slipping his feet into a pair of sneakers that he didn't recognise, Chase zipped up the bag and again got to his feet, using items of furniture to help himself to the door.
Chase pushed the door open slowly and peered out into the deserted corridor. Three doors down, there was every chance that House and the remaining ducklings were sitting in the conference room, puzzling over the latest case. Chase headed in the opposite direction, aiming for the elevator at the other end of the floor, all the while hoping not to bump into anyone he recognised. There was something entirely familiar about this scenario, and Chase thought back to a few days earlier as he had escaped from House's apartment. That hadn't played out too well. But again, Chase refused to think about the flaws in his plan, like the fact that his disappearance would be discovered within hours if not minutes, and that the logical place to look for Chase would be at his apartment, the only place that he had to go, and that without continuing treatment for his pneumonia, there was every chance that the bacteria would again multiply and the infection would come back full force. Chase pushed the thoughts away. If he didn't allow himself to believe them, then they couldn't be true. It was a tactic that he had often resorted to in childhood, and it had never worked all that well then either. But he was well practised at it, and could push his brain into believing almost anything he wanted it to. At least for a few minutes. Then reality had this irritating tendency to catch up with him.
Chase had reached the elevator by now, his mind still swirling in a haze of thoughts. He couldn't quite recall if he had seen anyone as he travelled the last few metres to the elevator, so lost in his own world had he been, but no-one had stopped him, so he rather assumed he had made it.
The elevator came to a halt on the ground floor, just ten feet from the exit, and Chase put his head down, and, fuelled by adrenaline induced strength, steadily walked the last distance to his freedom.
The doors slid open, and Chase finally found himself outside, breathing in the cool wintry air. His short burst of energy rapidly fading, Chase tried to suppress his cough as he half stumbled towards the taxi rank outside the hospital.
Chase reached the empty cab waiting first in queue at the rank, and fumbled with the door handle before finally managing to pull the door open and flop into the back of the cab. The driver, a wizened looking Latino, turned to face him.
"You sure you shouldn't be leaving in one of those things?" the driver asked him, pointing at an ambulance. Too exhausted to play along, Chase instead gave the driver his address, and leant back in the seat with his eyes closed.
"He's WHAT?" The voice echoed down the corridor, stilling people as far away as the ICU.
Dolores, the middle aged nurse who was one half of the double act to which Chase's care in the hospital had been entrusted, wasn't often stirred by irate doctors, having been in the job for thirty years, but under the glare of the six foot two man, crippled or not, she positively cowered.
"He was here when I administered his medication at 11…" she mumbled.
"Well that's fine then!" House answered, his eyes wide with sarcastic menace. "When he turns up dead in a few days time, you can just explain to Cuddy that everything's fine, because at 11 this morning he was alive and accounted for. What more matters?"
Dolores took a step backwards, expecting at any moment to have the House's full and notorious wrath unleashed upon her, possibly in cane form. For a moment it looked as if House would affirm her suspicions, bending over the five foot four frame in a threatening fashion. But taking Dolores completely unawares, he instead stepped back, turned, and hobbled towards his office, marching past a worried looking Cameron and a raised eye browed Foreman before locking himself away in his office and switching on his I pod to full blast.
Three hours later, Wilson found him in much the same position. After ten minutes of knocking, finally House saw fit to open the door.
"Led Zep, Stairway to heaven. Can't interrupt a master whilst they're at work," he explained.
"It's a recording," Wilson pointed out, unimpressed.
"Who says I was talking about Led Zep?" House replied. Fed up of the game, Wilson decided to get to the point.
"I just heard Chase has gone," he said expectantly. House merely flopped back into his chair and looked up at him nonplussed.
"And what does this have to do with me?" he asked. Wilson sighed.
"For starters, you're his doctor. Then there's the fact that you're the only one who really knows what happened to him in the first place, the fact that it was you who took him into your home to stop him from killing himself, that it was you that coerced me into driving around for hours looking for him, you who lied to everyone to protect his job, you who's kept him locked up in your room all this time…" Wilson trailed off, feeling he had made his point. House looked affronted, as if he had just been accused of a heinous crime. Perhaps, to his mind, he had. Because all of those things suggested that he actually cared.
"Now now, Wilson," he said in a consoling voice, as if soothing a wife who had just accused him of having an affair. "There are perfectly good explanations for all of those things."
Wilson had finally decided he had had enough. This was House's mess, and he wasn't going to stand around and pick up the pieces this time.
"You know what House? That's just fine. Keep pretending you don't care. Wait and see what happens. Wait and see who gets hurt. I'm going home. Sort out your own mess." And he stomped out of the door.
House sat in silent shock. Wilson had been angry with him before, but he had never really expected this to happen this time. Because this time someone else was involved in House's mess. A third party was in danger. And usually, Wilson played a fairly big part in clearing up House's messes. House hadn't expected Wilson to abandon him, but more than that, he hadn't expected him to abandon Chase. Not because he thought Wilson particularly cared about Chase, but because as far as Wilson was concerned, Chase was surely little more than an innocent victim caught up in House's never ending mind games.
But then he thought back to his own actions over the past few weeks. If it wasn't for him, Chase most probably wouldn't be here right now. Almost certainly in fact. So where did the mess that existed now stop being Chase's and turn into his own?
At the back of his mind, House knew that he cared, and that this was as much his own mess as it was Chase's simply for that reason. And Chase had yet to show any sign that he was ready to help himself. Quite the opposite in fact.
It was dark by the time House pulled up outside Chase's apartment block. If House had allowed his emotions to get the better of him, he might have said that he was sad to be back here, in this same situation, weeks on, fearing what he would find inside. But he wasn't the emotional type, he assured himself.
Hoping that he would have a use for the bag of medical supplies in the passenger seat, he turned towards the entrance of the building and once again caught the elevator to the fifth floor.
The bulb had gone out over Apartment 504, nestled away in a bend at the end of the corridor, an architectural flaw that was testimony to the quality of the building.
But more worrying than this, the door was ajar, and there weren't any lights on on the inside either. It didn't look like anyone had been in here in weeks.
But House already knew that Wilson had been by since that night only a week ago, wordlessly tidying up the mess and destruction, the overt reek of something that smelt a little like death, if you wanted to be fanciful about it. And Wilson wasn't the type to leave the door ajar. So something had changed. Some form of life had been here.
House pushed the door open with only the point of his index finger, but made no move to enter the apartment. The door swung inwards silently. House gave his eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, and then stepped forwards.
The first thing that struck him was the smell. Most obviously, disinfectant, but almost as strong was the stench of vodka. And underneath it, not quite masked by the valiant efforts of Wilson, was the smell of stale vomit. House reached for the light switch by the door, not really expecting it to work, but, surprisingly, the bulb flickered into life, suddenly exposing the room before him in a cold, artificial light. The bulb that hung from the ceiling was bare. Perhaps the look Chase had been going for was masculine and minimal. Perhaps it was just the circumstances, but House thought it looked more like something from the refrigerator of a morgue. Glancing around the room, House noted the dark stains on the carpet which appeared to be seeping out from under the sofa, evidently an attempt by Wilson to conceal the past.
But then something more interesting caught House's attention. Sitting by the sofa was his own sports bag, the bag that Wilson had brought Chase's belongings to the hospital in. Which could only mean…
"Come out come out wherever you are!" House called childishly. But the call was as much to try and shake out his own fear, the atmosphere that the apartment created, as it was to try and locate his missing patient, employee, and whatever else it was that Chase meant to him.
Treading as stealthily as he could, as if he was playing hide and seek, House began to tour the room, checking off a whole load of ridiculous and unlikely places as he went, though of course it wasn't because he was fearful of what he might find.
Under the coffee table: nope. Behind the door: nope. Under the sofa throw: nope.
Having checked the rest of the apartment, House ventured towards the partition wall that divided the kitchenette from the living room. House flicked the switch to the side, and again, the room before him flickered into sight.
And there before him, sitting with his legs to his chest on the middle of the floor, surrounded by shards of glass, was Chase.
A/N: The rest of the story (there are still a few chapters to come) will be posted in the next week, because I'm going away for the next half year to a third world country, so I will be leaving behind!