Nikelodean: Thanks for the info. about the HIV test! I went back and edited chapter 8 ever so slightly, so if you really feel like reading it over again...just to keep the facts straight...Thanks!
Amber Chase: Have a terrific time on your retreat! Stop by when you get back, I hope you enjoy the chapters waiting for you!
Dafina: OMG, that was so nice of you to say! (The whole thing about it seeming like an episode of the show, I mean.) LOL, it might take up a whole season.
Jeevesandwooster: Don't cry! I didn't mean it, I really didn't! Well, I meant the story, but not to make you cry! I promise it'll be okay...all questions will be answered within the next few days.

So here's chapter nine, enjoy! Chapter Ten might take a few days because I'm actually doing something tomorrow...baby-sitting. Bleh! Oh, well, money is money, I'm not complaining. Lots of love, you guys!

"Come on, Dr. House," Julia continued. "Sit down."

"Thanks so much for your hospitality," he said sarcastically, pulling up a chair.

"Why don't you call him what he should be called?" Alma asked impatiently. "Why don't you call him by his rightful name?"

"I call him by his title because I'm not comfortable with anything else yet," she said, catching his eyes. Thank-you, they said, and she read them without any trouble. "So, how long has it been since you've seen each other?"

"A long time," House said.

"Very long," Alma added. "Not since we graduated from high school." Her voice sounded bitter.

Julia nodded, then sat back in her bed. "Can you tell me anything yet?"

"Christ, Julia, it's only been two days," House informed her irritably. "Give us some time –"

"Time?" Alma repeated, her voice shrill. "You want to talk about time? I waited for weeks for you to call me back and you never did. I've been waiting since then for this to happen, and finally it has. I want something out of it."

"You don't always get what you want," House said.

"I'm not asking too much," she told him, starting to cry all over again. "I just want to know what happened. I thought we were having fun, Greg. I thought you loved me, or at least liked me enough not to put me through all the shit I experienced anyway."

"Do you always curse around your daughter?" he asked. "What an example you've set."

"I seem to remember an F-word slipping out the day I met you," Julia said. "That was before you even knew who I was."

Alma glared at him. He glared at Julia. "I didn't come in here to be verbally attacked by a bunch of crazy women," he told them coldly, standing up.

"And we didn't come here to be toyed with, damn it," Alma said sharply. "Greg, it's all too obvious we're over. I'll even understand if you don't want to have anything to do with your only daughter." She said the words much more hurtfully than she'd intended, and she knew they had cut into Julia's heart like a knife. "But come on. You're a goddamn doctor, and this is your job. Just get her well."

"You certainly know how to change your tune quickly," he commented dryly. "One minute, it's, 'Oh, Greg, don't leave me again.' The next you don't give a damn as long as I can tell you what you want to hear. Pick one, and then I'll see what I can do."

"Stop it," Julia said. "Jesus, you sound like a couple of kids. We all know this is a very awkward situation."

"One that you dragged us into," Alma said. "Julia, was this a coincidence?"

"Of course not, Mom," she replied exasperatedly. "It's the only thing you ever did for me when you were drunk. I could get anything I wanted out of you. Whether or not you loved Len, my real dad's name, could I have another cookie. I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone, and I succeeded."

"Jesus, you can be such a bitch sometimes," Alma said, looking down.

"She learned from the best," House shot at her.

"I won't let you go around talking to me that way in front of our daughter!"

"How noble of you," House seethed. "But isn't it a little contradictory to tell me not to yell at you in front of her when you went and got married to a goddamn psychopath that treats you, and her, a hundred times as badly as I ever could?"

"Stop! Fighting!" Julia shouted, saying each word as a separate sentence. She had learned the most effective way to earn silence was to imitate it between words. Her parents both stopped arguing and looked at her. "I said it the day I came in here, and I'll say again. I'm sorry, I was a stupid woman to try this."

"You're not a woman," Alma said accusingly. "You're a spoiled brat."

"She's more of a woman than you'll –"

"Dr. House," Julia interrupted, enunciating the words very clearly. He groaned in exasperation but fell silent. "Thank-you. Look, Mom. For the past 24 hours, I've found that I can get along with my biological father very easily by pretending he is just my doctor and nothing more." She glared at him, hoping he could receive telepathic messages. Certainly her mother didn't need to know the part about him cradling her until she'd stopped crying long enough to make his escape. "I suggest that you try that. And Dr. House, it would make this whole awkward experience much easier if you wouldn't bring up things from the past just to make yourself sound wittier and more intelligent. It hasn't worked yet, and it won't in the future. Do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal," he said, tapping his foot impatiently. "Can I go now? I'm going to check out some of your test results."

"That would be terrific," she said, smiling. "Go ahead."

House walked away, trying not to scream. Had his own daughter just ordered him around, and gotten her way!

"Mom?" Julia asked. "Is that okay with you?"

"Julia, I am so disappointed in you," Alma said, standing up. "I can't believe you were selfish enough to come here without thinking who else it would affect besides your own precious self." She walked to the door.

"Mom, please don't leave," Julia pleaded, her eyes filling up with tears. If she goes home and starts drinking again, whose fault will it be but mine? If she passes out, who's going to be there to clean up her vomit and beer bottles? Who will call 911 if something goes wrong? "I'm sorry, I should have thought about it."

"Too late," Alma whispered, walking into the lobby.

"Mom…Mommy…" Julia trailed off. "Jesus. I can't do this anymore. If she wants to swim in the alcohol till it's coming out of her eyes, that's fine, but I can't crawl into the bottle with her every time she decides to dump her problems on my conscience. I'm 19 years old, damn it, and she's 37! She should be taking care of me. Even when I'm in the hospital, even when we don't know how many more breaths I'm going to draw… 'Julia, it's all your fault, you're so selfish. What about my needs?'" She shuddered violently, and reached for a tissue…

"Julia?"

She froze. Oh, God. It's that voice. The hot Australian cross-dresser.

Chase opened the door, a concerned look on his face. Could she possibly be hallucinating now? There's no one in the room she could be talking to. "Who are you talking to?"

She laughed, a high, hysterical laugh that wasn't so much of an expression of joy as a cry for help. "No one, just me," she said. "I'm monologuing. I do that sometimes, during…times of, ummm…stress," she finished lamely. Shit. The hot Australian cross-dresser thinks I'm crazy. "So, what brings you to my room, Dr. Chase? Need more blood? Checking my vitals? Or are you here to make sure I'm telling Dr. House absolutely every part of my medical history? I can assure you, your colleagues have been taking excellent care of those things all day."

"Can't a doctor just want to check up on his patients' general well-being?" Chase wanted to know, taking a seat beside her. "Like, perhaps wondering if she's comfortable, or if she's lonely, or if she wants to talk?"

Julia smiled. "That's more than fine, Dr. Chase."

"So," he said. "Are you comfortable?"

"Very much so," she answered truthfully.

"Lonely?"

"God, no," she said, sounding repulsed at the idea. "I have people constantly coming in and out of this room. It's like it's a freaking train station or something, the way there's a new face every second."

He laughed. "So I'm supposing you don't need to talk then, if there's a new face every second."

Julia considered this. "That's not necessarily true," she said, suddenly becoming shy. She blushed, looked down, and suddenly seemed to become very interested in the seam on bed sheet. "Don't get me wrong, everyone's been great. I couldn't have asked for more. It's just that…I don't know, no one here's really seemed to care about how I'm doing up here –" she tapped her temple "- as opposed to physically. I know they do, I mean, it's just that they're so busy…"

"We're not as busy as you think," Chase told her. "At least, I'm not. I'm here if you need to say anything."

"Better than talking to myself," Julia admitted. "And I feel very close to you, you know, Dr. Chase."

"Really?" he said, sounding astonished. "Why is that?"

"Well," she said, appearing to be trying to choose her words carefully. Then she glanced up at him, a mischievous grin on her face. "I'm assuming it's not every girl in the world you feel comfortable enough to wear a dress around."

Chase laughed heartily. "You're right, you know," he said. "I suppose that's true. Well, in that case, we must be very close, Ms. Peterson."

"If we're close, you've got to call me Julia," she said. "I don't get it. I'm still practically a kid. I mean, 19. I don't care about formalities. My mom named me this because she thought it was…a pretty name…" No, she didn't. She named you Julia because right after she had you, she went right back to drinking. Then she got it in her head to name you after some cheerleading bitch from her high school that she had never liked anyway. She keeps telling you day after day how much she regrets giving you the name "Julia" because it brings back such bad memories and she never liked it anyway. Julia stopped smiling.

"What's wrong?" Chase asked.

"Just thinking about my mom," she said. Tell me my voice didn't just shake like that.

"Has she been here?" he asked. "I don't think I've seen her."

"She just left," Julia said miserably. "I don't know where she was before, I don't know where she's going now."

Chase shifted in his chair uneasily. He wasn't used to playing the kindhearted listening ear; he was more of a silent observer when he bothered listening to other people. "You sound a little…uneasy talking about her," he commented, hoping it wasn't rude.

"She's tough to deal with," Julia admitted. "Dr. Chase, I love my mom. A lot. But it's pretty pathetic when the child ends up taking care of the parent, don't you think?"

He swallowed. This too nearly echoed his own experience. "I do. Care to elaborate a bit, perhaps?"

She sighed. "My mom's an alcoholic, my step-dad's a murderous psychopath, and my real dad's…" My doctor. "Well, his parenting leaves much to be desired. Like, maybe he could actually be present more often, you know?" Julia glanced at Chase, carefully gauging his reaction.

Then, slowly, he spoke. "You know, that's very strange, how very nearly identical we really are."

After recognizing their similarities, Julia's story spilled out. Chase listened and understood, empathy suddenly coming naturally to him. She couldn't tell him the part about House – couldn't bring herself to out him to his entire team just yet – but everything else flowed easily between them. When they finished talking, Julia was very close – and understandably so – to tears. She was too exhausted from everything to let them go, thus saving her from what could have been very humiliating.

"That's a lot of baggage you've been carrying around," Chase told her gently, feeling very strongly like he should touch her, maybe hold her hand or pat her shoulder.

"Back at you," she said. "Wow. Now we know everything about each other, every dirty little secret, and we're no closer to letting it go, are we?"

"You can't let it go yet," Chase protested. "You still see this every day. You still have to watch your mother do this to herself. I wouldn't go through it again for anything."

"Is it very slow?" she asked softly. "Watching them drink themselves away?"

"It was for my mother," he said. "Don't be angry about it, whatever you do. You'll find it alienates you from the people you most need to be surrounded by."

She laughed suddenly. "Thank-you, voice of experience. But let me ask you this: Looking back, do you see anything you could have done to save her?"

"Yes," he said, sounding surprised that she would even ask such a thing. "For every drink she had, there were probably ten things I could have done. You ever feel guilty, like her life is your hands and you're not doing a good enough job taking care of her?"

"Every day."

"Logically, that's not true. You have to know that," Chase told her firmly. "But emotionally…"

"Nothing can tell you otherwise," she finished for him.

"Exactly." They fell silent, contemplating everything they had just shared.

"I hope she comes back soon," Julia said, suddenly sounding very young. "I hope she even remembers where I am when she wakes up in a drunken stupor. I hope she remembers I even exist."

"She loves you," Chase said. "You know that, don't you? Just like you love her. It's nothing to be ashamed of."

"Feels like it," Julia mumbled dejectedly.

"Getting gloomy on us again?" Chase asked her, deciding now was the time to change the subject. "Am I going to have to wear a dress the next time I come to see you? Please don't put me through it again, Julia, that damn tutu itched like hell…"

"See!" she cried triumphantly. "You men folk don't appreciate the effort we of the female variety make to look good."

"Point taken," he laughed. "I appreciate it, although I must admit I do think you'd look good no matter how much effort you put into it."

Julia's heart monitor started beeping, not lethally fast but high enough to cause alert. They both glanced at it, and Julia blushed wildly. Please, God, just melt me into the floor and I'll never lust after him again, she prayed. Please make the beeping go away. Safe place, safe place, safe place… Of course, it was all Chase's fault. If he wouldn't go around saying things like that, it never would have happened.

Chase grinned, and was infectious, eventually spreading to Julia's rose red face. "That was cute," he told her, walking to the door. "I'm going to give you some private time to see if you can get that under control." He closed the door slowly, not taking his eyes off of her as he did so.

"Unh," she groaned, falling back onto her pillows. "Tell me my heart didn't just go as fast as the speed of light and give Dr. Chase the humiliating but totally correct assumption that I'm half-in-love with him."

So that's chapter nine, and I think we might just be getting somewhere! I don't know if that part with the heart monitors was even possible or not, but whatever, I thought that was mildly amusing. Enjoy! Chapter ten is on it's way! Be afraid. Maybe I'll spare you more anguish over this story if you leave reviews.