Robert Chase, MD | Everybody Lies

Chase had shown up late to rehearsal, again. "Late" by dancer standards, at least, which meant right under the wire, still pulling his hair back and only just starting his warmups when the director walked in, clapping her hands and calling everyone to attention and to take their places. They were about a month out from their production of Swan Lake, which was the ballet that was considered by dance critics to be their company's strongest production. The company director was trying to make this performance better than the years before, while still trying to finish securing the details of their next run. It was chaotic, and Chase thrived on it. Even as busy as he was with college, he wouldn't give this up for the world. In the studio, he was far more alive than he was in the classroom, even if he was taking it seriously. Medicine. Becoming a doctor. Not what he wanted to do with his life, but he couldn't afford Julliard teaching five year olds how to plie, even if he wishes that he could. His classes and rehearsals run rather tight together, and he knows that a number of the other dancers judge him for it, but Robert pretends not to notice.

Or it's the fact that he's slept with more than a couple of his coworkers. People get so jumpy about sex, about who's having it and who isn't. Chase likes sex, and he's never seen it as a bad thing, never really had the desire to hide his interest. Other people just lie about it.

Rehearsal isn't particularly remarkable, at least not in matters of routine. They start off in pairs, running through movements and lifts, contact and extensions, to the often repeated instructions of grace and evoking simplicity in movement. They work their way in broad strokes through the third act with their instructor tweaking arms and pulling legs and saying hold. The same as the past two weeks. They take a break, she pulls out a notepad and they start back on Act I, Scene I, reviewing sections she had marked in green pen. What was remarkable, at least to Chase, was seeing Greg in those black tights. He stared, not quite shamelessly. He looked away when the older dancer would look his way, watched him through his blond eyelashes. He had a boyfriend, more or less. There were very good reasons not to be looking. But he couldn't help himself, he never could, because there was just something about him, about the way that he looked, the way that he moved, and it caught his breath half the time, and it always made his pulse race. Chase was a little more awkward, a little distracted when he wasn't dancing. He walked into someone during a break when he went for his water bottle.

He tried not to be obvious, but that was one thing that the young blond was not very good at. Much like how at the end of rehearsal, when Greg went off to one of the smaller studios, Chase couldn't help following. Everyone else either wasn't interested or knew better. Either was likely. Chase was terrible at knowing better. He was young, impulsive, and pretty scant on self-control. So there he was,  leaning in the doorway, watching, his things still left behind in the other room. House usually wore loose pants, and the man was gorgeous. Older than most, but he made Chase have to struggle to try and not get a hard-on in the middle of rehearsal.

It didn't always work. He wanted to say something, but he didn't want to interrupt, so he just waited, watched. Quietly lingering while he stared.

It was one of those brief lulls between  cases. The man's family was tearful and overjoyed, and they'd all been clapping each other on the back for another case solved through House's manic, and almost insane methods, that Chase couldn't help but worship. He thought the others were getting ready to leave, but Chase instead wandered downstairs to the basement, under the guise of retrieving a patient file that Foreman wanted. He found it, but, surrounded by the boxes of employee files bound to be digitized, he couldn't help but give in to his curiosity. House was in here somewhere, between 'Houle' and 'Housel', was the file of 'House, Gregory, M.D.'.

There was a fascination that Chase couldn't resist and tried not to look at too closely. How could anyone work with him and not worship the man? Sure, Foreman gave him a hard time about it, but House's madcap approach certainly gave results, and in the process saved lives. They bent the rules, and House outright broke them on more accounts than he could count on both hands, but that was, in a sense, part of his charm. Not that House had a lot of that to spare, mind. Even Chase was brutally aware of that.

And that was part of the reason why he was down here, fairly forgetting about Foreman as he tugged the file he was looking for out of the stacks with a lopsided smile accorded to his prize. Just who was Doctor House? What secrets did his file hold about what he'd been and done before Chase and the others had come to work for him? He sat down, and had barely flipped open the folder to a pretty lousy two by four photo of the man, when he looked up sharply.

He thought that he'd heard a noise...