Chapter Text
The first time he should have walked away from Cameron was the first time they had sex, as soon as these words left her lips:
"Come on, Chase—don't turn into a good guy on me now."
He was not deliberately a villain; in fact Chase preferred to think of himself as an island, letting no one swim to shore.
But for Cameron apathy was a sin as great as any other, and he should have walked away instead of stepping inside her apartment and taking off his pants.
He did not want the drama of being someone's bad guy, did not want to carry all the weight of the poor decision they were about to make.
(He did not know yet that it would be impossible to carry more weight than Cameron—more guilt, or more responsibility, or more hope, or more fury, or more despair.)
Cameron that night was a different creature from the Cameron of Princeton-Plainsboro. She was red-eyed, she fisted her hands in his hair with manic energy. She was sad and crazy with whatever had inspired her to try meth in the first place.
They had frenetic, inspiring sex, and Chase had better sense than to expect an afterglow.
"You should go," Cameron said, as soon as they finished. One of her hands was still dancing in the bed sheets, something she did not seem to notice.
"Are you sure you're going to be alright?" he asked, picking up his boxers off the floor.
Cameron snorted. "Do I look alright?" she asked.
The answer was no, but Chase knew that wasn't the word she was looking for.
"You look fine," he said.
"I am fine," Cameron snapped. She went into the bathroom while Chase finished dressing, and he heard the shower running. He looked around the room to make sure he hadn't left anything behind, then ducked into the kitchen and filled two glasses with water. He drained one, and set the other on the nightstand next to Cameron's bed. He reached into his messenger bag and took out a bottle of aspirin, shook out three, and left them next to the glass of water. Then he went home.
000
Chase was late the morning after House hit him in the face.
"Oh," said Cameron, the syllable more a mewl than a word, when she saw the bruise on his face. "What happened?"
"You call another mobster a fag?" Foreman asked, smiling.
"Nothing happened," said Chase. If he was angry about it yesterday, then today he was mostly embarrassed. This was not his fault, but he still felt vaguely ashamed. It was not an unfamiliar pattern.
"Seriously," said Cameron. "What happened?"
"Seriously," Chase mocked, his American accent unconvincing, "nothing happened."
"Oh-ho," said Foreman, grinning even more widely. "You back with that girl? What's her name? The one who liked to be burned? "
Cameron's eyes went wide. She looked away from him.
"No," said Chase. "I am not. And I was never in that to begin with. That was all...her."
"So you got into a fight," guessed Foreman. "Hitting on someone else's girlfriend."
"No," said Chase.
"A girl hit you," guessed Cameron, her voice lightly teasing. "For being too fresh."
Chase lifted his chin. Enough people in the hospital had seen that the gossip would get around. It was somewhat surprising Cameron and Foreman didn't already know.
"House hit me," he said. The other two were silent. "You saw him yesterday," Chase added. "He was detoxing. I told him my porphyria theory. We argued about it. Anyway, I won the argument." He did not explain that he won the argument from the floor.
"Well," said Foreman slowly. "That's a new House low, isn't it?"
Cameron didn't say anything at all.
When House came in later, tossing his file at Chase, the other two watched House, not him.
When House asked him if he'd had the bruise looked at, he said no, but the words that he wanted to say, that surprised him with their fervency, were: as if a weak old junkie like you could do any damage.
000
Cameron cornered him while the bruise was still fresh. Chase was in the cafeteria, shredding pieces of iceberg lettuce from a mostly inedible salad.
"Did you deserve it?" she asked, standing over him. Chase blinked up at her. He was surprised and only mildly offended, but more than either of those things amused at her choice of wording. He waited for her to catch herself.
"That's not what I meant," she added quickly. "I mean, did you provoke him? House didn't just hit you." She stared at Chase's salad, which freed him to look at her face.
"He was walking away," said Chase. "I didn't even push him, really. I was just trying to keep him from walking away."
"But you did push him," Cameron repeated. For a moment, Chase wanted to repeat the phrase he had just used: I didn't even push him. But Cameron was wearing an expression as close as he'd ever seen to the night they had sex: there was something desperate in her, something in her eyes that said the world had been turned upside down. Chase had the power to give her something she could use to reorient.
"Yes," he said. "I pushed him first."
Cameron looked into his eyes a few seconds longer. Chase didn't know what she was hoping to find there, but doubted she would.
"Okay," she said. "I'm glad you did it, though. You saved that little girl."
Chase was shocked at how good it felt to hear someone tell him that he'd done the right thing.
000
Foreman came as close as anyone else did to expressing sympathy or concern.
"You know," he said in the lab, "if House had hit me, I'd have hit him right back."
Chase didn't look up from preparing his slide. "You'd have hit a cripple going through withdrawal?"
"I'd have hit House."
"Well," said Chase lightly, "lucky for him he hit me, then."
Foreman looked up from his microscope. "No luck about it," he said. "House wouldn't have hit me in the first place."
They did not discuss the matter again.
000
The second time he should have walked away from Cameron was the second time she wanted to sleep with him.
Chase never had trouble finding people to sleep with him. He might have had a certain predilection for women who could politely be called "troubled," but that was never a barrier to getting laid.
Cameron's difficulties forming an NSA sexual arrangement were not his own.
He was better than microwave pizza.
None of that stopped Chase from smiling when he followed her into the snow and said "yes."