Author's Note: It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures. –Ally Condie
Chapter takes place during Season 4, Episode 2: The Right Stuff.
Disclaimer: I don't own House, M.D., nor its concepts, characters, and setting, but I do love them, especially Chase.
Chase was happy. Clearly, getting fired was no more of a 'tragedy' than Mr. Knoller's rake had been.
God knew it had been painful, but it had brought Cameron back to him, this time willing to try for an actual relationship, and it had brought him a surgical residency. All things work for good…
Two weeks surfing down at Folly Beach in the interim had made waiting while Cuddy and Thomas negotiated more a pleasure than a burden. Now, however, Chase was ready to work. Nor would he have to do it alone. Cuddy had filled the open Emergency Room position with Cameron.
Cameron told him House had apparently not even noticed she was still at PPTH. Then again, the ER was on the opposite side of the building and four floors down from the Department of Diagnostic Medicine, and she had intentionally stayed out of sight to see how long it would take their former boss to discover her presence. Three weeks and counting.
Chase had no such willpower. It was out of his way, but he couldn't resist the urge to go up to the fourth floor and walk past the DDM offices where he'd worked so long, as his very first action on his very first day back. The walls were glass, he couldn't resist looking in… to see who was replacing him.
Cuddy and Cameron had told him the place was choc a bloc with applicants, and indeed, the conference room contained what looked like a full team: House, plus two women and one man, all three sporting the white lab coats of doctors. House looked over at him, and their eyes met. Chase kept walking. He was due in Dave Thomas' office in two minutes, and the Head of Surgery despised tardiness in his residents.
Chase had entered the gallery under orders from Thomas to go watch what was supposed to be a splenectomy, but found House and his… "team" in the O.R. instead.
It was like… what? Seeing an old girlfriend while out and about? One you maybe weren't quite over yet?
What were they doing? Chase looked at the two clear waiting mounds over to the side—were they doing a breast augmentation? What the hell for?
"Cysts, I count three of them," someone said.
"Probably the same if not more on the left lung," House replied. "Okay, so what's been working overtime to kill Miss Bin Laden?"
Miss Bin Laden? But pure House to be DDXing in the middle of a procedure. I remember this…
The conversation below him continued, House offering, "Say the magic word and get immunity from the next challenge."
A woman's voice said, "Alveolar hydatid disease. Hits all the organs." Was she one of the two he'd seen in the DDM conference room?
"She would've had multiple seizures by now," the master objected.
The short man across from House, apparently the owner of the voice who had counted three cysts, pitched, "Pulmonary Langerhans."
House's tone was mild, coaxing, his teaching tone. The tone that meant he'd already figured out the answer, and he wanted you to do so, too, so you could feel good about yourself. "Wouldn't explain the red blood cells. C'mon. Cysts, synaesthesia, heart attack—"
Chase couldn't help it. His heart ached and soared at the same time. He pressed the button that would allow him to communicate with the O.R. "Von Hippel-Lindau Syndrome."
House looked up as Chase continued, "Raises red blood cell count, causes masses on the organs. If one of the masses is a pheochromocytoma, it'd cause neurologic episodes and a heart attack."
He saw House lean over the patient to speak to the short man across the operating table. The man looked up at Chase and nodded.
House grabbed the microphone. "This is a closed procedure; gallery's off limits."
Of course. Tell him the right answer, it still doesn't matter. But 'off limits'? Not hardly. "Not to the surgical staff."
House's mike was still open. "You going to hire that guy instead of us?" the short man asked.
House looked up at Chase without replying, as if he were considering it.
Chase met his eyes and could feel his own head slowly shaking no. House had made that decision a month ago. Chase had no time machine, to undo what had been done.
He heard House telling the applicants in the O.R., "Not a chance. I love you guys—" before the observation room door had shut behind him, and he was safe in the hall. He knew as well as anyone that you can't go back. And fair dinkum, he was happy to be back in a surgical residency, but—God, he had loved working for House.