#chasexreader

[thesealishere]

Chase Brody X Reader: The Rose Series

Light pink roses: Admiration, sympathy, grace, joy, sweetness

 Chase sat down on his bed and stared blankly at the floor, it had only been a few hours since Stacy came and picked up the kids but to him it already felt like days. Time away from them always dragged so long, he missed them so much. With a heavy sigh he took off his hat, setting it on his bedside table as he ran the fingers of his free hand through his hair. He hated this, he felt empty and alone… Slowly his eyes moved over to the space between his bed and the table, one drink wouldn’t hurt. He leaned over and reached for the bottle of whiskey he kept hidden there, feeling confused as something soft brushed against his arm before he pulled the bottle out to find that the whiskey had been replaced with water and that there were now three light pink roses sticking out of it.

“What the-?”

“Sam and I did that while you and Grey were making breakfast.” His head snapped forward to see [Y/N] leaning on the door frame, he didn’t remember hearing the door open. “They were afraid that the roses would be dead by the time you found them… I had sort of hoped they would be honestly.” They spoke with a sad smile, their eyes resting on the bottle in his hand. “Wha- I- How did they know it was there?” He looked down at the flowers in the whiskey bottle, it was something he’d hoped they never found out about.

“Grey found it while playing hide and go seek on Saturday. I was the one that poured it out, Sam wanted to put the flowers in it and picked them too.” They spoke, pushing themselves off the door frame and walking into the room. “I think she picked well too, don’t you?”

“I… Yeah… They’re- They’re pretty… God, I can’t believe they found it and… And thought the flowers would die before I went for it…” His hands began to tremble, he felt that he’d failed them.

“Hey, don’t beat yourself up Chase.” He felt the bed sink him next to him as [Y/N] sat down.

“Why not? Look at me! My little angels found my whiskey stash and still think enough of me to think that I won’t go for it till the flowers were dead! Well they’re still fresh [Y/N]! I didn’t even last a damn day!” His voice rose as his eyes began to sting and he held the bottle tightly.

[Y/N] stayed quiet, reaching over and placing a hand on his shoulder and squeezing it, letting him know they were there for him. His breathing slowly became more even, his grip loosening on the bottle with tears starting to fall.

“You want to know why Sam picked those flowers? I mean, of course she thought they were pretty but when I told her what the roses meant she said it was a done deal.” They finally spoke, his eyes left the bottle and he looked over to them, shouldn’t they be mad that he yelled at them? He thought they should be… “They mean admiration, grace, joy, and sweetness.” They said, leaving out the sympathy part because they had done the same thing with Sam.

“And why would that make it a done deal?”

“Well! She said the grace part was a little off…” They said, that got the tiniest laugh, they’d take the small victory. “But, both Sam and Grey admire you-“

“What’s there to admire? I’m pathetic… I can’t face my problems head on, I have to be drunk just to get through the day…”

“You know that’s not true Chase. You’ve gotten so much better, and you are someone to admire.” They spoke softly, Chase turning his attention back to the bottle, his eyes moving up the stems and to the flowers. “I admire you. You’re stronger than you think, look at you still being here, still fighting this depression and even trying to stop drinking so much… And you bring your kids so much joy, I don’t think I have ever seen them frown when you’re around. What was that thing you were saying to Sam yesterday? Something about how if thunder bothered her, you’d find a way to fly up and fight the clouds?” They asked, earning another small laugh from him, a smile actually finding its way to his face at the memory.

“I was gonna punch that cloud in the face.”

“It doesn’t even have a face, Chase.”

“I’d find a way.”

“See! That’s my point! That right there, no matter what obstacles you have you’ll do what it takes, that’s why they admire you. Well, Grey might admire you because of that sweet shot you did last week, but he’s three so he doesn’t quite understand things that in depth yet, but he admires you none the less. That’s why there’s three flowers too, not just because it’s all that would fit, I swear I could’ve gotten at least one more in there… But, it’s one for each of us. Grey said this one is him.” [Y/N] pointed to the flower in the middle that was just slightly more open than the other two.

“Which one is Sam?” He asked, listening to them hum for a moment before pointing to the one on the right.

“That one I believe she said would be her.” They said and he nodded slowly as he continued to look at the roses.

“So, the left one is you then?”

“Yeah, that one is me.”

The two sat in silence, [Y/N] letting him take in everything and gather his thoughts, there was no rush. Finally, the silence was broken as Chase set the bottle on his bedside table, next to his hat and a sniffle escaped him.

“Chase?” They were almost knocked over with how quickly he spun around and hugged them, burying his face in their chest as he began crying again.

“Thank you… I don’t think I deserve you or them. But thank you.” He cried as [Y/N] wrapped one arm around his torso and began to run their fingers through his hair.

“Doesn’t matter that you don’t think you deserve us, you do, and you got us and we’re not going anywhere. You’ve even got us in flower form now.” They said.

“What about when they die?” He asked, his voice soft.

“Then we’ll just have to get you new ones and then again and again, we’ll keep getting as many roses as you need so that you’re never alone.” They told him, feeling his arms around them tighten.

“Thank you, [Y/N]… Can-Can we stay like this a little longer?”

“We can stay this way for as long as you need. I’m not going anywhere.”

~~~~~~~~

I won’t lie, I got slightly emotional writing this one for... Reasons. But! There ya go! Chase has his flowers and because he has those his kids are still with him, in flower form. I hadn’t been sure what to write for Chase, the first idea had been something similar to JJ’s but, I dunno this idea just kind of hit me ya know? Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed reading this and as always I accept any and all feedback. Thanks for reading!

~Seal~

[thesealishere]

Chase Brody X Reader: A Random Short

A small short based on how my S/O asked me out for the first time in celebration of our 4 year anniversary! 

Bold italics: Is the reader texting 

Just bold: Is Chase texting

Chase looked down at his phone and took a deep breath. He’d been texting [Y/N] a lot that day and they’d been flirting back and forth for a month or so now, but he was ready tonight. He was finally going to ask them out.

Hey, do you think you could help me with something? a text message lit up his screen. Well, this was the perfect window of opportunity of he’d ever seen one.

What do you need help with?

I bought this cute little Eevee and have no clue what to name her any suggestions?

Chase bit his cheek as he looked down at the screen, so it wasn’t something he had to physically do. He was trying to figure out to turn this, he had to confident... He could do this..

[Y/N] sat on their bed, playing with their new Eevee that they’d gotten, it was a small one and absolutely adorable.  If only they could figure out what to name the plush. They heard their phone ding and looked over to see that Chase had responded.

Ill give you a name if you give me a kiss on the cheek on Monday ;)

Well... they hadn’t been expecting that, they could feel their face heat up as their heart sped up. Yeah, they finally admitted to themselves that they’d been sort of flirting with Chase recently. Which had been hard to do after denying that they had a crush on him for so long. But this, this is was the most bold faced he’d done so far... They wanted to say no but they also wanted to say Yes... Their friends would never let them forget that they were right about this whole thing. But he wasn’t exactly a bad guy… He also was pretty cute…

Okay, give me the name. They typed and stared for a moment before hitting send and then hiding their face behind their hands. Even if they were alone at home right now this was embarrassing.

You ready for this? Eve. The response came pretty quick and [Y/N] could help but snort.

Thats a sucky ass name, deals off. They quickly typed and hit send. They totally weren’t backing out, no, this was just-

Ding!

Hey! You already agreed to the deal no take backs!

I could’ve come up with that name. They typed back, this feeling more like their usual banter, they felt a lot more relaxed.

But you didn’t, you made a deal with me to get a name, I held up my end.

Fight me

I will and you will lose

Will not!

Will too!

Ill prove you wrong! Just name the time and place!

Olive Garden! With breadsticks! Over dinner maybe?!

[Y/N] stopped, their breath leaving them as they read the text over and over again. Did he just... Ask them out? What do they say? What do they do?!

Meanwhile, Chase sat in his chair and chewed on his lip. All the confidence he’d had a second ago was gone. They weren’t responding and he was starting to wonder if he’d gone too far. Of course, not like the first suggestion hadn’t been forward enough, they had effectively backed out of that one, but they still agreed. He really hoped he didn’t mess this up. Then his phone dinged and he quickly opened the message.

Bring it on

Was that a yes? A grin spread to his face, his heart racing as he began typing again.

As a date?

His leg bounced as he waited for the response.

Yeah

“Yes!” Chase shot up from his seat, doing a quick happy dance. He was about to run out of the room, but he quickly stopped and grabbed his phone to reply.

Cant wait! He hit send and then immediately ran out of the room.

“Marvin! Marvin it worked!”

Meanwhile [Y/N] laid back in their bed and covered their face with their hands, they couldn’t believe that just happened.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And there ya go! That’s actually exactly how my S/O asked me out 4 years ago, long story short we went to Olive Garden, he bopped me on the head with a bread stick, and we’ve been happily together ever since! Sorry it’s so short, it really was all through text messages and I really couldn’t come up with much more. Hope y’all liked it and thank you for reading! 

~Seal~

[loveindraft]

Chapter 20: The Equilibrium of the Element

By the third week of September, the air in Hopewell had turned cold and thin. The wind came off the northern ridges with a sharp clarity that turned the leaves of the old maples near the barn into small, brittle plates of rust.

Clara stood in the kitchen of the townhouse, the electronic breast pump humming on the counter beside her with a steady, mechanical rhythm: shhh-wuck, shhh-wuck, shhh-wuck. She was holding a 150-milliliter polypropylene bottle under the plastic shield, her eyes fixed on the small, white stream of milk collecting in the bottom of the cylinder.

The kitchen table was covered in four different medical journals, all open to articles on the long-term cognitive outcomes of breast-fed infants.

"The maternal excretion of immunoglobulins is highest between the hours of 02:00 and 06:00," Clara said to the empty room, her voice rhythmic and flat as the machine beside her. "Which means this sample has a twenty-two percent higher concentration of secretory IgA than the expression from yesterday afternoon. If I store it at minus twenty degrees—"

Robert Chase entered from the living room. He wasn't wearing his scrubs; he had on an old, oversized blue flannel shirt that belonged to his father and a pair of faded jeans frayed at the cuffs. His hair was still wet from a quick shower, blonde strands sticking out in uncombed tufts.

He didn't speak. He walked straight over to the counter, reached out with his right hand, and switched off the power toggle on the breast pump.

The sudden silence in the kitchen was massive, broken only by the low, distant whistle of the wind against the window frame.

"The expression was not complete," Clara said, her blue eyes turning toward him with a cold, geometric precision. "I have exactly twenty-five milliliters remaining in the left gland to reach the target volume for the 06:00 feeding log. If the infant experiences a caloric deficit during this cycle—"

"Clara," Chase said, his voice quiet, steady, and completely devoid of the diagnostic rivalry that had defined their lives for three years. He reached out and gently took the plastic bottle from her hand, setting it down on the counter next to her leather ledger with a small, firm click. "Stop."

"The logistical timeline requires—"

"Sit down," he repeated softly. He placed his hands on her shoulders. They weren't clamping down with force; they were just heavy—heavy with the dense, warm reality of a man who spent his days holding people together while they were trying to fall apart in the dark.

Clara’s jaw tightened. She looked at his fingers on her shirt, then at his face—at the small, fresh line of silver hair that had appeared near his temple over the summer, and the deep clarity of his seawater eyes. There was no data in his gaze. There was just her.

She sat down slowly in the oak chair near the table, her legs drawing up toward her chest in that old, defensive posture she hadn't used since she was a girl sitting in the radiology reading room waiting for her father to finish his third bottle of beer.

"She’s not icteric anymore," Chase said, sitting in the adjacent chair and pulling the ledger toward him. He didn't open it; he just rested his palm on the leather cover, his fingers covering the columns of numbers she had spent three hours calculating. "I checked her skin under the halogen lamp in the hall. Her bilirubin is completely clear. The liver is functioning at one hundred percent efficiency."

"The skin color is a subjective metric," Clara muttered, her chin resting on her knee. "Without a transcutaneous bilirubinometer, the margin of error in your visual assessment is at least fifteen percent."

"The margin of error is zero because I am an intensive care specialist who has seen four hundred cases of neonatal jaundice," Chase said, his mouth twitching into a small, crooked smile. "And because she smiled at me when I changed her diaper ten minutes ago."

Clara’s head snapped up. "A smile at twenty-one days is not a social validation. It’s an involuntary contraction of the risorius muscle caused by gastrointestinal gas movement through the lower duodenum. The neurological pathways for a voluntary social smile do not mature until the sixth week of extrauterine life."

"She looked at me, Clara," Chase said softly, his hand moving off the ledger to cover her cold fingers where they were clamped around her knee. "She looked at my face, her pupils dilated by two millimeters, and she turned her mouth up at the corners because she knew my voice. It wasn't gas. It was her."

Clara didn't reply. She looked down at his hand over hers—at the long, lean fingers that were so fast with a central line and so slow with the crib bolts. A sudden, sharp sensation moved through her chest—not a contraction or a metabolic shift, but a wide, cold space that felt remarkably like the library at Johns Hopkins when the lights were turned off at midnight and the books were nothing but gray shapes against the stone.

"My father says I’m going to be a terrible mother," she whispered, her voice dropping into a register so low that Chase had to lean forward to catch the frequency. It was the first time she had ever spoken the words aloud, the first time the armor had cracked wide enough to see the ghost inside. "He said I don't have the empathy for it. He said when she scrapes her knee, I’ll lecture her on the tensile strength of the asphalt instead of picking her up."

Chase looked at her, his expression softening until the last remnants of his own professional exhaustion seemed to dissolve. He slid his chair closer, his knees bumping against hers, closing the physical distance between them.

"Your father is a brilliant cripple who lives in a three-room apartment with five thousand records and a bottle of narcotics because he’s terrified that if he lets anyone touch his leg, he’ll have to find out what he looks like without the pain," Chase said, his grip tightening around her hand until her knuckles went pink. "You’re not him, Clara. You look like him, you talk like him, and you have his habit of treating Cuddy like an expensive piece of office furniture. But you’re here. In a townhouse in Hopewell. With a grease trap that works and a crib that’s anchored at ninety degrees to the wall. You didn't stay in the library."

"The library is safe, Robert," she said, her blue eyes wide and suddenly glossy under the kitchen lights. "In the library, if you follow the index, the answer is always on the page where it belongs. The numbers don't change their mind in the middle of the night. They don't... stop breathing."

Chase felt a sharp pull in his own ribcage. He reached up with his free hand, his fingers gently capturing her jawline, forcing her to look directly at him. His thumb brushed against her cheekbone, finding the skin warm and slightly damp.

"Neither will she," Chase murmured, his voice thick with a sudden, fierce tenderness. "Because she has you. And she has me. I spent years watching my father treat people like medical abstracts, Clara. I know what it looks like when someone uses science to hide from the world. You aren't hiding. If you were hiding, you wouldn't be counting every milligram of her food like it's the holy grail. You're just terrified because you love her so much you don't know where your own skin ends and hers begins."

Clara let out a shaky, uncalibrated breath. She didn't pull away from his hand. Instead, she leaned her cheek into his palm, closing her eyes as the heat of his skin bled into her own. "I don't have a protocol for this."

"Good," Chase whispered. He leaned in, his lips brushing against her forehead, lingering there until the tension in her neck finally began to break. "We'll write a new one. Together."

The door to the kitchen didn't bang open this time. It opened with a slow, cautious creak that suggested the operator was trying to avoid a mechanical friction report.

Gregory House stood in the hallway, his cane held reversed in his hand so that the silver handle was hooked over his forearm like a structural brace. He had a small, white plastic pharmacy bag in his left hand, which he tossed across the room with a quick, flicking motion of his wrist. It landed perfectly in the center of the ledger, covering the numbers with a small, crinkling sound.

"The kava root extract was positive in the actuary’s urine," House said, leaning his shoulder against the refrigerator door and surveying the two of them with a slow, deliberate squint. "Foreman is currently in the unit giving her the acetylcysteine and explaining that she’ll have to spend her summer vacation looking at insurance statistics instead of swimming in a chlorinated tank in Beijing. He looked very professional. He had his pen in his pocket and everything."

Clara sat up, though she didn't move away from Chase’s side, her hand remaining firmly locked in his. "What is that?"

"It’s a digital density scanner," House said, his voice dropping into that rough, gravelly drawl as he limped two steps closer to the table. "The commercial ones are garbage—they use an acoustic pulse that gets distorted by the drywall adhesive. This one’s from the engineering department at Princeton. It uses a low-frequency electromagnetic field to map the vertical studs to within half a millimeter of accuracy. I stole it from the maintenance locker while the guard was trying to fix the vending machine in the basement."

Clara reached out, her long fingers sliding the plastic bag toward her. She pulled out the small, heavy yellow instrument, its digital screen grey and clean under the kitchen lights.

"The studs in the nursery are sixteen inches on center, Dad," she said, her voice returning to its normal, level register, though her eyes remained fixed on the yellow plastic. "I checked them with the density scanner from the library."

"The scanner from the library is ten years old," House said, his mouth setting into that hard, white line as he turned back toward the hallway. "Its battery has a voltage decay curve that drops by five percent every twenty minutes of active use. If you trust that thing to hold up four hundred pounds of pediatric urology texts, you’re going to find out what a structural failure looks like from the underside of the plaster."

He reached the front door, his hand touching the brass knob before he stopped and looked back over his shoulder—his blue eyes small, bright, and completely devoid of data.

"The kid’s crying," House said. "It’s a three-hundred-hertz frequency. It’s been going on for twelve seconds. If you don't go up there and pick her up, Chase is going to start singing that Australian sea shanty his grandfather taught him, and then we’ll all have to file an administrative complaint with the department of environmental protection."

The door clicked shut behind him, the safety glass settling into its frame with that specific, low frequency that they all knew by heart.

Clara stood up from the oak chair, her hand releasing Chase's fingers with a slow, deliberate reluctance that had nothing to do with protocol. She looked at the yellow density scanner on the table, then at the ledger, and then at the ceiling where a faint, thin cry was beginning to cut through the quiet of the Hopewell morning.

"The 06:00 feeding log is late," she said, her voice steady as she walked toward the stairs.

Chase rose and followed her, his hand coming to rest on the small of her back as they climbed the wooden steps together into the gray light of the nursery. "Let it be late, Clara. The geometry will survive."

[loveindraft]

Chapter 5: The Complication

By week eight, Clara's morning sickness had become a tactical problem. She'd started arriving at the hospital at five in the morning, two hours before her father and an hour before Chase, just so she could throw up in the peace of the staff locker room without anyone checking her pulse.

She'd lost four pounds. Her scrubs looked loose around her shoulders, and her skin had taken on that translucent, bluish quality of someone who lived on ice chips and crackers.

"You're not eating the bacon" House said during a differential on a thirty-year-old schoolteacher with sudden-onset blindness. He was sitting at the head of the table, his eyes darting between Clara and the whiteboard. He hadn't said anything about the pregnancy since their confrontation in the lab, but his silence was louder than his usual shouting.

"The bacon is ninety percent nitrates and ten percent floor sweepings" Clara said, her eyes fixed on the MRI scans on the light box "The optic chiasm is clear. It's not a tumor"

"It's histoplasmosis" Chase said from across the table. He hadn't looked at her directly in three days, ever since their argument in the lobby. He was focusing entirely on his charts, his tone clipped and efficient "She has a parrot. Parrots carry fungi. Fungi loves brains"

"Parrots carry psittacosis, you brilliant diagnostic engine" Clara said, her voice sharp despite her exhaustion "Histoplasmosis is from bats. Unless her schoolteacher is moonlighting as a vigilante in Gotham, she hasn't been around bats. Try again, or let Foreman handle the heavy thinking"

"She lives in an old house" Chase shot back, slamming his pen down "Old houses have attics. Attics have bats. It's basic biology, even for someone who spent her residency in a concrete box in Maryland"

"Enough" House said suddenly. He didn't look at Chase; he looked directly at Clara, his blue eyes tight with a strange, dark protective streak that she had never seen in him before "Chase, go check the teacher's attic. If you find a bat, you get a cookie. Clara, go down to the clinic and do my hours. Now"

"I can finish the differential" Clara said, her jaw setting "I don't need you to manage my schedule"

"I'm not managing your schedule, I'm managing my department" House growled, his voice unusually harsh "You look like a corpse that's been dredged out of the Delaware River. Go sit down before you ruin my carpets" Clara stood up, her pride flaring, ready to deliver a retort that would level the room.

"I am perfectly..." but as she spoke, the room took a sudden, violent tilt to the left. The light boxes brightened until they were blinding, and the sound of her father's cane became a dull, roaring echo in her ears. She reached out for the edge of the table, but her fingers missed the wood entirely.

"Clara!" That was Chase's voice. It wasn't angry anymore; it sounded panicked, coming from somewhere far away. She felt the floor hit her knees first, then her shoulder.

The linoleum was cold against her cheek, and the last thing she saw before the gray darkness took her entirely was the sight of her father slamming his cane down, trying to stand up from his chair with a speed his leg didn't possess, while Robert Chase's expensive leather shoes rushed toward her across the room.

When she woke up, she was on a gurney in Treatment Room 3. The overhead lights were dimmed, and she had an IV line in her left hand, a bag of normal saline dripping steadily above her head. The taste of copper was strong in her mouth, and her arm felt cold where the fluid was entering.

"Don't move" a voice said from the corner. It wasn't House. It was Chase. He was sitting in the small plastic chair by the door, his lab coat gone, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his shoulders. He looked exhausted, his hair messy as if he'd been running his fingers through it for hours.

"Where's my father?" Clara asked, her voice crackling like dry paper.

"He tried to come in here" Chase said, his voice flat, completely devoid of his usual accent or arrogance. He didn't look at her; he was staring at the floor between his boots "Cuddy physically blocked him from the room because he was shouting at the nurses. He... he looked terrified, Clara. I've never seen him look like that"

Clara reached up to touch her face, finding a small bandage on her temple where she'd grazed the table on her way down.

"He wasn't terrified. He was just annoyed that his clinic coverage collapsed"

"Stop it" Chase said, standing up slowly. His movements were heavy.

He walked over to the gurney, his eyes fixed on the heart monitor beside her head, then down at a small piece of paper in his hand, a lab report from the hospital's internal system.

"I ran the panel myself" Chase whispered, his voice trembling slightly. He looked down at her, his seawater eyes wide, dark with a mixture of confusion and a sudden, terrifying realization "Your HCG levels are over forty thousand. That puts you at roughly eight weeks if it's a single, or four weeks if..."

He stopped, his fingers gripping the metal rail of the gurney so hard his knuckles turned white.

"House knew" Chase said, the realization hitting him like a physical blow "That's why he was watching us. That's why he looked at me like he wanted to dissect me alive in the lounge. It wasn't because we had a one-night stand. It was because..."

He leaned down, forcing her to look at him, his breath hot against her face.

"Is it mine?" he whispered. Clara looked at him... this man she'd spent three weeks matching wit for wit, this man who was currently looking at her as if his entire world had just cracked open along the seam. She didn't flinch. She didn't look away.

"Yes, Robert" she said, her voice perfectly steady, perfectly clear "It's yours"