friend and i rewatched hunting this morning and i realised: after cameron is exposed and comes back to the office in her scrubs, chase reaches out to touch her shoulder and tell her she should take the rest of the day. he’s doing a princess diana. touching her to show he’s not afraid of infection himself. which is a nice thing to do of course but also very funny to me. he really is the people’s princess.
tonight i met a security guard at a gay bar who was kal penn’s bodyguard several years ago while he was in australia. which means! the degrees of separation between myself and the house cast has shrunk dramatically. much to ponder
would love your take on cameron finding out about retcon sister. does it happen before she and chase get married? does she take it well?
thanks for the australian language consult pal
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The phone is ringing and Cameron is half-awake and reaching for it before she has a single conscious thought beyond House: her fingers grope on an unfamiliar nightstand, fumbling for the plastic casing —
Chase reaches over her, awkwardly, heavily, pinning her beneath him for a moment as he grabs the phone: sleepily, waking up, Cameron remembers they are at his place, not hers. His phone. Shit, that’s embarrassing: they are not nearly at the picking up the other’s phone stage in their relationship — not that it’s a relationship: “Hello?” Chase mutters, flopping away and back onto his pillow. And then, complaining: “It’s the middle of the night.”
He doesn’t talk like this to House. Foreman, maybe. Cameron isn’t sure if she ought to be getting dressed: she peers over at the alarm clock. It’s just almost five, hardly the middle of the night — might as well, she decides reluctantly…
“No. It’s alright, you’re fine” Chase is saying, his tone gentle. She pauses in the process of sitting up, climbing out of bed: Chase is lying on his back, and she thinks he’s frowning. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
He turns his head towards Cameron. The room is still dark, only the faintest blush of dawn creeping in. Too dark to really tell if he’s annoyed she’s listening in. Too dark to attempt to look reassuring. She bites her lip and climbs out of bed, foot finding Chase’s discarded shirt, which she pulls over her head to carry her to the other room, where she’d left her bag —
“Calm your farm,” Chase says, and Cameron stops her progress out of the bedroom because for a second she thinks he’s having a stroke, but he huffs, exasperated, and she continues on, listening to him murmuring reassurances to the caller: “I’ll take care of it. Okay? Okay.”
She turns on the living room light, blinking in the glare as she finds her overnight bag, pulling out clean underwear and an itchy bralette she hadn’t brought because it was nicer-looking than her usual bras — as she’s buttoning up her blouse Chase emerges from the bedroom, tousled and in sweatpants: he scoops up his own discarded shirt where Cameron had left it and pulls it on, yawning loudly.
“Sorry for picking up your phone,” Cameron says, brisk, having decided it was the best opener.
“’S alright. Glad it wasn’t House,” Chase shrugs, and she feels a cold prickle of dread imagining having actually answered it as he stumbles to the kitchenette.
“So who was calling you at four in the morning if it wasn’t our boss?” she asks, brushing out her hair and pulling it into a ponytail, trying to keep the curiosity out of her voice.
“An idiot who forgot about time differences,” he grumbles, starting the coffee machine. And then: “My sister.”
“Oh.” What?
Cameron has known Chase for almost four years. Even before they started having regular sex, she spend most of her time with him in the office, at work. She knows how he takes his coffee, what foods he likes to eat, that he has a berry allergy, that he’s dabbled in a dozen different sports. She knows his parents divorced, that both are dead. That he’s a light sleeper, and a restless one. He has a sister?
“Is she… okay?” Cameron settles for asking: it is a neutral question.
“She’s fine,” he says curtly.
“She’s your… step sister?” Cameron hazards; this could explain a few things.
“No. Just younger.” Chase remains standing before the coffee machine, back to her, even though there is nothing left for him to do until the pot has finished brewing.
“Gotcha,” she says, casual and light as she can. She can’t just be imagining the tension, and she remembers him when his father came around, curt and angry… but he hasn’t overtly shut her down yet. The part of her brain House has been prodding at for three years now registers his tension, knows Chase well enough to know this is unusual. There is no obvious reason to be so on edge after a call from your sister, to hide her existence. Differential: Shame. Embarrassment. He’d been soothing on the telephone; he cares. Cameron gets dressed silently, part of her uneasy at the psychoanalysis, part of her convinced she’s onto something. She wants desperately to ask, but is wary of setting Chase off.
“Is there anything I can do?” she asks, buttoning up her cardigan. Chase has turned in her direction at some point in the process of her dressing, his expression tense in the way she knows means he’s stressed and thinks he’s hiding it.
To her surprise, he takes her offer. “I’ll have to go to the bank when they open,” he says. The coffee machine beeps, and he moves to the cupboard for mugs. “Can you cover for me if we get a case?”
“Sure,” Cameron says. “Need me to cover clinic?”
“It should only take an hour or so. I have to — wire some money.” Does he do this often? What is his sister like? Why does she need money? Cameron is dying to ask, but she sees Chase’s wary expression as he hands her a mug of coffee — cream and sugar, just as she likes — and she bites her tongue.
“No problem,” she says, and he practically sinks with relief, exhaling with a shaky smile, and she's suddenly okay with not knowing the details after all.
okay IN HIS DEFENCE. writing left-handed on a whiteboard is not easy. if you rest your hand on the board you erase your own writing so you gotta like. pinch the pen in your fingertips. and it’s really unstable
i know ppl acknowledge chase's shift in personality post-cameron but i feel like we give the divorce too much credit and ignore his catholic guilt over murdering someone. like i don't have any deep thoughts to share about this bc my brain doesn't work but i feel like we as a fandom should acknowledge how much that fucked him up like i don't think he ever truly recovered from that
been beefing with a orb weaver in my yard lately. she builds her web across my washing line so i have to remove it every week or so. she is fortuitous and simply rebuilds. so now i’ve started decorating her web for her in a bid to annoy her into leaving. yesterday i put five cicada skins in her web and by the time i checked in the evening, she’d woken up and removed every single one and tossed them to the ground, indignant. next i will add flowers and leaves. may our prank war never cease
Can you write some Chase-centered angst with Thirteen (post divorce)?
this was harder than i anticipated, actually. chase becomes such a closed-book post-divorce that even a curious type like thirteen would struggle to get much out of him.
is this really angst? sort of maybe probably not. it's angst because we know why he's like this, and thirteen doesn't. so, sorry to anon for derailing the prompt lmao, but hopefully you enjoy anyways!
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