This fic takes place firmly in S2 of House (just after the finale, "No Reason") and does not include any HP characters. (If unfamiliar with any HP terms, see the glossary in the endnotes.) No one at PPTH knows about the magical world except House and Chase, who both can use magic, and Wilson, who comes from a magical family, though he cannot use magic himself. House and Chase, both trained Healers in addition to their canon medical credentials, use the occasional surreptitious spell on patients, but only if they can keep the magic unnoticed by those patients and the rest of the staff.
In this 'verse—though I'm not, as a rule, in favor of the problematic Disappearing Disability trope—as soon as House diagnosed the clot in his leg, there was no way he would refrain from using magic to heal the damage, and the parameters of Rowling's magic allow the regrowth of muscle and nerves, provided the injury was not the result of a curse. So his leg is intact, and he has never had chronic pain or needed a cane.
This fic was written for skywalkingintheair as part of the 2017 fandomtrumpshate charity auction.
Considering House was just gunned down yesterday morning, he can admit the need for better security. And since—all Wilson's kvetching aside—he doubts his bedside manner was responsible and wouldn't improve it even if something he said had set that patient off, warding his office is the most logical solution.
It's just not the most convenient one.
"Remind me again why we're doing this at three in the morning?" House grouses.
Okay, so House was the one who demanded Chase be here—but there's no reason he can't still complain.
Chase pauses in the process of casting Muggle-Repelling Charms and Concealment Charms—all the necessities of large-scale magic in a Muggle space. Technically, there are forms that should've been filed with the idiot government bureaucracy—declaration of intent to ward, certification of appropriate secrecy measures, and request of associated permissions—but the magical community doesn't have the manpower to monitor and punish every instance of minor rule-breaking. So plausible deniability rules. They'll be fine so long as none of the staff sees them and records proof of magic.
Chase brushes hair out of his eyes with his free hand and visibly suppresses a yawn. "For starters, because you're not supposed to be here perfectly healthy a day after getting shot in the abdomen. And after signing out AMA."
"Oh, come on! As if you weren't happy to be relieved of the responsibility of preventing my escape from ICU."
"Never said I wasn't," Chase says. "But if we can get this done without having to explain anything, so much the better."
After House had regained consciousness, noticed and removed Chase's Monitor Charm (a coil of just-perceptible pressure no doubt watching him for any sign of post-op infection, because broad- spectrum antibiotics don't cover everything), he'd stuck around just long enough to get sufficient painkillers in his system to take the edge off. Then he'd refused further treatment and demanded that Wilson drive him home—a tactic that had worked only because Wilson knew he'd have Apparated from the bathroom otherwise.
In the privacy of his living room, lingering pain blunted by morphine, House had been able to muster the power and concentration to finish healing his gut wound. Gillick had done good work, though House will never tell him so. It'd been a much less complex job than it would've been without everything already expertly stitched up.
"Trust me," House says, "no one who's already unlucky enough to still be in this building wants me to explain anything at three A.M."
He kicks back in his Eames chair while Chase, having already covered any outward-facing walls in the inner office, finishes a circuit through the conference room.
Finally, Chase releases a breath and glares balefully around their personal fishbowl. "Cuddy never thought she'd be causing more problems than she solved, putting you behind glass?"
"It occurred to her after the fact," House says, smiling with smug relish. "But by then, I'd decided I liked it here."
He'd made sure to be goofing off as ostentatiously as possible when Cuddy paraded her first big-deal donors by, surrounded by an elaborate, garish and gravity-defying arrangement of small toys, juggling office supplies. Cuddy had pasted on her best 'I am a highly competent professional and in control of this situation' smile and hustled the group down the hall, but House had already filed away their aghast faces for posterity. (Hypocrites. As if they spent every moment in their offices hard at work.)
House spots movement in his peripheral vision and looks over. Just the night janitor, dragging a mop in a neon-yellow bucket. He doesn't so much as glance over at Diagnostics—good sign, though it could as easily be down to boredom as to magic. "Are we good?" House asks Chase.
"Prep work's done, yeah," Chase says. "Just let me get the lights." He switches them off, then flicks his wand, conjuring a white light about the size of a basketball. Another flick divides it into four smaller lights, which station themselves overhead, spaced far enough apart for dim illumination through the room.
"What, are you creating atmosphere? The electricity in here tolerates ambient magic." Of course, how much ambient magic is an open question. Two wizards, each casting the occasional wandless spell, don't generate enough magical interference to screw with the power—but then, House has also learned his laptop glitches if he leaves his wand sitting too close to it, so Chase probably has a point.
"Doesn't mean it'll tolerate wards settling in," Chase says, and then asks, "What're you basing them on?"
"That." He indicates the large bloodstain on the carpet. When Chase grimaces, House asks, "Problem with blood magic?"
Not a convenient position for House's purposes—but he doubts that's it. Chase is too pragmatic to have swallowed the conservative line about all magic even slightly Dark being evil.
"Problem with coming in every morning to a reminder of you bleeding out on the floor," Chase says tersely.
Between intensivist training and having done his Healing Mastery in post-Voldemort Britain, he's seen way, way worse than gunshot wounds. House has watched him with any number of coding patients—competent, efficient and unfazed. So what's the problem?
"You stop people from bleeding out every day," House says.
"Not people I know." Matter-of-fact, as though it's that simple—except that it isn't, not after a life debt owed and waved aside.
House had felt the steel-strong thread of the debt between them, felt it dissolve when Chase told him, "You taught me for two years; I stopped you bleeding out. We're even." And they shouldn't have been, not unless Chase had been getting far more out of his tutelage than House knew.
With anyone else, he'd have used Legilimency: darted along strands of memory and taken in reasoning, cross-referenced associated events, and parsed emotional subtext until he'd found the answer. But of course, he'd had to hire a damn Occlumens, and one with the skill to keep him out.
House had taught himself Legilimency in the first place for ease of access to information—he'd known since childhood he was better at prying information out of people than he was at actually using social skills, and he'd followed that knowledge to its logical conclusion as soon as he'd had the chance. Yes, everybody lies, and every mind is biased, but absorbing answers directly will always be an improvement on the inconvenience of asking questions.
He's never asked—has never had to ask—why Chase had become an Occlumens. Not since adding up his father's absence, his mother's alcoholism, and the iron calm Chase had obviously taught himself long before he'd studied Healing or intensive care. It was too easy to see the sum of the lessons Chase had learned from his own childhood: moderate and compartmentalize emotion to handle chaos, maintain a placid surface so no one looked too closely, and whatever hadn't already gone to hell might just remain controllable.
So yeah, he gets the reasons. Most of the time, his inability to access Chase's mind presents an intriguing challenge. But right now, it's just maddening. Life debts are a big deal. Chase could've made pretty much any single demand, and magic itself would've made it impossible for House to refuse. Even Wilson would have held on to that power—he'd have seen it as an emergency brake, a lever he could pull as a last resort if he judged House was careening toward some disaster. But Chase had refused to.
That refusal may have rebalanced the scales between them where magic is concerned, but it'd upended all of House's expectations in the process. And House won't get Chase's reasons unless he actually asks—which, if the answer's some personal thing, still may not get him the detail he wants, because Chase hates the exposure of getting personal. (House can just imagine Wilson chuckling at the irony and pulling out that cliché about not liking the taste of his own potions.)
Wards now, annoyingly opaque minion later. House picks up his wand and taps it idly against his left palm, sparing a glance at the blue-green sparks that drift lazily toward the floor. Wards are intricate, personalized, in a way simple security charms aren't. There are plenty of ways he could play this, potential riffs on the basic structure—but also constraints on that structure, because his fellows and Wilson and Cuddy and anyone else who doesn't intend to shoot him can't end up locked out.
"Okay." He raises his wand, starts sketching a rough diagram in the air. Lines drawn in cool blue flame stand out well in dim light. "Inner office there, conference room here, doors here, here, and here"—he marks interior, exterior and balcony doors with x's in the appropriate spots, then finishes with a circle on the conference room floor—"and big bloodstain there." He can layer broader keep out clauses on the balcony door later, leave himself one place no one's going to barge in and interrupt him, but the other two doors require more precisely defined, permeable barriers.
"Anchor points?" Chase asks.
"Point," House corrects. "See also: big bloodstain."
Chase frowns, shakes his head. "Not enough." A beat, then, at House's impatient look, he explains, "If you've only read theory or treated patients who've botched it—"
Most of the time, it makes no difference that Chase is half-blood and House is Muggle-born, so House tends to overlook it. But very occasionally, like now, Chase's having had a pureblood mother is useful. "Fine, Mummy used to work with blood. What am I missing?"
"You can take that power, fix it to—some other kind of structure, but you don't use your own blood as an anchor. Not by itself. The books that say blood works on its own,"—he grimaces —"they assume the blood's from another source. Something you don't mind hurting." The unspoken or worse is very clear on his face. "My mother used her own blood with runes, talismans. Not..."
"Animal or sentient creature sacrifice," House fills in.
"Yeah." With a nod toward the blood on the floor, he says, "If you just used that—then the wards wouldn't have anything to draw power from but you."
"Then I become a battery for the wards, the wards suck on me until I get magical exhaustion, and you have to dismantle the wards so my life is worth living again," he surmises. He's pushed himself to magical exhaustion before. It feels like every hangover he's ever had combined, plus that one Wilson had after his second bachelor party. Not life-threatening, but enough to make House wish he were dead.
Chase nods. "From what Mum told me—most of the stuff on complex blood magic isn't in books you can find outside pureblood family libraries. And the benign side of it doesn't get written down in the first place, because it's just—simple."
Simple. Yeah. The part about blood tying the caster directly to a piece of magical work, about its boosting the power of that work, had made instant, intuitive sense. Of course blood—which carried genetic information, which sustained life—was the strongest shorthand for This is mine and This is important.
"But the part where you don't get critical information if you happen to belong to the wrong bloodline, that's complicated," House says acidly. He can see how it happens. Of the available books on blood magic, some are written by wizards and witches who practice it, leaving out the basics they assume are so fundamental that any moron has to know—plus still more information that's not basic, just so they can hoard the knowledge for themselves. And the rest are written by scholars who study those books, duplicating all the holes in their sources. "When we're done here, there are some authors getting hexed by mail."
"That'll improve their scholarship," Chase says dryly. Then, "How do you want to do this? Runes? Arithmantic forms?"
Runes are loaded with nearly two millennia of traditional uses; Arithmancy, with its basis in sacred mathematics, is even older: its beginnings were in development five hundred years B.C.E. Either would make an effective foundation.
But he doesn't need Latin or runes or anal-retentively precise geometries. Screw all of it. This place is his. He's spent years pacing these floors, countless hours in these rooms, working relentlessly for answers. The work he does here holds more power for him than any of the traditional forms ever will.
That's why attacking him here was an insult. Why basing wards on the mark of that attack is the best kind of defiance.
"House?" Chase asks.
"Let's go with C: neither of the above. I've already got what I need."
He uses his hands instead of Locomotor Charms, jerking his whiteboard across the room so it sits perched over the bloodstain, then grabbing his markers and tossing them to the floor beneath. In the inner office, he picks up his red-and-gray ball, plus a handful of the dominoes, paperclips, small blocks, cards and toy cars he plays with when he's bored or pensive, and takes the whole armful of stuff back out to arrange in a circle around the bloodstain. Then he turns to the bookshelves, where he retrieves the copy of DeGowin's Diagnostic Examination he's known by heart for decades, several of his most useful textbooks on rare presentations of rarer diseases, and a handful of issues of the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet that Cuddy had forced him to write articles for. All those go under the whiteboard with the markers.
What else?
He pauses, considers, then returns to the inner office, unlocking the bottom drawer of his desk and taking out several files. Failures, reminders of limitation. The questions that medicine and magic, even combined, hadn't answered in time.
Chase nods very slightly as he returns with them, sets them down on top of the books. He's never been through House's desk—too much respect for personal boundaries; he'll get over that one of these days—but he's been here long enough to have seen a few of these files before. He knows how House looks when he's carrying ghosts.
House returns his attention to the diagram still hovering in the air and indicates the outer doors. "Barring hostile intentions is going too broad," he says, thinking aloud only partially for Chase's benefit. "Half the time Cuddy's in this office, she wants to fire me." He knows. He's looked. "Intent to harm?"
"Depends on your definition of harm," Chase says. With a shrug, he offers, "Assault, battery, murder and clinic hours?"
Chase probably meant that last one as a joke, but why not? "Assault, battery, murder and clinic hours," House confirms. "Sounds good."
He'd happily add any delivery of pointless paperwork in there—all the referrals, billings, invitations to conferences, and notices of legal action that form his typical Jenga tower of administrative neglect—but that would just lock Cameron or Cuddy out when they inevitably attempted to get it in the door anyway.
Oh well. A man could dream.
"Right, then." Nodding toward the pile on the floor, Chase says, "This'll work better if you're the only one to handle your things, but I can help fix the power to the walls and doorways."
"I don't need your help," House says. He hadn't asked for Chase's direct participation, just an extra wand to handle the boring-but-necessary concealment spells. And yes, he could have cast them on his own—but he needs to know why Chase had dismissed the life debt so easily, and that's not a question he can toss across the conference table during work hours.
"You had major surgery yesterday," Chase says. "You just regained consciousness this morning. Then you healed your own gunshot wound—"
"You wanted me to ask you?" Not a chance. One excused debt had been enough. He hadn't wanted to ask for or owe any favors.
Chase ignores the question. "Acute magical exhaustion's common after severe trauma. I had you under a Monitor, remember—I know you were on the edge of it. Even if healing your gut wound didn't push you over, setting wards alone will knock you on your arse. 'Specially since you're using blood—the casting'll still take from you, even if the finished wards don't."
House knows that. He also knows the several restorative potions he took earlier, although not a real substitute for recovery time, will blunt that particular impact. "Are you seriously nagging me about my health? Because that's Wilson's job."
"You could've been killed yesterday—"
"I know. I was there."
Chase refuses to be distracted. "—and I know you took potions instead of actually resting. And I have a right to give a damn about your health, because it was my job to stop you bleeding out. After stopping that bastard putting a bullet through your head."
House vaguely remembers Crazy Ex-Patient dropping the gun. Not the result of a Disarming Charm, or anything else typically used to get a wand out of someone's hand. All of those spells are either too flashy to explain as anything but magic, or they create physical force that would probably have caused Ex-Patient to fire. "How did you do that?"
"Legilimency."
House raises an eyebrow. Chase is a talented Occlumens, so he must know basic Legilimency— they're mirrored disciplines; being highly skilled at one requires a decent grasp of the other—but the traits that make an excellent Occlumens are a disadvantage in Legilimency, and installing a compulsion strong enough to force Ex-Patient to drop the gun is beyond basics.
"Either you're better at it than I think is likely," House says, "or you shoved a compulsion into his brain with a hell of a lot of force." The kind of urgent, absolute focus Chase is capable of in an emergency would've lodged a command in an unresisting brain with the ease of a scalpel piercing soft tissue. "Good chance it never fades out."
"Lucky for anyone else he'd have shot," Chase mutters.
It's hardly the pleasingly punitive justice House would've gotten had Ex-Patient failed to evade Cuddy's incompetent rent-a-cops, but knowing the guy will never be able to pick up a gun again without the irresistible urge to drop it blaring through his brain is worth at least some satisfaction.
"You ever try that before?"
"No. I've studied the theory, guessed at most of what's possible watching you. But anything beyond surface scanning..." Chase shakes his head, then gestures at the stuff on the floor. "Are we doing this or not?"
"Fine," House says. He doesn't want to indulge Chase's concern, but unfortunately, the only other option is accepting Chase's help after ending up unconscious on the floor again. "God, you're pushy after a guy gets a few units of blood on you."
"If I'd been two seconds slower—"
"—some seriously underpaid janitor would be scraping my brain off the walls," House finishes. "But you weren't, so get over it."
He turns his back on Chase and faces the bloodstain on the floor, the components of his diagnostic process he's arranged around and over it. There's plenty of power there—he just needs to reach for it.
For this, House doesn't want the cool, clinical distance of wanded magic. He wants to make a firestorm of his purpose and feel it thunder through him.
That's what it'll take to equal the violence of the bullet, to redeem pain and shock and the weakness of blood loss. To stop the next pissed off patient who gets vengeful.
Intention summons a frisson of magic, and the temperature in the office ratchets up a few degrees. He pauses then, just long enough to glance over at Chase. "I'm about to throw around a lot of magic. Things will move. You won't want to be standing too close."
Chase nods and retreats, positioning himself against the wall at House's back. That should be a safe distance—and he's got the sense and the reflexes to throw up a Shield Charm if it's not.
Okay. Showtime.
His grip on his wand tightens as he imagines Wilson cracking along a fault-line of grief. Imagines him alone in his apartment, professional armor stripped away, wearing soft clothes that wouldn't give any comfort. Crying until he was an exhausted mess of tears and snot, too shattered to care about appearances.
He can imagine the syllables of the Mourner's Kaddish on Wilson's tongue, murmured at House's funeral. Can imagine Wilson's anger at a nonexistent god, his useless wish for magical solutions.
Even if Wilson could do magic, there's no spell that can restore life to the dead. (There are plenty of spells that blast things, though, and House knows he'd want that nearly as much, because anger is so much easier than pain.)
Eventually—after the funeral, after the stupid, meaningless condolences, after enough time that every thought of House wouldn't be salt in livid wounds—he'd paste his affably charming persona back together and play the part for his patients, his staff, another few wives, presenting them with hollow words and empty smiles. Miserable, but sunk too deep in the rut of the role to ever climb out.
With House gone, there'd have been no one who'd care about the reality more than the pretense. No one who'd yank him up, shake him out of his carefully calibrated social performance, and demand to know the witty, cynical, manipulative bastard at the core.
If House had been killed, Wilson would've been lost.
House gathers the pain of that possibility, lets it burn, and the toys arranged around the whiteboard rise a few inches from the floor and begin revolving in a fast, tight orbit.
Now he imagines the bang of the gun, the wet spatter of blood and brain tissue on the wall. His body falls, the gunman runs, and Chase shoves shock and pain deep beneath Occlumentic barriers, clutching calm too fixed to be natural. Foreman's voice is wooden as he pronounces time of death, taking shelter behind protocols. Cameron cries.
He imagines Cuddy, her own tears denied by reapplied makeup and stiff composure, offering consolations and grief counseling, telling them there's nothing they could have done. Imagines Chase thinking If I'd been two seconds faster, imagining a dozen spells he could've used, and hating himself. Carrying House's death closer than House carries any of those lost patients—but there'd be nothing he could learn from it, no mistake he could later correct. Just slow, corrosive poison.
He imagines Chase withdrawn into guilt, avoiding the fourth-floor hallway that would take him past the room where House had been killed, past walls where he'd always see failure. He'd probably leave the country, or at least the Muggle side of it, to get distance. (He hasn't learned yet that running away never works.)
In the worst-case scenario, he'd turn his back on medicine and retreat into Healing, a low- complexity practice of wounds, illnesses, and spells gone wrong that could be fixed with a simple counter-charm or two, a short course of potions. No risks, no losses, nothing to disturb the comforting illusion of magic as a panacea. And there'd be no one to build the spark of brilliance in him, to clear away the passivity and people-pleasing that usually keep it damped down.
With House gone—all of that potential wasted.
His pulse pounds with fury, and magic races along his skin, prickling like static. All the books, journals, files fan open, rise, and circle above the whiteboard, joined by the markers. Toys lift, fit themselves into the gaps between the texts.
Ex-Patient hadn't been one of the ones House had failed. He'd found the answer, he'd been right—and the idiot hadn't cared. He'd been willing to kill for some grievance House couldn't even remember.
Everything spins faster around the board, building speed until he can't track individual objects, just a blur of color against white. He lets it whirl like a gyroscope, lets himself feel every reason no one can ever touch him here again—and then he sweeps his wand upward, pulling everything to a stop. Holding symbols suspended and compressing rage into bright, sharp intent.
One immovable point, and he can pull the accumulated magic like a lever.
"All these things are mine," he says, slow and deliberate. "They are my process, and its successes and failures are mine.
"This department exists to serve my process, my people, my patients." He can feel the thrumming resonance of power awaiting direction, hear building momentum in the rhythm of the phases. "My mind serves my work. My blood, my life, serves my work. My work is my power. So all the power here is mine."
That truth joins the blood on the floor to the objects above, surging through him with an electric edge that's almost pain. Crimson light wreathes everything—the toys, the texts, the board, his own body. It brightens and dims with the beating of his heart, the rush of his living blood.
"From this moment until my death, no one comes into this office I do not allow to be here. With the work I do here, with the iron in the blood spilled here, I lock and bar the doors against anyone who wants to murder me, assault me, batter me, or exile me to the clinic, and I command that those people fuck off!"
Gathered power crescendoes and snaps—and the force of the recoil is a whole-body blow, driving the breath from his lungs. He stumbles, rocks backward—and Chase's sudden grip on his shoulder, the stabilizing hand at his back, keeps him upright. When he regains his balance, Chase lets go and moves to his side.
He'll ask in a minute what happened to safe distance. For now, he watches the flood of his power expand, finding the predefined pathways of the bindrunes Chase had marked in the corners, drawn over the doorsills and lintels. Sneaky bastard. Rather than give House the option of refusing his help, he'd exploited House's distraction. Nice work.
The design is deceptively simple—a bisected X, the vertical line extending past the two that cross —but he can pick out four connected runes. Boundaries, creative fire, protection, sacrifice and exchange. That last one, which also means partnership, is the basis that'd let Chase step in to refine House's commands.
Blood-red light radiates from the bindrune's lines, down over doors and walls, and envelops the conference room and inner office. For one moment, everything looks as bright and raw as a wound —and then the light flashes and fades as the wards close around them, as firm as the click of a lock.
"I told you to stay out of my way," House says.
"I said I'd help define the boundaries," Chase says. "And before you complain—the backlash would've been a lot worse if I hadn't. You shouldn't open the floodgates on that much power without giving it someplace to go."
House nods curtly and decides he can skip the complaints, just this once.
With the work done, his brain is taking his body's memos again, and he can feel the low ache at his temples, his abdomen throbbing dully with the aftershock of impact, and the long-familiar, irritating buzz of an adrenaline rush at its end, plus the dizziness of low blood sugar.
When his Eames chair scoots up invitingly behind him, he scowls at Chase, but sits. He's going to crash soon—he's been pushing limits, even with those potions he'd taken—but he can put it off a while longer. Long enough.
Raising his wand, he throws a Summoning Charm at the animal crackers in the cabinet and catches the box in his free hand, eating a few handfuls before conjuring a glass of water. Meanwhile, Chase turns the lights back on, then dismisses the wandlights he'd cast earlier and moves to the nearest wall to start stripping off the Muggle-Repelling and other concealment spells.
House waits until he's focused on the work, then says, "Why did you cancel the life debt?"
Chase stills, then lowers his wand to his side and turns to face House. "I didn't want the power to override your free will."
"Yeah. That's the part I don't get." He drains the water glass, puts it down on the floor and leans back in the chair, regarding Chase over steepled fingers. "Wizards and witches are generally all about trampling over other people's free will. And all people, magical or Muggle, are driven by self-interest."
"All right," Chase says. "So I didn't think it was in my interest to have the power to override your free will."
"Obviously," House says, narrowing his eyes. "What interests me is why. I've insulted the whole staff, blackmailed at least half of it. Ask any doctor, nurse or lab tech here what they'd do with a demand I couldn't refuse—most of them would enjoy settling the score. Wilson would want a guaranteed stop to the methods of my madness. So would Cuddy, Cameron, Foreman."
"You'd hate them for it," Chase says, matter-of-fact.
"That's it?" House says. Chase's motivations are rarely that simple. "Because you care if I hate you?"
"Makes it a lot easier to work with you if you don't," Chase says. It's not exactly an answer. He turns away from House again, takes a few more spells down.
While Chase's attention is off him, House takes the opportunity to cast a low-grade analgesic charm on his headache. It dulls the pain, but can't mask the mild lightheadedness of oncoming exhaustion. For that, he Summons his red mug and conjures a double espresso. He knows he'll pay for the caffeine later, when he needs yet another magical workaround to get any decent sleep, but he refuses to fall asleep in his chair. And worse, without having gotten an answer.
Chase turns back toward him. "Coffee?" he says. "At four in the morning?"
"Want some?"
Chase sighs—but he's not Wilson, who'd lecture House about combining caffeine and too many potions and major magic after trauma. He just pulls out his usual chair at the conference table and sits down, angling his body to face House. After a moment, he says, "I care about boundaries, limits. Any Occlumens has to." A pause. "Or any Legilimens who doesn't want to do damage."
House nods. "Your point?"
"As an Occlumens, the idea of prying into someone's mind... I'm not fond of it to begin with. But bringing any kind of compulsion into things..." Chase drops his gaze to his hands—tightly clasped, a sure sign he's upset. "When I forced that nutter to drop the gun... that wasn't even really magic. Just—overpowering his will with mine. And I don't regret it, obviously, but—it was violent, it felt violent. And I did damage."
"Extremely localized," House says. Considering the situation and Chase's lack of experience with Legilimency, that level of precision is impressive. "You gave him behavior modification, not an icepick lobotomy. And even you can't feel guilty he's permanently off guns."
Chase smiles wanly. "No. But in general, I've never thought compulsion's justified. And after that, I know it's not."
House sips his coffee, regarding Chase over the rim of the mug. After a final swallow, he puts it down beside the empty glass. "You're saying this was a matter of principle."
"Is that wrong?"
"Wrong?" House shrugs. "A little inconsistent, maybe, considering you're okay working for a guy who's rummaged through the brains of half our patients and practically all the staff." He couldn't get anything from the surgery or radiology departments without the blackmail Legilimency affords. His team runs as many of his tests and procedures as they can, but they can't do everything, and he occasionally needs cooperation from a doctor outside his own department.
"I know how you operate," Chase says dryly. "I'm capable of respecting your free will anyway."
"You actually mean that." He wishes he could get a closer look at Chase's thought process, see the events that formed the belief. In his experience, sure, people say free will is important and that they respect other people's choices—but there's always a condition, always a 'no autonomy beyond this point' somewhere. Some arbitrary legal or ethical line beyond which he's gone too far, been too callous or reckless or defiant.
"Yeah."
"There's nothing I could do that would make you feel like anything was justified to stop me."
Chase purses his lips, releases a long breath, and seems to come to some decision. "Know why I'm so good at Monitor Charms?"
House rolls his wand slowly between thumb and fingertips, back and forth. "Best way to keep an eye on Mummy, I assume."
Chase nods. "They weren't the first thing I looked at," he says. "There are spells to deal with hangovers or clear an airway, potions that reverse liver damage if you catch it soon enough and stop whatever's causing it. But none of that actually stops someone from drinking herself to death."
Fifteen, House guesses. After Rowan left, when his mother's drinking had escalated and there was no one else to see her spiraling decline. (Chase's mind is a black box, but Rowan's hadn't been. Unfortunately, his memories had turned only an occasional, distant lens on Chase—but there'd been enough in his head about his marriage and his wife that House has a good idea of the dynamics of the household, and how they'd produced a precocious, self-sufficient, quietly desperate child.)
"If you were thinking of excising the depression and alcoholism," House says evenly, "Legilimency's the only thing even theoretically precise enough."
Legilimency can be a scalpel in cases where a garden-variety Memory Charm would be a cleaver. But the amount of cut-and-replace it'd take to attempt altering something as pervasive as a mood disorder, much less one complicated by substance abuse... House grimaces. Even with talent, years of practice, and a detailed understanding of the neurochemistry involved, he wouldn't try it. "Obviously not an option."
"No," Chase agrees. "But any decent book on Legilimency references basically every kind of magic it's possible to use on someone's mind."
True. "Which is how you learned about compulsions." Any book discussing how to actually cast one would've been Dark Arts... which does go a long way toward explaining Chase's feelings on mental meddling.
"Anything a spell could do would've been short-acting," Chase says, "unless I was willing or able to actively police her mind. I wasn't. And if I wanted something more durable, something that wouldn't need an ongoing watch—"
"—then all roads lead to the Imperius Curse," House finishes. "Which is inconveniently Unforgivable."
"Histories said it wasn't always," Chase says. "Used to be legal to use it to stop a murder or a suicide, and that... made sense. But people abused it." An instant's pause, then, "Theory said the nature of the curse itself... twisted people in ways that made abuse more likely."
That's the chicken-or-egg argument all theory on malefic Dark Arts eventually boils down to: do sadists cast the Cruciatus Curse, or does casting the Cruciatus Curse create sadists? (House has dabbled in enough Dark Arts, seen enough of human nature, to say it's both.)
"So you went with Monitor Charms," House says. Highly intricate, demanding to sustain continuously—but subtle and minimally invasive. Just enough to alert Chase to an emergency so he could respond in time, and stop fearing he'd come home some weekend and find a body.
Chase nods. "I had to ask myself—what I was willing to do. Where the line was I wasn't going to cross." He drops his gaze. "Anything that could've stopped her would've destroyed us both."
"Most people," House says, "would've done it anyway."
There's a silence. He waits it out, knowing he won't get anything but total shutdown if he pokes Chase in the childhood trauma. At last, Chase says, "Whatever intentions you start out with—it's too easy for compulsion to turn into abuse. Only time that doesn't matter is if you're willing to hurt someone."
"You forgave the life debt," House says slowly, "because you believed it would hurt me."
"Yeah." His tone is measured, but House sees his shoulders slant forward subtly, tightening a notch.
"Legilimency, Occlumency—they're both about control," Chase says. Cautious. "Different ways, but... when something's gone wrong enough in your life you turn to magic for that... anything that takes away your control does harm."
If Chase were psychoanalyzing him, he'd deflect, redirect, retaliate. If he saw pity in Chase's eyes, he'd answer with anger. But understanding?
He doesn't know what he's supposed to do with that.
It'd be one thing with Wilson—he sometimes pushes past the point when a topic should be dropped, and he just loves filtering House's behavior through that psych textbook he swallowed in med school, but Wilson knows where the absolute limits are. And if those limits are crossed, there are parameters for payback, unspoken but agreed upon. Their own twisted version of the social contract.
He has no such arrangement with Chase. Just a mental note about skeletons in the childhood closet that shouldn't be rattled without good reason. Similar to his mental notes about managing Foreman's coldblooded ambition and Cameron's fetish for terminal patients.
Well. Mostly similar.
He should have realized that the employer/employee dynamic had been compromised when he'd taken a look at Chase in Rowan's memory and caught himself giving a crap.
But then, he's always thought of Chase as more valuable than the others—for his diagnostic talent, and for the considerable convenience of having another Healer around to assist with that element of House's practice. If pressed, he would've said ally: more than an employee, less than a friend.
Before.
Saving House's life after he was shot—that could be written off as professional obligation. Helping to ward the office at goddammit 'o clock in the morning—that was explicable as self-interest, because the next armed lunatic might be sufficiently pissed to murder the whole department. Even forgiving the life debt could've been particularly clever conflict avoidance.
But understanding House well enough to know why the debt had to be forgiven... that's not any of the above. That's interesting.
House doesn't bother wrapping himself in layers of persona and pretense. He doesn't have to. Anarchistic genius is the most obvious thing about him, and most people fall for the misdirection
of noise and shock value, assume that's all there is. And for House's purposes, that's fine. Colleagues and patients who rightly conclude he's an asshole are colleagues and patients who don't subscribe to Cameron's misguided belief that underneath it all, he's a Good Person, or to Foreman's equally misguided belief that he's evil incarnate.
He'd known Chase saw him more clearly than the other two. But he'd underestimated how clearly.
Even Wilson, who's very aware of his control issues, has never figured out the why. But why would he? His own parents' excessive protectiveness of their Squib son had screwed him up in all kinds of ways, but it'd been sincerely well-meaning. House is pretty sure Wilson's constructed a story for himself in which House avoids his parents because it's painful to know he's so not what they expected their child to be. Projecting his own dysfunction onto House, in other words.
That usually annoys him, but in this case, House is going to let him go on projecting, because he doesn't want to explain—doesn't want Wilson's pity. Sure, he'd call it compassion, but House has never seen much difference. No matter what, it would be about Wilson's feelings, Wilson's need to talk.
Chase will never want to have the kind of conversation Wilson would, because being an Occlumens means respect for boundaries—respect for the pain those boundaries protect. It means understanding that when pain can't heal cleanly, it has to be isolated and contained to prevent further harm.
House can appreciate that understanding.
He's already learned to rely on having a mind around that can keep up with his process, extend what he builds, offer him a new angle when he's stuck. On the strength of a life debt set aside, House thinks he could learn to trust Chase himself. Get used to banter in a different rhythm, to concern at enough distance to avoid intrusion.
This isn't the jolt of interest he'd felt when polite, put-together James Wilson had suddenly shouted fury and hurled a bottle of expensive brandy into an even more expensive mirror. Just a subtle mental click as a puzzle in progress rotates a few degrees and he sees something previously overlooked.
Chase had said it was House's instruction that'd been important enough to balance the debt, and House had been distracted by his injuries at the time, enough that he hadn't examined that statement more closely, seen that it didn't fit. It wasn't the teaching that Chase had valued so much as the teacher.
Part of him wants to recoil from that, fling out a barb about daddy issues, maybe throw in something from Wilson's psych textbook about transference. Tell Chase he couldn't have found a more dysfunctional object for his thwarted filial affection...
All of which is true. But House has a Legilimens' instinct for spotting weak points; he can tell when a vulnerable spot will bleed. He can cause Chase pain, if he wants, but that won't make Chase stop caring. And pain for no purpose is just cruelty.
"House? You all right?"
He answers with no more than his usual acid. "I thought I taught you not to ask me stupid questions."
"Fine." Chase points his wand at House's heart, and the bright coil of a Monitor Charm circles and
clasps House briefly before vanishing. He feels it break, so it's not a sustained data feed—but still.
At House's affronted look, Chase tilts his head in the direction of the bloodstain. "You've just done major magic, the potions you took have nearly worn off, and you're keeping yourself upright with caffeine and bloody-minded stubbornness."
House scowls. "This is not news, Doctor Obvious."
"If you get to keep pushing the limits," Chase says, "I get to know when I should expect you to pass out on the floor."
Almost despite himself, House thinks how Chase had anticipated the impact that had finished the warding and quietly positioned himself to prevent House from falling.
He's good at figuring out what needs to be done, doing it unasked.
Rather than think too much on that, too much on the reasons for it, House picks up his wand and puts everything—almost everything—he used in the warding back where it belongs with a series of Locomotor Charms. Those things will remain tied to the wards. Every time he writes on the whiteboard, pages through the reference books, tosses the ball, plays with the toys, he'll be feeding that magic, shoring it up.
Even now, he can feel the solid strength of it, a restoration of safety, integrity, that's as reassuring as the recently-healed flesh of his own abdomen.
Chase stays silent as House rises and moves to pick up the files belonging to lost patients. These are things House won't touch with the convenience of magic, things that deserve the respect of physical effort.
Once he's locked the drawer and returned to the conference room, Chase asks, "We done here?"
"Yeah," House says. "See you when I'm done faking three weeks of medical leave." He starts to raise his wand to Apparate (even he can admit he needs food and sleep, not in that order, before he does any more wandless magic) when Chase interrupts.
"You're mad if you think you're Apparating after this. You'll splinch."
House narrows his eyes. "Will not."
"Wilson's second bachelor party, right foot," Chase counters.
"Oh, come on! I was drunk!"
"Effect of sleep deprivation's the same," Chase says, "and I'm not in the mood to reattach body parts." He extends a hand, expectant, and House rolls his eyes, but closes his own free hand over it.
"Thank you," Chase says, and with a loud crack and a split second of too-tight compression, the office gives way to House's paper-cluttered living room, dim in the gray light of early dawn. Chase releases his hand and says, "If we get any interesting cases while you're on leave, I'll send them along."
House nods, and Chase turns away from him and Disapparates.
House goes immediately to his bedroom, where he toes off his sneakers, exchanges his jeans for a worn-soft pair of sweatpants and climbs into bed before Summoning a vial of Dreamless Sleep from the kitchen cabinet. It's been a long day, a longer night—he can afford the indulgence of a dozen hours of nightmare-free sleep.
When he wakes up, he'll call Wilson, and they'll watch a movie and eat whatever House can talk him into cooking, because Wilson's mother-hen tendencies should be taken in culinary form whenever possible.
Whatever Chase's friendship offers, it's going to fit a very different pattern—but House is looking forward to figuring it out.
END.
If you enjoyed this work, please let me know! I'm open to writing more in this 'verse if there's sufficient reader interest, and even a short comment can be inspiring.
Glossary for Non-HP Readers
Apparating/Disapparating: Essentially magical teleporting. "Apparating" is generally used to mean going to a destination; "Disapparating" is leaving that place afterwards.
Cruciatus Curse: A curse that causes unbearable, excruciating pain in the subject. Prolonged exposure can cause incurable insanity. One of the three Unforgivable Curses.
Dark Magic: HP canon uses several definitions of "Dark" as a descriptor of magic. Among wizards and witches with several generations of magical ancestry, it describes a branch of magic which can be dangerous and/or transgressive, but also useful. Among those affiliated with the (conservative) British magical government or its law enforcement, "Dark" means either "illegal and dangerous" or "illegal and evil," depending on the magic involved. Finally, among wizards and witches closely affiliated with the anti-Voldemort war effort, it means "illegal and evil," with particular emphasis on the latter. (Note that House and Chase use it in the first sense, since neither is exactly a stranger to doing things that are illegal and dangerous for pragmatic reasons.)
Half-blood: An individual with A) one magical and one non-magical parent, or B) one magical parent whose family has been magical for several generations, and one magical parent with non-magical ancestry within a generation or two. (The former usage is the most common.)
Imperius Curse: A curse that allows the caster to dictate the actions of the subject via a kind of mind control. One of the three Unforgivable Curses.
Legilimency: A branch of magic that allows the practitioner, known as a Legilimens, to access memories and emotions within the mind of another (and potentially to alter them, though this is extrapolation on my part). Finding the information sought after is a matter of subtlety, precision and skill.
Muggle-born: A person with magical ability born to two non-magical parents.
Occlumency: A branch of magic that allows the practitioner, known as an Occlumens, to make his/her/their mind inaccessible to a Legilimens (and potentially impervious to all magical tampering, though this is an extrapolation on my part).
Splinch: To leave one or more parts of the body behind when disappearing from one place to reappear in another. These parts can be reattached.
Squib: A person without magical ability born to two magical parents.
Unforgivable Curse(s): Any of the three curses (two are mentioned above; the Killing Curse is the third) whose use earns the caster automatic life imprisonment under British Wizarding law. If plural, refers to these curses as a group.
Wards: A general term for (usually elaborate) protective magic of considerable strength and sustained duration.