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Foreman has been sitting at the desk for almost an hour, staring at the surface littered with reminders of the previous occupant, from the small animal skulls to the multiple baseballs. It takes him half an hour to work out that he doesn’t feel guilty, which sends him into another minor panic about being like House. It doesn’t last long. If he were House, he’d be bouncing a tennis ball against the wall and making a joke which would get him reported to HR. Instead he’s just sat at a desk, wondering what the hell he’d gotten wrong.
That’s what’s getting to him. He’d messed up - already something of an uncommon occurrence for him - and he can’t work out how. Had he changed the meds too late? Should he have changed them at all? Arguments fly back and forth across his mind like a game of tennis.
The game is interrupted by House, who arrives as obnoxious as ever.
“If you wanna curl up and cry, the lounge chair’s a little more comfy.”
Foreman doesn’t rise to the bait, “I switched his meds. I thought I was wrong so I took him off the antifungals, put him on steroids like you said.”
“You know what that means.”
“I was too late, or I was right in the first place.”
House wanders over to lean against the wall. “So. either you killed him by not having confidence in your opinion, or you killed him by being too attached to your opinion. And if you’re anything like me-”
I’m not , Foreman thinks to himself, at least not as much as you think I am.
“-and by the way, you are- you need to know which.”
Foreman picks up on what he’s implying and shakes his head, “The body’s under lock and key in the morgue. His government wants their own doctors to do the autopsy.”
“There’s a reason I hired you,” House stops fiddling with one of the slats in the wall and turns to look at Foreman, “you used to know what to do with a locked door.”
//
A lock he would’ve been able to deal with, but the presence of an armed guard stops any idea of breaking in. For a wild moment he considers just asking - please may I be able to see the dead body of your leader etc etc - but stops himself. Clearly he’s been working here too long if crazy ideas like that are popping into his head.
On a whim, he picks up the pile of recent morgue sign-in sheets and flicks through them for a patient he could be pretending to see instead.
Hatchings, Theresa, visited by Dr Suarez at 3:12am - that explained why Suarez had been in such a bad mood when Foreman had bumped into him at lunch.
Frobisher, Lawrence, visited by a Dr Carraway at 7:10am - Foreman doesn’t know Carraway or their department, so that's no good.
Jim é nez, Soledad, visited by-
“Can I help you?”
Foreman jumps about a foot into the air, shoving the form he was holding into his pocket and turning to face the disapproval of the receptionist.
“Er- no, sorry.” Foreman backs out the corridor as fast as he can, one arm awkwardly covering the paper sticking out his pocket. The receptionist merely raises an eyebrow and goes back to filing.
Foreman ducks into one of the stairwells and reads the form again. Jim énez, Soledad, visited by Dr Chase at 9:45am. Why the hell would Chase be wasting time visiting someone in the morgue? Especially when Dibala was still seriously sick, and, although they didn't know it then, hours away from dying.
9:45am. Chase said he did the blood test at 10am. An idea starts to form in the back of Foreman’s mind, but he pushes it away. No way would Chase ever be that stupid, that reckless, that bold. That required a level of bravery Chase simply didn’t possess, being the meek little boot-licker that he was. In fact, there had been several times over the years where Foreman considered doing an x-ray to check out Chase’s worrying lack of backbone.
He looks at the name, Soledad Jiménez, and remembers an old woman Cameron had been treating, one who’d recently died of scleroderma. Scleroderma, a disease which if tested would provide identical results to Dibala’s. If Cameron had told Foreman about her then she certainly would’ve told Chase, who could’ve… no. Surely Chase doesn’t have the guts.
He considers calling Cameron and asking the name of that lady, but if Chase has done what Foreman thinks he’s done then the fewer people involved the better. Unless Cameron already knows, but Foreman doubts that. House had called her Morality Jane once, always going on about the sanctity of life and the ethics of every choice they made, and Foreman is fairly certain that “murdered a patient” ranks pretty high on Cameron’s list of morally dubious medical decisions.
Better to go straight to the source of the problem and talk to Chase.
//
Chase is slumped on a bench in a locker room when Foreman finds him, the perfect picture of a grieving doctor. He looks up when Foreman approaches and flicks his hair out of his eyes, a move which Foreman definitely ignores.
“I went down to the morgue to rerun the antibodies test.” Foreman watches Chase’s expression carefully.
“You ran it twice.” Confusion definitely, but no guilt.
“Turns out I couldn’t get in. They had an armed guard.” Foreman thinks he sees relief momentarily flicker across Chase’s face, but it’s hard to tell when Chase won’t make eye contact with him.
“I saw this.” Foreman says, holding out the paper, “It’s a sign-in sheet from the morgue. Your signature, 9:45 this morning. That’s right before you guys ran the test.”
Finally Chase turns towards him, expression guarded, and slowly takes the form.
“What were you doing there?”
“Follow up on a clinic case.” Chase’s voice is monotone, and he still won’t look at Foreman.
“What case?” Foreman says sharply.
“You think this is really important?” He’s angry now, defensive.
“One of the patients in the morgue was a seventy year old woman who had scleroderma.” The look on Chase’s face tells him he guessed correctly. He pauses while he decides how to word the accusation. “You and Cameron - if you took that woman’s blood you could’ve messed up the test results so we treated Dibala for the wrong disease.”
Chase looks him dead in the eye and holds his gaze. “Cameron had nothing to do with it.”
A confession. A confession wrung out Chase because Foreman lied and said he suspected his wife as well. He doesn’t have time to feel guilty about that right now.
“You son of a bitch.”
“He was going to kill the Sitibi.” Chase mutters, “Every last one of them.”
“I don’t care what he was gonna do,” Foreman half-shouts, because he’s just properly realising the weight of the situation, what Chase has done, “he came to us and put his life in our hands.”
“All the good we’ve done,” Chase is on his feet now, “every life we’ve saved - it would’ve meant nothing if we’d just sent him off to kill hundreds of thousands of people. Look at the news, the moderates are taking over. There’s hope for peace talks. You tell the world I faked this test, Dibala becomes a martyr and the massacres begin.”
“I cover this up, I become your accomplice. You think you can guilt me into that?” Foreman searches Chase’s eyes for any sign of regret or sorrow and finds steely determination staring back at him. This is what he’s put his job, freedom, and possibly life on the line for, and he’s asking Foreman to do the same.
“If the cops are gonna come for me… please warn me so that I can tell my wife first.” Chase hands him back the form and sits down.
They’re left back where they were at the beginning, Chase sitting slouched on a bench and Foreman standing by the lockers holding a form that could alter the course of both their lives.
“Chase… you really think you can kill another human being without any consequences to yourself?”
Chase clasps his hands together, as if he’s praying. “No.”
//
Foreman finds himself back in the office, staring miserably at House’s collection of nick-nacks for the second time that day. In one hand he has the form, the other is fiddling with a battered lighter.
Flick-click, flick-click, flick-click.
Legally, this is wrong. That should be enough to stop him but in this case…
Flick-click, flick-click, flick-click.
Quickly he runs through all the reasons he doesn’t like Chase. His accent, which stretches vowels in all the wrong places. His evident privilege which he barely seems to notice. His clear disdain for fat people. His habit of licking boots and sucking up to authority figures.
Except killing a dictator and lying about it went against that last point. And come to think of it, he hasn’t heard Chase dismiss an overweight patient in years. And yeah he’s still a pretty white boy who grew up rich, but he’s not so oblivious to the circumstances of other people anymore. And, although Foreman would rather die than admit it, the accent is kind of cute.
Flick-click, flick-click, flick-click.
He could just put the form back with the others, pretend he’d never seen it. He almost stands up to do exactly that, when he remembers the resolution in Chase’s cold eyes, and sits back down again. If he puts it back he puts Chase back in danger. There’s no morally neutral options left.
Foreman leans his head against the desk in frustration. If this were anyone else he would’ve just left the form where it was, never spoken to them, certainly never destroyed evidence for them. There’s something about Chase he just can’t seem to shake off.
He doesn’t like Chase. Even if he’s less annoying than he used to be. He definitely doesn’t like like Chase, a horrifying suggestion brought on by a sleep deprived brain that he quickly pretends he never thought. But is Chase worth putting his own career on the line? Foreman finds to his surprise the answer is a very easy yes, and before he can overthink anything else he lights a corner of the form on fire and watches it burn in the wastepaper basket.
//
Cameron finds out, of course, and the marriage crashes and burns from there. Chase spends his days looking miserable, putting in clinic hour after clinic hour in an effort to kill time. One day he comes in with his hair cut short, and Foreman’s surprised to find that he misses how he used to look.
He’s more surprised by the ugly grudge he now holds against Cameron. Spitefulness isn’t his thing - for as long as he can remember if he’s had a problem with someone he’s dealt with it there and then - but he can’t shake off flickers of irritation when he sees her. Once he almost tells Cameron that it’s not fair, Chase put everything at risk to save an entire population and he’s rewarded with a divorce and never-ending catholic guilt. It’s none of his business though so he watches the mess from afar.
As he watches Chase sink deeper and deeper into gloom, Foreman finds himself thinking back to times where he’d actually seen Chase happy. A couple awkward co-worker bowling games, where Chase beat both him and Cameron easily (maybe he does hold grudges - he hasn’t been bowling since). Solving an emergency case that had kept them up for two days, delivering the diagnosis sleep deprived but elated. The bachelor party - Foreman, drunk as the devil, with one arm slung around Chase’s shoulder and Chase grabbing his wrist so they were leaning on each other as they staggered across the room.
//
“Why did you do it?” Chase asks him while they’re alone in the lab, waiting for Mr so-and-so’s samples to process. Arguably this could’ve been done by one person but Chase had been looking particularly depressed that day and before he knew what he was doing, Foreman had volunteered to help. House had said nothing, just raised an eyebrow and gestured to the door.
“Running lab tests with you is marginally less boring than spending yet another hour with Mr… the patient.” Foreman makes a mental note to start remembering patient names. He doesn’t need to share any more similarities with House.
Chase snorts, “I’m sure Mr The Patient will be thrilled to hear that watching test tubes full of spit is more interesting than his supposed life’s work.”
“Maybe you care about HOAs but I sure don’t.” Foreman sticks a label on yet another identical petri dish as slowly as he can.
“Oh, me neither. Honestly I’m considering running these twice to put off having to listen to his stories of him having a go at people’s innocent outdoor decoration.”
Foreman chuckles, “Did he tell you about how he heroically saved the street from a blue fence?”
“And then you heroically saved all of us from any more heroic tales by heroically putting him under anaesthesia,” Chase continues, “Yeah, House told me. Wish you’d bent medical ethics like that when we had crypto guy.”
“Oh god, don’t remind me,” Foreman mutters. Crypto Guy had been a nightmare patient to deal with, going on about how much cleverer he was than anyone in his vicinity who wasn’t into crypto (which was everyone) and refusing to let any of the female nurses and doctors handle the equipment. “Y’know I thought Nurse Kumar was going to violate the hippocratic oath when he told her she shouldn’t be working a man’s job.”
Chase scribbles a few more numbers down on a form. “I’ve never been happier to see a patient moved to the cancer ward.”
There’s a companionable silence for a few minutes while they finish the tests.
“That’s not what I meant, by the way.” Chase says almost inaudibly.
“Huh?” Foreman looks up from the microscope. Chase hasn’t turned around but he’s no longer writing.
“When I asked why you did it. I meant-”
“I know.” Foreman can’t let him say it out loud. “And I decided I like having you around.”
“Oh.” Evidently not the answer Chase expected.
Foreman put the last of the slides under the microscope, “Why'd you ask now anyway?”
Chase shuffles the papers awkwardly, “I dunno. I haven’t been paying much attention to… well, anything really for the past few months. What with all the… y'know. Then I realised that no armed forces had come bashing down my door in the middle of the night, so you must’ve kept quiet. Then I realised that you must’ve also destroyed the evidence because what were you gonna do, put it back where you found it? So you risked your job, which is weird enough because you love your job. And you did it for me, which is weirder, because you hate me.”
It’s not lost on either of them that this is the most Chase has spoken in months.
“I don’t hate you,” Foreman says, because for some reason hearing Chase say that feels like a punch.
“Ok,” Chase says doubtfully.
“I really don’t.”
“Ok.”
“I mean it.”
“Ok.” Chase is almost smiling now.
Foreman wants to say something to back it up, maybe you’re funny , or you’re kind , or you have legible handwriting , or your eyes light up when you talk about something you love , or I hate that you’re so unhappy now , or your hair is pretty , or you’re pretty .
Instead he says, “Do you wanna get a drink after this?”
Chase freezes, pen just above the paper. He looks at Foreman like he’s trying to read a foreign language.
“You serious?”
“Yeah,” Right now it feels like Foreman’s never been so serious about anything in his life.
Chase beams at him. It’s like a ray of sunlight has broken into the room.
“Yeah. Yeah I’d love to.”