TITLE: All The Rooms You Wander Through
FANDOM: House
CATEGORY: Chase/Foreman, Chase/OFC
RATED: Quite R.
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. I did beat James Spader up in the parking lot, though.
NOTES: Betaed heroically by sinquepida, bless her for figuring out how it ends. Like any story, tons of other people helped along the way, and I am indebted. The title is nearly a lyric of Mike Doughty's. All medical errors are mine. Feedback/critique/hate mail/offers of firstborn children are so very welcome.

SUMMARY: There's something wrong with people that most doctors never diagnose. There's something missing, something hollow that keeps everyone--keeps you--always searching for more.



When the door proves to be locked, you move over and try a window. "House has launched us into a life of crime," you say.

Behind you, Foreman says, "Speak for yourself."

"Right. I forgot. You were a budding felon long before he got his clutches on--"

"Spare key behind the porch light," he says, jingling it in his fingers. He unlocks the door and you're inside, breathing the dry, boxed smell of a house that's been empty for a week. Framed photos eye you from the walls of the foyer. Mummy and Daddy and baby makes three, only Daddy has something that presents like meningitis even though his spinal tap was clear.

You pass Foreman in the hall and head for the kitchen. There's nothing in the kitchen but you look anyway, at the plastic teething ring in the drainer and the milk expiring in the stainless fridge. No fungus under the sink, no slime pooled in the crisper, no flashing neon sign that says, I am what's wrong. "It's clean," you say, loud enough to be heard in the living room.

"This thing isn't environmental anyway." Foreman appears in the doorway, as empty-handed as you are. "It would've affected the baby first."

"Maybe it did," you say. You haven't examined the baby; offhand, you can't even remember whether it's a boy or a girl.

"So she's not breathing abnormally or running a fever because she doesn't want Mom to worry?" You shrug. He shrugs, mocking you, and walks over to the stairs. "We're not gonna find anything here," he says, but he goes up anyway.

Now that you've declared it clean, something about the kitchen is bothering you. You do a second round. The fridge, the microwave, the sink, the teething ring, and a ceramic dish of pennies and nickels and--there--a cigarette lighter. "Hey," you say, picking it up. Foreman doesn't hear you.

You flick the flame on and off. You remember how Sylvia did this, the first time you saw her.

Sylvia was your first American girlfriend. Sylvia had wavy black hair, rounded lips, and an athletic little body hidden inside a banker's wardrobe, and she sat by the window at Starbucks and flicked her lighter without a cigarette in sight.

She talked to you for twenty minutes about the secret to a perfect cup of coffee, and getting her phone number made you late for rounds. She was really funny, Sylvia, and her whole face turned pink with delight when she made you laugh.

On and off, off and on. You take the lighter upstairs to show Foreman.

"...So?" he says, folding his arms in front of his chest.

"They both said they don't smoke," you remind him.

"If he was showing respiratory symptoms, I'd say you just cracked the code."

"If he lied about not smoking, maybe he lied about something else." You hear yourself practically parroting House and wince even before Foreman glares at you. "All right," you say. "Let's keep looking."

He shakes his head. "When I was busting my ass to get into medical school, this is not what I thought I'd wind up doing with my life."

"Breaking and entering?"

"What, are you enjoying this?" He fixes his eyes on yours.

Sometimes it's hard to tell what you're enjoying and what you're doing because you were told. You've read that children of divorce have this problem, that children of addicts have this problem. That children have this problem. You let the lighter drop into the pocket of your jacket and say, "Let's get it over with, yeah?"

He sticks you with the baby's room, to sift through a hundred floppy, fuzzy toys and at least two alphabets' worth of wooden blocks. Everything is plush and pastel; everything is sanitized except for the occasional blotch of old drool. Everything is safe. You don't understand babies. Strike that: you understand babies quite well; they're simple machines with a low input to outflow ratio. It's parents you don't understand, and--you touch the mobile over the crib and it plays three notes of a lullaby--you probably never will.

You find Foreman across the hall, sitting on the edge of the Jacuzzi in the master bath, chin in his hands. "I could have gone back to L.A.," he says, and sniffs a blue towel for mold. "I could have a partnership, I could have palm trees. I could not have a boss who gets off on humiliating anyone who crosses his path."

You catch your own eye in the mirror on the closet door. Foreman has worked for House for just over a year, and every few months he talks about how he could be somewhere else. You get that. So could you.

Two years ago, you calculated the time differences, made a phone call, and asked your father to make a phone call of his own. If it's not too much trouble, you said, sharpening the edge of your voice. If you think your influence might help. I really want this job, you said, and hung up without saying goodbye. You lay back against your pillow and wondered how much you'd regret it. You still lie awake nights, wondering how much you regret it.

"So why're you still here?" you ask. "Why not L.A.?"

Foreman looks up at you, with the white spark of the bathroom light shining out of his dark eyes. He stretches his legs out and stands up. "What House does, you can't learn from anyone else."

"Yeah." It's the same reason you usually come back to, when your eyes tire of staring at the ceiling.

"Rotten human beings can be great doctors," he adds.

"I know that." You open a drawer of the built-in wardrobe: six colors of the same cashmere sweater. "I've always known that."

He makes a noise in his throat, but doesn't say anything. You finish the second floor without talking, the two of you falling into a rhythm. You work well together, whether it's this or reaching over the body of a patient, a needle in your hand and a scalpel in his. Blood on his hands, blood on yours. With Cameron--or without Cameron--you are a unit, a team. Sometimes you take this for granted, but when you notice it, you're always surprised. You're not often part of anyone's greater whole.

You're not easy with your trust. Sylvia noticed that about you, too.

One night in a Thai restaurant, Sylvia passed her fingers through a candle flame, with such a casual gesture that you thought it was painless until you caught her eye. Later she sat on her kitchen counter, skirt hiked up to show you the bright stripes of scar tissue like garters at the tops of her thighs.

Your first thought was how you could fix her, heal her, take the damage away. You realized that was a stupid thought and didn't voice it. Sylvia poured you some dry red wine and talked about what felt good to her, and about how hard it was to find somebody she could trust to go there and back. There was a lot of talking and kissing. So, Sylvia said, do you trust me?

You said you thought it was supposed to be the other way around.

It only works if it goes both ways, Sylvia said. You know that, don't you?

You'd always known that.

She had some odd ideas about what felt good and some odd ideas about safe words. Colorado, she suggested. Eel. Fruitcake.

What about stop, you said. You had her bare legs lying across yours, and a cigarette lighter in your hand. You were a little bit hard and a little bit scared.

She blushed when she smiled. It's too easy to say stop and not mean it, she said.

All the time you're thinking about this, you're busy going through the wardrobe, scanning the smooth floor, peering behind the hamper. You shouldn't be thinking about Sylvia right now, anyway. You try to concentrate on your patient. His fever keeps rising, he can barely nod his head, and when you left the hospital, he was forgetting things, like your name, the day of the week, the year. It ought to be meningitis. It has no business being anything but meningitis. In a couple of days it'll probably kill him. Maybe it'll kill him before you get back to Princeton-Plainsboro. Maybe you should bolt for the car and run every red light between here and the hospital.

Foreman steps out of the pristine guest room and says, "It still looks like equine encephalitis, but--"

"No bite," you finish for him. "No suspicious marks, scabs, or rashes on the physical exam, and the urine test was negative into the bargain. It isn't environmental."

His eyes narrow. "Funny, that sounds just like something I said an hour ago."

"Yeah, yeah." You go to the top of the stairs, take a step down and turn back to look at him. "I've seen a lot of patients just lie in the ICU and go to pieces no matter what we did for them," you say. It isn't that far behind you: the years of internship and residency, years of end-stage cancer and end-stage AIDS and end-stage everything. It's right at your heels. You really wanted this job. "We lose fewer of them House's way."

"That doesn't make this any less a waste of time," Foreman says, but his voice is a little softer than usual, a little less tried and convicted. He comes down the stairs behind you, tapping a beat on the banister with every step. You're three feet shy of the front door when he says, "Chase."

You follow his gaze. Shit. There's another door, angled into the wall beneath the stairs and half-hidden behind raincoats on hooks.

"The basement," he says.

"Yeah." You push your hair out of your eyes. "The basement."

A few seconds pass, with neither of you wanting to open the door. You both go for it at once. Foreman smirks, the corners of his mouth barely lifting, and sweeps his arm out in a sort of ladies first gesture. You roll your eyes and go ahead, groping the wall before you for a switch.

Dim light filters up from somewhere you can't see. It doesn't help much, and you squint at your feet going down the raw wooden stairs. You descend into the basement, almost directly into a cement wall. When you stop short, Foreman bumps into you, his hand planted for a second against your spine and away. The wall and its shadow corner sharply. You squeeze past a skeletal lawnmower, toward the musty smell, the bare-bulb glow.

The first thing you see--you can't miss it--is the pin-up on the wall, large as life. The naked girl has masses of white-blonde hair and a faintly familiar face, her hands cradling huge silicated breasts as though she's offering worlds to you. She's got a studded collar around her neck and black vinyl boots that come up over her splayed knees, and she stares back at you through her impossible eyelashes until you look away. You look away, and you see that she's not the only one.

There are more posters further back on the wall: different girls, different poses, same show. There's a combination TV-VCR sitting on a crate of videotapes. There's a long workbench, piled above and below with about ten years' worth of pornographic magazines, centerfolds hanging out like dogs' tongues.

Foreman lets out a low whistle. You glance back at him, at his wide round eyes.

"Sick," you say, cracking a smile.

"Yeah. That'd be my diagnosis." He digs around in his pocket and comes up with a new pair of gloves.

"This isn't a normal married man's stash." You shoot another glance around the little room, without stepping out of the doorway. It's too much to be healthy; it's too much to be arousing. Well. Barely even a twinge. You shut your eyes. "This is not normal, period."

His shoulder bumps yours as he steps past you. "And if Chase says it's not normal," he says, sounding a bit like House and a bit like a game show host. You hear the latex snap against his wrist.

"Bite me," you say, and Foreman snorts out a laugh.

For a moment, and you know it's an overreaction, you want to grab him, give him a shake, just to remind him that he doesn't know you as well as he imagines. No. You don't want to touch anything in here. You shove your hands into your jacket; your fingers find the lighter. You freeze, and your memory freeze-frames and reels backward to Sylvia.

Sylvia, stretched out on her bed, a pillow beneath her hips, wax melting at the indentations between her breasts and below her navel.

You thumbed the lighter. The flame bowed in the stream of your breath.

She didn't make much noise when it touched her, only sucked her breath in hard, but the muscles jumped from her throat to her thighs. Every inch of her tensed and tight. You heard yourself panting, dying to pick up her knees and just fuck her. But you held on. Your fingertips stung in the heat of the flame. The lighter sputtered off and on.

It had to hurt but she never flinched for a second, her face suffused with red and her ass hitching up into your grasp. She was dripping on your free hand, and your sweat was running down onto her body. Wax and salt and flame.

You were hot, so hot it was like you were inside her, wholly, inside the cave of her beating heart. Like you were dying. It sure as hell was nothing like your life.

And her eyes flew open as her hands closed on the mattress, and Sylvia let out the only cry she'd make all night, this single sound. Sylvia said your name.

Your name in a howl of pure inhuman want.

For the first time since seminary, you came without being touched.

The memory goes through you, goes burning down your spine, all your blood rushing south. You are standing in a stranger's basement, sweating, clutching a stranger's cigarette lighter as if it meant something to you. As if it meant anything.

You take your hand out of your pocket, open your eyes and look at it. There was a blister on the pad of your thumb for a week. What are you? Enjoying this?

"Okay," you say, out loud, and you hear and hate that your voice is hoarse. "Are we done here?"

Foreman doesn't hear you.

He's standing near the wall, both hands flattened against the concrete, close enough to be checking the blank area for mildew. Except he isn't moving, or even really looking around. The way he stands, tension radiates out from his shoulders and the back of his head and ripples out to you. Maybe his eyes are shut; maybe he's thinking of something he shouldn't. Maybe he feels what you feel: the room closing in on you, the discomfort, the sweat, and the pressure of desire for something that can't be taped to the wall.

You wonder, and, wondering, you have to know. This is something you're learning from House, or it's something you learned from your father, or else it's just how you are.

Two long steps take you across the room, the pin-up girls' eyes following your every move. You stand at Foreman's shoulder, pretending to study the water heater instead of the way the bare-bulb light bronzes his profile. Your mouth is dry. "It's pretty clean in here," you say. "Once you get past how filthy it is."

He looks at you without turning his head. His eyes are so dark. "We can go."

"Yeah." Neither of you makes a move.

"What kills me," he says, looking at the bare patch of wall again, "what really kills me about this is how bad House's jokes about the whole thing are going to be. It's not even that funny."

You glance away from him, at the arsenal of porn that your patient's assembled, the bared breasts and spread legs of all these other women. You don't understand how he could live like this, how he could hide all this while his wife and son were sleeping two floors up. That's wrong. It's a daughter. "No," you say. Your eyes focus on Foreman again, on how he's biting his lip. "It's not that funny."

You lean in and, like it's an accident, let your hand fall against Foreman's thigh. And, like anything but an accident, you reach over and squeeze him through his trousers. Just a little pressure. Just enough to find out that he's turned on. Just like you.

He tenses into your fleeting grip, a reflex action, an animal's push toward anything that feels good. It does feel good, and you stroke him again, twice, five times before he seems to wake up, and seizes your wrist. He shoves you, not too forcefully, back against the wall, his body flinching away from yours as if burned.

"Fuck." His voice shudders. "Anything that moves, huh, Chase?"

But he doesn't hit you. He could have hit you. He could've stopped you sooner; he could've yelled at you to stop the instant you made contact. Your breathing is shaky and so, you notice, are his hands, as he wipes his sleeve quickly across his face. "You wanted--"

"Shut up." He turns his back on you, like a child who believes that if he can't see you, you disappear. "Don't say another goddamn word."

In six months with Sylvia you never once heard the safe word. She never once asked you to stop anything, and she broke up with you because you didn't figure it out on your own. Or maybe because you didn't do enough. You hide your hands in your pockets again, let your back press against the wall, and shut your eyes. There's something wrong with people that most doctors never diagnose. There's something missing, something hollow that keeps everyone--keeps you--always searching for more.

House knows about this. It's why he has you breaking into patients' houses. Everyone has some kind of room in the basement.

Your eyes snap open and you're staring at a lot of naked, unnatural women and the back of Foreman's head. The thing that's wrong, the thing you haven't been able to identify, is right there in front of your eyes.

"Listen," you say. "What if..."

"I'm not listening," Foreman says, louder than necessary. "I may never be able to look at you again."

"What if it's Epstein-Barr?"

He spins around and looks at you. He looks at you like you've lost your mind, but at least it's something. "You think he's dying of mono?"

"Hear me out." You push off the wall, throwing your arm out to indicate the whole room. "If he's got all this, if he needs all of this, he could be a sex addict. Chances are he's engaged in other risky sexual behavior." Foreman's mouth twitches, as if he doesn't know whether to smirk or groan, and you add, "It's not terribly unlikely that he'd pick up a case of mono, which, in a few cases--"

"Recurs," he finishes for you, his forehead wrinkling. "But it's almost never serious."

"Almost never?" you say. "We've tested for everything else. This does explain all the symptoms."

"And the clear LP."

"And if he didn't get it from his wife, he wouldn't have told her. He probably wouldn't have told the family doctor. So his medical history--"

"--Would still be clean."

His eyes lock on yours, and you can see the light behind them again. The flashing neon sign. Off and on.

"There's no treatment for Epstein-Barr," he says, kneading his hands together. "Either his body'll fight it off or he'll die."

You let out a long sigh, more breath than you thought you'd been holding. "If I'm wrong, we still have no diagnosis. If I'm right..." You risk another couple of steps toward him, and he doesn't back away. It always comes back to the job. He always comes back to the job. So do you. "If I'm right at least we'll know what's killing him."

Foreman holds your gaze for a few more seconds, nods once, and starts for the stairs. "Fuck," he says again, almost sounding amused this time. You think that sums it all up pretty well.

At the top of the basement stairs, he flicks the light off. You blink a couple of times as your eyes get used to the daylight. Foreman stops shy of the front door and jabs a finger toward you, anger crossing his face like a cloud. He looks at you and your sweat turns cold.

"You better not--" He bites down on the sentence, rubs his eyes. "You better not be taking any souvenirs."

Your eyebrows jerk up. "Here," you say, holding out the cigarette lighter. It's still warm in your hand. You toss it to Foreman, but he steps sideways instead of catching it, and it hits the parquet floor and skitters away. You leave it there. It's nothing to you. "I wouldn't dream of stealing from a patient. That's your territory."

The anger doesn't disappear, but it dulls when he smiles, showing his teeth. "You get to tell House what we found," he says, and walks out the front door.

It isn't going to be a pleasant conversation, at least on your end. You frown to yourself as Foreman goes down to your car. He'll back up your diagnosis, you know that already. He'll be able to look at you without blinking or blushing. He'll be only too happy to forget what you found, what you did.

You look down at your empty hands and it seems clear to you: you did what he wanted. He wanted what you did.

A smile rises on your face. You had to know.

Now you know.

You lock the door behind you.

*

This whole thing is dedicated to baked_goldfish, who lured me into the fandom, and to mazily, therealjae, and daygloparker, whom I dragged in with me. And there was much rejoicing.