dr_robchase | (no subject)

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By now, six years and counting, Chase should have been ready for whatever he had to come up against. He should have been expecting the worst and thought -- stupidly, stupidly thought -- that whatever this place had for him, it couldn't be worse than what he'd already lived through. It was bad enough to see both your parents leave you again (whether by death or disappearance), bad enough to have a near-death experience, to constantly lose everyone you ever loved, but the one thing this place had never done was take him back to the harrowing moments he had growing up.

At least, not until today.

He'd been downstairs, in Gwen's old room, trying to figure out whether they could shift the space around. One moment, it was the spare room with its dusty floors and the empty bed. He blinked, only closed his eyes for a second, but when he opened them, he knew that smell. He knew the feeling of being closed in, and he swore he could even smell the faint aroma of gin in the air. Chase felt a sick lurching in his stomach.

"No," he begged, terrified that he was right back to where it all started.

What if, behind this door, his mother was drinking herself into a stupor. What if his father has left for months? What if he finds his baby sister, what if -- what if what if. Chase slams both palms against the door, feeling a stricken with panic as memories filter back and he remembers, all too well, the begging and the shouting and the pleading he did to get out of this room. The books were the same, the leather armchair still had the cigar burn in the arm, and the carpet had that same old musty smell from too many glasses of scotch and gin spilled on it.

"Let me out!" he shouted, his voice catching. "Let me out of here! Let me..." he trails off, a weak and frustrated exhalation of 'Mum, please' on his breath before he slams his palms harder against the locked door, struggling with the antiquated copper knob.

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Chase gave the Doctor a slightly pained look, considering that he didn't want to abandon the home he had made, solely because of one room. "This is where we live," he said stubbornly. "This is where I want Nate to grow up. It's our Treehouse," he insisted. "I just want this to stop. I want to stop being afraid of my shadow."

The Doctor had meant in the room, but he opened his mouth, then shut it. "Maybe you need to go back into therapy?" he suggested, very very gently. "Or talk to someone at least a little."

He'd been putting it off for so long because he thought he could handle it, but in the face of this room and all the rest of the things lurking in his past that could undo him, Chase knew that he couldn't really put it off. "I'll see if Will can fit me in for a couple of sessions," he agreed.

"That sounds like a plan," said the Doctor, who really needed to sit down and have a think. He didn't know if he wanted to sit down in any of the chairs in the room.

Chase took a deep breath as he wound up on the edge of the oak table, staring at the Doctor without blinking. "It shouldn't be you, should it?" He'd like it to be, but that was too many conflicts. "We could talk about it here, unofficially, but I don't want it to provoke fights between us."

"Fights or no fights, I don't think it'd be in your best interests," said the Doctor simply. "I don't have an objective take on it, Rob, I couldn't even muster one up if I had to." He cocked his brows as if certain Chase would see his point.

Chase couldn't help it; he smiled tiredly as he pressed his chin to his shoulder and peered sleepily at the Doctor, careful not to fixate on any one point in the room -- lest he be pulled back into dark memories. "Is that your long-winded way of saying you love me?" he asked.

"I thought I said I love you by saying I love you," pointed out the Doctor idly, before he snorted a brief laugh through his nose. "But yeah, maybe. You look like you're about to pass out, Rob, did you need to have a sit?"

"I don't know, I like it both ways," he replied, pushing himself up from the table so he could wander closer to the Doctor, cupping the back of his neck lightly, pressing his forehead down against the Doctor's. "I feel sick," he admitted. "It's like I can't escape from the memory of myself locked in here with my mother just outside, ruining her life."

And his own along with his sister's.

"Which is why you need to talk it out," the Doctor said, pulling Chase closer to him. "You need someone to provide strategies for getting around it, if not past it. Not to go all therapy on you, but I think that's the most important thing for you to do right now."

In part of his mind, he was trying to figure out how to gut the room and maintain structural integrity.

Chase leaned in easily, grateful for the contact that he got without having to ask for it. "You must be dancing, inside," Chase remarked ruefully, shooting the Doctor a lazy and bemused look. "I'm not avoiding my issues. No more repression, it's practically what you ask for every Christmas."

"That doesn't mean I'm happy about what's happened to spur it," the Doctor said. In perfect honesty, he'd believe the lack of repression when he saw it--it was something harder to fix than just saying so.

Maybe if he hadn't been inside the room, it would've been different. If he had walked into it, he could have seen that it wasn't a trick to make him think that he was back there. "It could be worse, too, couldn't it." He wasn't joking, but admitting this quietly. "One of my parents could've been here with it."

"Yes," the Doctor said solemnly, softly. "It could have been a lot worse. Rob..."

He had been going to say he was sorry, but he had no idea how, or how to keep it from sounding patronising or ridiculous.

Chase managed a soft smile, keeping his head bowed against the Doctor's. "I never talk about my sister," he said, keeping his eyes fixated on middle distance. "It's hard. She's so much younger than me that we were never really close, but, this room, it reminded me of her."

"You don't have to talk about her now if you don't want to," the Doctor said, giving Chase a faintly concerned and wary look. "I don't mind, you shouldn't feel you have to."

Maybe he was just too used to repression from Chase that this seemed worrisome.

Chase shrugged, because if he didn't talk about it now, he felt like it had the chance to get buried deep down and he wouldn't bring it up again, simply because he didn't feel like it. "She's a lot younger than me. When I was fifteen, she was only two. My parents and their last-ditch attempt to save the marriage."

Clearly they were going to talk, and the Doctor needed to sit down, so he manoeuvred them towards the chair where he could perch on the arm. "It didn't work. But there's more to it, isn't there. More to her."

Chase stared forward into space, the guilt gnawing at him even though he knew that he'd done nothing to be guilty for. "She grew up in Mum's footsteps," was all he could say about it. "Blamed me for it."

"Not very fair," said the Doctor, though he knew Chase would have internalized that entirely, would have been completely shattered by it. "Self-determination, we make our own selves. Not without some influence, but still."

Chase gave the Doctor a slight shrug. "Yeah, well, what part of my life was fair?" he pointed out. His childhood, right up until he was sixteen, had been one horror after another. He didn't know how to get away from that or if he just had to accept it. "I never really saw her. She stayed with an Aunt when I moved away, but maybe I should've stayed."

The Doctor gave him a look. "And did what, exactly?" he said, simply. He'd have crossed his arms over his chest if he could.

"Honestly? Kept every bottle I could out of the house so she never got a chance to start," he said. "I screwed up with my Mum, I shouldn't have led my sister down that same path by not paying attention."

The Doctor looked intensely sceptical. "You honestly think that would have worked in the long run? For either of them?" Hadn't Chase read any stories as a kid about kids with alcoholic parents swapping their vodka for water, and how effectual that was?

Well, maybe he hadn't, considering Chase.

"At least I would've tried with my sister," he pointed out. "I just left, Doctor. I left her and I cared about myself. I was selfish for the first time in my life and look what happened," he said.