Revelations by Minttown1

YOU GUYS! Guess what day it is! It's Deadline of the Chase Ficathon Day! Hurray! (There are a few of you who haven't contacted me about your fics -- pls send me word or the actual fic as soon as you can. Because of the nature of this ficathon, you've got quite a few more days than you normally would [if you have a comment to make about the ficathon in general, DO NOT COMMENT ON THIS POST WITH IT. Go here or just email me])

We begin out Chase ficathon with the best House fic about zombies, or just ever, that I've ever had the pleasure of reading:


Title: Revelations
Author: minttown1
Pairings: House/Chase
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,039
AN: Much gratitude to garnettrees for betaing, and to kandykorn for allowing me to steal a version of the final line. The help from both of you is hugely appreciated.
Prompt: 70. AU. Zombies.




Everything he has left is in one canvas bag, and near the top is a worn Bible. It opens to one page now, one chapter of Revelations.

But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.

He knows it doesn't mean this, but then, Chase isn't exactly sure what it should mean. He was never very good at reconciling the metaphorical and the literal.

Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years.

The pages are soft under his fingers, and he stares until the words begin to swim.

And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.

Whatever it means, it feels appropriate.

*

The nightmare started, for them at least, with a patient EMS brought into the hospital, a child found alone outside town.

He had barely been breathing, and he coded fifteen minutes after he arrived. All efforts were made, all options exhausted. Patient Doe was pronounced dead at 8:47 AM. The doctor in charge had never even had a chance to get back the test results she'd ordered.

By noon, when Chase was sitting down to a coffee lunch in the conference room, Cuddy was already on the warpath, trying to determine exactly how a body had been lost on its way from the emergency room to the morgue.

*

"Get up."

Chase spends his days on the back of House's bike and his nights at House's side. If House ever didn't wake him up at the crack of dawn with a cane to the stomach, he would know to be truly scared.

As it is, Chase sort of regards this as just another lifestyle change. From the monastery to the hospital, from Australia to the United States. Now he's on the road, part of a traveling caravan of strangers, and it doesn't matter where they are because, honestly, at this point, they're not sure there's anywhere safe to go.

They don't know how far this has spread. New York, Philadelphia, Chicago? West to House's California, or maybe all the way to Chase's own Australia? It doesn't really matter, because they don't have much choice.

They're riding, and they're fighting. They're fighting not to die, and it doesn't matter that they can't answer the question of what they really have to live for.

It's not really as if Chase could ever answer that question before, either.

*

"Living's just another bad habit," House said, handing mugs of whiskey around to his fellows and to Wilson, whose office they were currently holed up in.

"Some of us actually enjoyed being alive," Cameron snapped.

"That's not the kind of past tense talk I want to hear from members of Team House!" Wilson raised an eyebrow at this, and House relented, taking two steps back from Cameron and admitting, "It's possible this isn't my first mug."

"Anyway," Foreman says, continuing a conversation from a few minutes before, "you can't cite Romero in a scientific discussion, House." Chase was sitting in the corner and had to stifle a laugh because they were acting so normal, as if an intellectual pissing contest about the how and why was the point right then, as if they weren't just waiting to die.

Chase took his share of the whiskey with a nod and retreated to the balcony. It was only a matter of time before it was off-limits, too,
before they barricaded Wilson's glass door and waited for it to be over, but for now, Chase could see the city around them, burning in spots and smoking in more.

"You're smiling," House said quietly. Chase jumped at his voice, the offending expression quickly disappearing. "The only question," House continued, stepping out to join Chase, "is whether you're a sadist, or just a sad man with a death wish."

"You sure there's a difference?" Chase asked coolly, pointedly.

House blinked, chuckled, joined Chase at the edge of the balcony. "A secret, since it's almost over?" Chase nodded, silent so as not to break whatever this was, and House said, "I usually wasn't as miserable as I let on."

"You want to hear a secret, too?" Chase asked. House shrugged, still feigning disinterest, even then. "I've never been anything but," Chase said. He stared down at the city, at the slowly ambling figures, and he waited, again, for something to happen.

*

Riding along on the back of House's motorcycle gives Chase entirely too much time to think, to take stock.

He has: one canvas bag; the remains of a first aid kit and some extra antibiotics; a gun and more ammunition than he anticipates surviving long enough to use; a pair of jeans, two t-shirts, two pairs of underwear, and a green oxford shirt; and his Bible.

In addition to that, he's wearing the tan pants he was wearing the day this started, one of House's t-shirts, and a black leather jacket. It doesn't do much to keep out the early December chill, but it keeps the pebbles from stinging his arms as they ride along, and, he thinks, it would make him harder to grab in a horde.

The tangibles aside, Chase has exactly what he had before: an oral fixation, some useful but still inadequate skills, a plethora of emotional issues, and an inexplicable and sometimes half-returned affection for Gregory House.

"Why are you still taking care of me?" Chase ventures to ask one evening. He is laying out their bedroll, and he won't have to see House's face as he answers.

"I had to leave Steve behind," House answers after a beat. "Can't expect me to lose all my pets at once."

But when it's House's turn to keep watch for the group, he spends his two-hour shift with his fingers threaded through Chase's hair, and Chase dozes under House's hand, feeling almost warm for the first time in weeks and almost content for the first time in much longer.

*

The idea to leave the hospital had been half Foreman's and half House's, because Foreman decided he still valued being alive and House decided he wasn't going to be outdone by Foreman. Chase, for the nth time in his life, had agreed to something he didn't really want to do simply because it was expected.

House showed up later that afternoon with two extra guns. "Presents!" he said, handing them over.

"You lifted these off of security?" Foreman asked. Even as he spoke, he was already checking out the gun, weighing it in his hand, getting a feel for the weapon.

"They won't be using them any time soon," House reasoned. "They're a little lacking in cognitive function now."

"You went out there into all of that just to get these?" Chase asked suddenly.

"Couldn't leave you two completely unarmed," had been House's only answer, as if he hadn't just put himself in mortal danger five minutes before. Before Chase could even protest, before he could muster a response or figure out a way to ask whether House had given any thought to what they'd do without him, House was already turned to Foreman and joking, "And you said there was no reason to keep a firearm in my desk drawer."

For Chase, all told, one of the worst moments of the whole ordeal was that same afternoon, before they even left the hospital.

Foreman had sighed and grabbed Chase's arm, positioned it in front of his body, and showed him the proper way to fire a gun. It wasn't the gun itself that upset Chase, or even that it had all come too late to help Cameron or Wilson.

What really scared Chase was that House stood five feet away, watching, and didn't even bother to crack a joke.

*

Now that things have settled down a bit, if living on the road while running from the undead can ever really be settled, House is acting like House again.

Chase is secretly relieved at this. He still acts annoyed, for appearances' sake, when House makes jokes about Lazarus and the like when he catches Chase reading, but Chase is just glad that there's anything about this life that resembles the one he had eventually found bearable enough in Princeton.

The only real problem with these jokes is that House is sometimes loud and people sometimes overhear, and after one particularly disastrous night, two-dozen ghouls dead but two of their own lost, a woman approaches Chase and says, "Is it true, what your friend said last week? Were you a priest?"

Chase explains, tells her that he was only a seminary student, that he's no more a priest than House is.

"He would have wanted this," the woman says of her dead husband.

"Look, I'm not allowed," Chase insists, but the woman's eyes are wet with tears so Chase ends up reciting Latin prayers along the highway somewhere in Indiana in some grotesque facsimile of a funeral mass.

House is on the side of the road, half-watching, clutching a bottle of whiskey that Chase knows for a fact he hasn't taken a drink from since they left New Jersey.

Chase can watch House and recite prayer at the same time, because both are perfectly natural to him. Maybe he lost his faith, but that doesn't mean he didn't appreciate the sense of purpose, the stated tasks, the life of repetition and structure and order. A vow of poverty would have meant never having to impress his father; a vow of obedience would have spared him from worrying his pretty head with that pesky business of deciding for himself; a vow of chastity would have saved him ever thinking much about that meaningless word, 'love'.

He glances back at House then, and he's grateful for the recitation because it allows him to bite back a bitter laugh that otherwise might never end.

He starts at what he sees behind House. Chase is full of adrenaline, thinking a little more quickly on his feet than usual, and he pulls the pistol out of his pocket, thumbs off the safety, and shoots two bullets right over House's shoulder.

*

"God, Chase." House pulled him roughly to his feet. "Stop being so dramatic. You're not going to die."

"Everyone else has," Chase reminded House, as if House would forget. "What's the point in postponing the inevitable?"

"Because I'm a horrible man and I'm not letting you off this easy." House pulled Chase along behind him, back to the small crowd who were getting ready to leave.

"House."

"You're not going to die," House repeated. It was a tone Chase knew from every hopeless argument at the office. House always won, and Chase always did as he was told. "Now get on the damn bike."

*

"Wow."

"Are you okay?" Chase asks. His hand is bleeding because he fell running over here, but he grabs House's sleeve anyway. "House?"

"I'm fine," House says. He doesn't shake Chase off the way Chase expected him to. "Just impressed."

Chase clutches House's sleeve more tightly, and House glances down. "You have to pay attention," Chase complains, because he's too rattled to think of anything else to say.

House, to his credit, just shoots Chase a look, then turns around and starts back toward the others. "Knew there was a reason to bring you along," he says over his shoulder, but there's no bite to his voice. Chase is pretty sure he even sees the hint of a genuine smile. "Come on."

Chase follows him.

They ride all evening, and when they stop for the night, House pats Chase's hair back into place. "Get some sleep," he says. It's all he says, but it feels like enough. Chase makes his bed between House and House's bike, and he's warm as he lies there, waiting for his exhaustion to overtake him. It won't take long.

And maybe it's just another symptom for a psychiatrist to scribble down if they ever find civilization again, but Chase really isn't minding the end of the world.