First Post - bearing FIC!

Oh dear sweet Jesus, I think this thing is a full year old. *shame* And . . . this is the first posting! ;_; But here it is, mah first post, humble as it is.


Title: Artifact
Pairing: Chaseman, vaguely (past) Hausvilsun)
Summary: After their fellowships end, what happens to the ducklings - and their mentors?
Rating: So G.
WARNING: Unbeta'd and not so terribly coherent.





After the fellowship is over, Chase and Foreman don’t see one another for a very long time. They maintain a strange sort of sideways contact through Cameron’s holiday newsletters, although they rarely respond. Foreman starts sending his own newsletters when he marries Diane, goes into family practice, and when they divorce she continues right where he left off. Neither of them knows Chase’s current address, so he never gets one. Not too much changes over the years, all things considered. When they all meet again, it’s at a funeral.

Invitations aren’t sent out, but they know almost the second he dies and fly back to Jersey as soon as they can. Cuddy wears black, complete with her usual attack cleavage. She avoids speaking to them as much as is humanly possible, and Chase decides that she’ll probably still be thrusting her breasts around when she is eighty. She stands in front of the surprisingly large crowd and tries not to cry.

Cameron wears grey and cries her heart out in the middle of the gathering. The service is open-casket, but she doesn’t go up to look. Chase and Foreman stand on either side of her, apparently unemotional. All of them come alone. For a little while Chase peers around for other familiar faces, but doesn’t really find them. He’s heard that Stacy is in Connecticut now, and figures that she’s doing from a distance. Wilson is missing entirely and so, he finds out after the ceremony, is House’s motorcycle. He wonders briefly where Wilson has gone.

Afterwards there are, inappropriately enough, refreshments and morbid gossip. Chase realizes later that they buried House without his cane, then promptly forgets about it. Cameron excuses herself early, but Foreman and Chase go for drinks at their old bar. It’s turned into a gas station since they worked here. Even if the ten years haven’t seemed to affect them, the face of New Jersey has changed. With no other real options, they head over to the overpriced bar of the hotel where they’re both staying. Foreman breaks out pictures of his three kids and Chase isn’t exactly surprised. He points out Deon and Jack and Lacie, extols their virtues while making sure Chase knows his wife named them. Ex-wife, he corrects himself. It’s been three years, but he still slips sometimes. Chase starts to think that maybe, just maybe time has changed all of them. Foreman’s happy. He’s lost his edge.

Chase’s change is only apparent to those who knew him before - he hasn’t even seen it yet. Chase is brilliant, almost legendary, an ER doctor now. The darkness Foreman always saw swimming just below the surface of Chase’s too-pretty face has surfaced now. It’s full-grown and sharp, angry, blunt, acidic. He can see and air any person’s dirty laundry five minutes after meeting them. Most don’t like him, but his strange, venomous charm keeps the people he needs close. After learning who he had done a fellowship under, one of his coworkers gave him a cane for Christmas. House would have been proud.

The only person in House’s will is Wilson, whom nobody can seem to find. After a week, Cuddy gives away both now-vacant offices. It’s almost universally agreed that Wilson isn’t coming back. Chase and Foreman clear out House and Wilson’s apartments before their landlords can get rid of the stuff and Cuddy promises to take care of it. The two apartments, though blocks apart, are so thoroughly intermingled that somebody’s gonna have a hard time sorting out what’s what.

“Wilson was in love with House, wasn’t he?” Chase says after only one tequila. It’s been two weeks and they’re both still there.

Foreman stares into his drink and tries not to think about it. “Not like they were ever together,” he says, finally.

Chase nods absently. “I wonder why?”

And that’s the last they speak of it.

Eight days later, House’s motorcycle is found abandoned on the coast in Maine, but Wilson’s still nowhere to be seen. Foreman thinks he’s off somewhere brooding, maybe staying with family. Chase thinks he’s dead. Neither thinks he’s ever coming back.

One more week passes and Foreman secures a ticket back to California. Somehow Chase secures the seat right next to him, a window seat. Foreman doesn’t find out until he’s actually on the plane. “Isn’t your boss going to worry?”

“Oh, I quit weeks ago,” Chase says with a vacant smile. “Those kids of yours are pretty cute. Thought I’d like to meet them in person.”

Like every other strange thing about Chase, he takes this in stride, as if it’s been two days instead of ten years. Chase pretends to be sleeping while Foreman gets them drinks and an in-flight movie, and even though he’s all kinds of rich he never pays his share of the bill. Back in California he camps out on Foreman’s couch and teaches his kids to play darts and annoy the neighbors and pull stupid pranks on each other and their parents. Diane treats him like a troublesome fourth child and accompanies him on his weekend job-hunts for a little while. Foreman eventually gives up trying to get Chase off his couch, which is a lost cause anyway after Chase figures out that it’s a pull-out.

“You know the stories you told me about your old boss and his friend?” Diane said one day, watching Chase teach the kids something involving water balloons that would inevitably come back to bite them, “Now it’s almost as if you were talking about you and him.”

It’s maybe just a little bit telling that this doesn’t scare the crap out of him.

Foreman thinks about it a little more that night and decides that maybe the comparison was a little too accurate. Yes, maybe neither of them can cook worth anything, but Chase can bake like nobody’s business, so maybe that counts for something. Maybe they don’t get into fights over the tiniest, most useless-seeming things - but, all right, they kind of do. Huh, he thinks, detached, we’re them. We’ve turned into them and never fucking noticed. Distantly he wonders if this means a future of soaps, monster truck rallies and failed marriages. He wonders when, if ever, he’s going to head into the pathetic repressed longing stage, which is jumping ahead a little bit, as he isn’t even in love with Chase yet. He probably has time for a few more divorces before his life falls apart.

Chase, however, being Chase, somehow senses his apprehension and has to prove him wrong. Foreman gets kissed in the kitchen next morning and immediately throws Chase out. Shit, he thinks, as if House and Wilson’s ghosts are in the fucking room with them. Shit. How’d we become them?

Diane and Foreman hunt Chase down and finally find him staying with a friend from work. They stand in front of the door for fifteen minutes before turning around and heading home. Foreman plays hooky for a couple of days, ruining his perfectly-groomed beard in the process, before he notices Chase’s message on his machine. He laughs desperately, thinking how strangely this all has turned out. Someone else’s history has ruined him. Foreman almost leaves a corresponding message on Chase’s cell phone, but aborts at the last second. He disconnects the message machine at home and sleeps all weekend before going to work.

One week later, Chase moves back in with him. He moves clean into Foreman’s bed and because they are not, in fact, House and Wilson, neither one of them ever leaves.