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A friend loves at all times; a brother is born for adversity
- Proverbs 17:17
The flash and pop at 3am in the hallway don't so much unnerve Chase as anger him. He wonders if it's coincidence or Adam's sense of timing that he's there just as Chase has gotten up to get a glass of water to combat the dry feeling in his mouth because Cameron likes to keep the fan in the bedroom running all night.
Chase steps out from the bathroom and Adam stands there, a shadow made of shades of black and dark blue, like the sea at night. He can't see his face, but every fiber of his being knows this isn't a prowler.
"Outside," Chase whispers, stepping lightly and quickly and pointing towards the front door. He pulls on a zip up sweatshirt that's hanging on the coat rack by the door and his jogging shoes and quietly slips out into their meager excuse for a front yard.
"Sorry, I didn't realize the time difference," Adam says, and Chase somehow doubts that.
"What the hell are you doing here? Oh, and I got married, by the way, thanks for showing up!" he stage-whispers back, determined that in thirty seconds, he's going to be going back into the house and snuggling with his new wife and letting Adam feel bad about something for once in his hey-go-mad life.
But then the neighbor's motion sensor goes off when some stray cat crosses the front lawn and the sharp white light that makes Adam wince and blink with tiny mole eyes reveals the state of him. One arm is wraped tightly with a mummy's worth of tape and bandaged and there's a set of bruises that look oddly congruent with a human hand that start somewhere near his Adam's apple - irony of ironies - and ends somewhere on the other side of where his carotid would be. One eye bears the ghost of a bruise and there's an all too raw cut on Adam's forehead.
"I wanted to come, really," Adam says, looking down at his bandaged hand with the first glint of shame and reluctance that Chase thinks he's ever seen on his brother's face.
In that moment, though he does feel a restrained kind of sympathy and worry, he finds himself calculating exactly how stiffly it moves, whether there's a break involved or not, and whether the bandaging was done by any kind of a doctor. And it wasn't. At all. He can thank House for the lightning fast mental reflexes that have him throwing away and debating possible diagnoses, even ones a simple as a sprained wrist versus a hairline fracture, like there's a whiteboard in his brain that never gets erased.
"What happened?" Chase asks.
Adam's eyes could be watery from tears, allergies, pain, or a number of other things and Chase is silently asking himself if he really just ran a differential on his brother's tears, or impending signs thereof.
"You got married," he says, and the completely uncontrolled nature of his smile, flickering back and forth between a frown and a smile like a light bulb that won't come on, sends the absolute coldest, heaviest feeling hurtling into the pit of Chase's guts. The kind of feeling you'd get if you, say, realized that you just severed a nerve in someone's spinal cord and they're going to be doing a Christopher Reeves impression for the rest of their lives, or when something starts bleeding and you're elbow deep in somebody's chest and you can't bloody well find the damn thing and your brain is giving you the "five minutes to self destruct" warning.
It's that feeling, turned up to a Spinal Tap worthy eleven.
"I can guilt trip you about that later," Chase says, coming forward and waving with his hand as though his complete rage at having his brother miss the most important day of his life has suddenly been downgraded to a gnat he's trying to swat away. "Are you all right?"
Adam scrubs his good hand through his hair. And god, he needs a haircut. Chase isn't sure when he became the designated Responsible One, but he can't help thinking that Adam also looks a bit thin and tired and pale, like he hasn't been out in the sun as much as he used to and hasn't been eating enough.
And there's that House-esque swirl of differential possibilities again, like flakes kicked up in a shaken snowglobe. Insomnia, anxiety, recent bout of food poisoning (god only knows what weird stuff Adam eats from bizarre parts of the globe, it's a miracle he hasn't picked up some mutant bacteria and spread it everywhere, and Chase tries not to think about his brother and the possibilities for swine flu becoming global).
"I'm fine. I just -" he looks down at his bad hand and there's a pause that make ice start forming somewhere between Chase's stomach and duodenum. "My little brother got married! I can't believe it. How's married life?"
"The whole week I've been married has gone just fine," he says, slumping his shoulders and rubbing the bridge of his nose, because Adam is seriously giving him a migraine. "Adam, what happened? Just tell me, because I'm not gonna stop asking. You're here and you bloody well know it's 3am and you just missed my wedding. So I'm going to say that something bad's happened, and you feel incredibly guilty because either you're about to die or we're all about to die. Which is it?"
This time Adam sighs and all pretenses of a smile are gone, but there's an amused little flicker in his eyes. "I thought you stopped working for House."
"It's a process," Chase says, dismissively, because there are some ways in which you don't ever leave House behind.
"Look, Robert, I'm sorry I missed your wedding. I wanted to come, I really did. I thought about you, too. I hope you took a lot of pictures."
Chase rolls his eyes. He certainly paid enough for them. But it's not the point and Adam's doing that thing where he distracts him, where he manages to have Chase looking at one hand while he's doing something incredible with the other.
"Just tell me."
Adam shakes his head. "I don't want to scare you."
"Scare me?" Chase shouts. "You look like you've been mugged, you come here in the middle of the night, you miss your own brother's wedding, and you won't tell me what's going on. I'm already scared, Adam. You might as well tell me."
Adam's answer is a tight embrace that first shocks Chase into a stiff cardboard cutout of himself, staring down at Adam's shoulder. He melts into it though and hugs back.
"Robert, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
"Adam, now you're really scaring me. And you're scaring me with hugs. What's going on?"
Adam gives a punchy, exhausted laugh and sits himself down on the patio chair, looking down to the square of concrete inside their tiny square of lawn. The neighbor's motion light finally goes out and leaves him enveloped in darkness.
It makes sense that it would be in darkness that Adam feels freest to speak, when his face cannot be seen, he's just a presence, not a person.
He always was kind of a drama queen.
"I never been in a fight before," he says, and that's when he breathes so hard that Chase knows for sure he's about to cry. "Not a real one. I mean, in school, you and your mates maybe throw a punch at a bloke, but not this. I've never been...beaten."
Alarm hitches, anger rises. Chase wishes the lights would come back on so he could see his brother's injuries again, so he could judge them again knowing this. But the darkness remains.
"Someone hit you? Who? Was it one of the men from the government?"
"No," Adam whispers. "It was...one of us."
"What? That's impossible, you're Tomorrow People. You can't."
"They found a way," Adam says and covers his mouth with the back of his badly bandaged hand. "Jade and Lisa are working on a cure, but -"
"But what? Just tell me what you need Adam. You need me to go beat someone up? Because I will. It'll look kind of funny, but I will if I have to."
It is at that moment when that damn light - which Chase is now seriously considering putting a rock into - comes on again and shows that Adam is giving a half laugh while he's crying.
Before he realizes what he's properly doing, Chase has his brother held tight and Adam is really sobbing.
"I'm so sorry, Rob. I missed your wedding, I'm so sorry," he cries into his brother's shoulder. "I wanted to be there. I even had a really great toast and a wedding present and everything."
They share another faulty laugh before separating. Chase sits next to his brother, so close their elbows are practically touching.
"So what do you need?"
"A surgeon. It's lucky I'm related to the best one there is."
"Ah, I wouldn't say that."
"I bloody well would!" Adam protests. "Don't get modest on me now."
Chase smiles. "And then?"
"Then maybe you could stay a little while with me? I'm so sorry to ask this."
Chase sighs. Again, with the drama queen tendencies. "You need help saving the world from crazed teleporters. It's for the good of human kind. I'd hardly call that selfish."
Adam looked down at his damaged hand and turns it over. "Is it still selfless if I wanted it to be you? We could have gotten other surgeons, you know. You're not the only doctor I've ever met. But I wanted it to be you. Because I told Megabyte, I told him -"
"Megabyte? What happened, is he the one that did this?"
"No, but, the cure works kind of like a telepathic vaccine. Except one of us has got to get this thing put in our brains, so it can spread. And I promised him that he wouldn't die, I promised him. And the only way I could do it is if I told him it would be you. Because I knew you wouldn't let him die."
Adam wipes his eyes and stands up. "Do you want to tell her where you're going?"
Chase says, "It'll only be a minute."
He goes back into his house and wakes Cameron, makes an excuse about emergency surgery and doing a favor and one of House's cases. A week into being married and he's already lying to her, but House once said all the best relationships were based on lies.
He wonders what House would say about him and Adam, if he would recommend that they lie to each other, that Adam never tell him about being a Tomorrow Person, if Chase pretended it didn't bother him.
However much it hurts, Chase can't see how that's better. At least not with Adam.
Cameron burrows under the covers after kissing him. Chase dresses quickly in the dark and returns outside. He grabs his brother's arm and they dissolve into light. They appear inside a very sterile looking facility, inside a long white hallway.
"Where are we?" he asks.
"A spaceship that's orbiting Jupiter," Adam replies and suddenly Chase is so dizzy he thinks he might vomit, fall or both despite the fact that the gravity is not discernibly different from Earth's. He wobbles and Adam catches him, injured arm and all.
"We're not on Earth," he says, not so much asking as marveling.
"Hey, it's all right. I won't let you tumble off into space or anything, promise," Adam replies, and smiles at him.
Chase bends down, braces on his knees and tries not to vomit on the nice white surface of the floor which looks too smooth to be anything natural. It doesn't even show footprints. That's impressive, and strangely makes him more nauseous.
"Has anyone told you that your entire life is just weird?" Chase asks, breathing in hard through his nose and swallowing back throat burning bile.
"What if I showed you your wedding present?" Adam asks, with a hand on his shoulder. "I went all the way to the Jaqit-Ricade for it. You're gonna love it."
"What's the Jaqit-Recade?"
"A long story. But it's sort of like another planet, except not really planet shaped."
"You went to another planet to get me a wedding present?" he asks, sitting up straight. Chase knows a lot about the human body, but he does not know why the thought of his brother buying him and wedding gift - an intergalactic fondue set or an alien crockpot or whatever he's found - makes him calm. He doesn't know why his stomach settles and he can stand straight, imagining Adam in some distant gift shop somewhere, comparing the pros and cons of an otherworldly blender.
Maybe it is the thought that there are blenders in space, and thus smoothies. But he strikes that off the whiteboard in his head because he doesn't really like smoothies.
Maybe it is the thought that there is life beyond the stars, that Earth isn't it, that whatever happens in his life, it is small and it is not the end of the world. Or all the worlds. That, too, becomes unlikely in the differential. It still doesn't change that he's scared for his brother, shaking, and not sure if he'll steady out enough to operate on the brain of his brother's best friend, in whom the ultimate trust has been placed.
No, that's right out. But somewhere in his head are the two people he has hated and loved and learned most from. There is House, twirling his cane, feet propped on the table, looking at him and smirking, promising all the derision he can come up with if Chase doesn't face the answer.
So that leaves Adam, and that leaves the last option: that he is soothed by the idea that in the farthest reaches of space, his brother thought of him and loved him. That even though he felt alone amongst Cameron's family and friends, with no one to represent his side of the equation, he was not, in actuality, alone.
He was loved and thought of and important, even a billion lightyears away and that amongst all the grand things his brother must have seen, heard, felt, done, he is still important to Adam, and that for all the places he could go for refuge, far off places, space ships, other planets - when all else failed, he came to Chase. He came back to Chase.
Your brother's that bad penny that just won't go away. How touching. They should make a lifetime movie about it, the House voice in his head says, and it makes him smile. Because he knows it's true.
He is soothed because he knows that his brother will always come back, that he will not be alone, that in the end, everything will be all right.
With a deep breath, he squares his shoulders and says, "Later. Show me where Megabyte is. The sooner we do this, the better."
- END -