Part 5

"What the hell is this?"

Ordinarily House would have been irked being disturbed during the sacred hour when he worshipped at the church of General Hospital. But as he looked up at the intruder in his office, the expression on Chase's face indicated there might be something even more entertaining on the horizon, so he allowed Chase's indiscretion to pass without immediate retribution.

"Jason's about to catch Sonny…" he deadpanned, before trailing off and feigning sudden comprehension. "Oh, you mean that thing you're holding? I'm pretty sure it's called a file. Or do you blondes have another word for it?"

"A personal medical file," Chase told him angrily. "One I kept someplace other than this hospital. One that strangely ended up in our medical records system anyway."

Busted. Time for a diversion.

"Very inconvenient that," House chided him. "It took me 11 phone calls to find it when you were admitted, and then medical records—well, those guys aren't going to be making any delivery guarantees anytime soon."

"The request was signed two weeks after my concussion. And you told them I was dying."

Damn, and he did his homework, too. Well, House thought, at the very least his fellow was proving himself thorough.

"And even if you weren't full of shit about my file, wanna tell me how my parents' files ended up in medical records, too?"

"Your parents' charts were actually the hard part," House answered nonchalantly. Actually, Chase's mother's records had been the problem; he'd had no trouble appropriating the one Rowan had left with Wilson. Mama Chase had turned out to be one very serious dipsomaniac. "Seems they have this bizarre rule about patient confidentiality."

"Yeah, and they also have this thing about a relative signing permission for them. Funny that. I signed the release forms to have them sent here without actually writing a word."

House said nothing. All those idiots on police dramas who opened their mouths always got into trouble, after all.

"Why?"

Chase would, House supposed, probably calm down if he told him he'd been intrigued by Chase's reaction to the events of 5/22. Even after scouring journals and websites, he'd found absolutely no mention of any other patient whose brain waves had gone berserk like his intensivist's had in the hours after the attack. Plus he'd been interested in Chase's unusually interesting diagnoses in the last couple of weeks, coupled with a rather exaggerated sense of spatial awareness—House hadn't been able to sneak up on his favorite target in weeks. Confessing might save him from Chase running to Cuddy, which would inevitably result in his being sentenced to even more time consorting with the masses in Purgatory. But the files had made both entertaining and enlightening reading beyond the scope of his original interests. And what fun was there in the truth?

"I was curious."

"You lied, then forged my signature to get my medical records and my parents' so you could go fishing?" His tone was a mixture of anger and incredulity that House found amusing. No matter how many buttons he'd pushed, Chase had never truly blown up at him before. But then Chase had a thing for personal privacy and was the most unpredictable of his pets—and thus, in many ways, the most entertaining.

"It was more exaggeration than lie," House pointed out helpfully.

"Aside from the fact that it had zero to do with my parents, that I wasn't dying, and that it was two bloody weeks after the incident you—"

A loud bang interrupted Chase's tirade, to House's disappointment. He turned his neck to see an immense crack radiating outward from the center of his office's window, before the whole pane gave up and collapsed, falling out to the ground below. A loud crash announced the glass's destruction.

For a moment, there was complete and utter silence. Then House turned slowly back to face a now speechless Chase.

"And I always thought it would be Cuddy's voice that would shatter glass."

To be continued