(A/N: This is an AU in one small aspect, more an alternate history. Same House, slightly different political America he lives in. The views expressed by the characters – either way - are not necessarily those of the author. As always, have fun! :-)

Aberrant

1. You Must Not Know About Me

Green eyes, blue eyes, black. Brown. Women's eyes of late had begun to snag him, pretty nurses' eyes strafing scorn across the joke his life had become, whores' eyes at night locked only on the money waiting on the dresser, a scarier joke. The mother in the clinic was pretty. She had brown eyes. Her son was too small.

"Growth hormone deficiency," he told them. "Easily treatable." Soccer-mom relaxed with relief, her petite figure, hips taut beneath her skirt, leaning back into the desk.

"What do we do?" she asked. Her eyes were the color of good bourbon.

"You do nothing. We get a blood count, x-ray the bones, then we'll make up a batch of hormones for Tiny Tim here."

"How do you make a hormone?" the boy asked.

"Just don't pay her."

In the sudden silence, as the brown eyes cooled, Cuddy stuck her head in the door.

"Need to see you."

"B&D's in Room 3 today. Harvey Schuyler from Gynecology's in charge. Brought his whip –"

"Now, House, out here." He left his patient swinging his stunted legs from the table, his mother's scowl as dark as it could get, and followed his boss into the hall.

"Your voice," he informed her, "tells me you've either been to see Harvey or you need to."

"Do you know who Michael Nealy is?"

The question brought him up short. "Doesn't everyone?"

She shoved a file at him. "Nealy's sick – and he's asking for you."

That burst of curiosity firing in his brain, the first in weeks, his own special poison, made him peruse the file. "So don't they have doctors up at the prison?" Beyond the half-open blinds in the clinic foyer, rain flailed against the windows. The waiting area was full. Patients clutched their legs or their heads or sat passively, spattered across the seats and leaning against the walls. It was raining sick people. Raining in his head. The file was boring. He slammed it in disgust and thrust it back to her. "There's nothing wrong with him."

"He has a heart problem."

"Wow. Now that's more interesting than the lunch I was going to steal from Wilson. Let's see, what could it be? Maybe the little-known medical fact that terrorists don't have hearts. The answer is no. I'm not treating Michael Nealy."

"Good. Okay. Never thought I'd say this but I'm actually relieved you're refusing to do something. Still, these people want to talk to –"

"Call them back, tell them I've moved to China for the air."

"They're sitting in my office –"

"Get Foreman or Cameron to do it." He had already limped down the hall, leaving her frustrated "House!" to dangle in the air behind him.

In the restroom he stared at his face in the mirror. Even his own eyes held scorn for him. The crippled addict at forty-seven. A good prime number. He thought he looked older than that. In that wonderland behind the glass, he supposed, he was a different person, virile, in control of matters, the world turning to him to acknowledge his accomplishments. A place where he could shake off the feeling that the world was only turning away, turning in its daily grind and leaving him behind, his hobbled life out of whack with life itself.

He rolled a pill between his fingers and popped it into his mouth. Jerk a clinic patient's chain, push Cuddy's buttons, refuse a case. It was a typical day in his life and that was the horror of it.

In his office he switched on a lamp against the dark morning and drew the blinds away to watch the rain shadows. As he turned a man and woman entered the office.

"Dr. House?" the man asked. He was blond, good-looking in a soft-doll way, too pink in the lips and cheeks. He had a British – no, Australian – accent.

"Turn around," he told him. "Walk back out the door, then read what it says on that door. That is, if they teach them to read by your age Down Under." He saw the woman's gaze narrow in an elegantly repressed smirk.

The man proffered a badge. "We're CA. We'd like to ask you a few questions about Michael Nealy."

That twinge of fear, his heart speeding up, he told himself, was natural. No one wanted CA on their neck. These two Nazi wannabes had to be the people Cuddy had said were in her office. Instead of persuading them to leave she had gone the wuss route and sent them straight to him. He managed his sarcastic grin and plopped into his chair. "Oh, excellent. This moron Nealy asks for me by name and that makes me an instant suspect. Does Christian Affairs go after all its cases like this? Because if you do, you can come work for me in diagnostics, Detective –" He checked the badge the man had laid on his desk, "- Chase. I've got some chicken bones we can throw down and read –"

"Dr. House, do you know Nealy personally?"

"Sure. We used to blow up buildings together back in the eighties." Again, the woman caught it faster than her partner. She looked away, lips curled, while Detective Chase's mouth was still opening and closing. "Tell me, how does an Aussie wind up working for Christian Affairs in the good old U.S. of A. anyway?"

"I moved here when I was thirteen." Defensive, which was good. He had him off his guard.

"And you just always dreamed of being a detective. I bet you've still got your secret decoder ring. Or was it the plastic gun -"

"What we want to know –" Detective Chase spoke too loudly, irritation making his accent stronger, " – is why you believe Mike Nealy would ask for you by name."

"There's this thing called a reputation."

"The doctors up at Kearney have ruled out anything unusual. It's simply heart disease. The man's sixty-five. He's lived a hard life, the last bit of it in prison. But for some reason he's become obsessed with having you check him."

"Look, I don't know Nealy. Never met him. Never even wasted a thought on the guy in the last – how many years has he been in Kearney? Seventeen? Besides which, all of this doesn't matter because I'm not going up there."

"Why not?" The woman's voice surprised him. She had stood slightly behind Detective Chase, mute while they bantered, watching him. He had taken her for the silent partner. "Aren't you curious?"

"About what?"

"The same thing we are. The why."

Give her your best shrug. "Nealy's heart's playing ping-pong with him. The guy sees he's going to die and he wants to prolong his miserable life, for some unfathomable reason. He figures I can just reach out with my magic wand or scalpel or whatever and save him. He thinks I'm God."

He felt his mouth bend around the last word, anticipating the reaction. Detective Chase's face went red. The boy-cop leaned his hands on the desk. "Do you know how easy it would be for us to make life hard for you? Maybe you should read what the badge says. Another remark like that -"

The woman's hand was suddenly on her partner's arm. With the slightest pressure she seemed to give him a sign and he glanced her way, then sank into the chair behind him. She took the other chair. "I'm sorry, Dr. House," she began. "We seem to have made the wrong impression. You're not a suspect."

As though an optical illusion had reversed on him, foreground and background switching places, he realized the mistake he had made. She had been in charge all along.

"This is a routine procedure on our part. Any visitor to a prisoner as important as Nealy has to be…scoped out." The touch of irony, the little shrug, get him on our side, don't we all just hate useless procedure, was so masterful it made him smile.

"I'm not a visitor," he reminded her. "Because I'm not going there."

She sat back and crossed her legs, the nondescript skirt whispering against her knees above sleek muscular calves. Oh yes, she was good. It gave him a second to study her. She was older than her partner, maybe thirty-five. It was his day for eyes and hers were a color he had never contemplated, or not with interest, arctic green merging to frosted blue, sea depths iced over and left to harden. He could imagine them making a scary impression on a suspected Christian. She sported white-blonde hair, the kind that came naturally, pulled back in a simple braid framing ordinary features. Her figure mirrored those terrific calves, but it was nothing he hadn't seen before. Except for her eyes he would not have called her pretty, or at least not to her face. Haughty, perhaps. Sexually wise.

The thought, coming out of nowhere, surprised him.

"The problem," she told him (is that I don't get any, he cursed himself, which makes me hot when I need to be cool), "is that the government can't be seen to be mistreating Christians, even if they are banned by law. Especially a famous one like Nealy. If he doesn't get the best treatment –" the eyes flicked up and down him as though she didn't quite believe it – "and then he dies, it will be a rallying point for all those little legalize-Christianity movements. Nealy the martyr. We don't need that right now."

"You're telling me I have to sacrifice myself for my country."

"Not yourself. Just an afternoon of your time. Go up to Kearney and look at him. Confirm the prison doctors' diagnosis, so everyone knows we did everything we could for him."

"I can do that from here. I've read the chart. All I need to do is throw those chicken bones."

"You need to see him."

"Can't we just tell everyone I went?"

She smiled and then hesitated. "There's one other thing." (Yes, your hair, he wanted to say, do something with it, corkscrew curls or a bob, anything to bring out those eyes). "You probably know Nealy never confessed to the bombings. A lot of the evidence was circumstantial."

"I vaguely remember the trial being what we used to call a farce and has now come to be known as due process."

"The guards around Nealy think he may be ready to make that confession now. From some things he's said." She was watching him so closely he felt chilled, the pulse of rain behind him at the window matching the cold beat of his veins. "A visitor – a new face – may be just what he needs to start talking."

"You want me to spy on him."

Detective Chase leaned in. "If he did talk, we would expect you to report back to us."

A glance from his partner stilled him. The woman was definitely on top. "We would ask that you let us know," she corrected. She extracted a card from her blazer, held it to him and stood, a smooth motion without a rustle. Her partner stood with her. "It doesn't have to be today, or even tomorrow, Dr. House. As I understand it, Nealy's arrhythmia is not that bad. He's still got a while. Take your time if you want. But tell us you'll do everything you can – on both fronts."

He shrugged. "Okay, Mom." Beneath the stamp Christian Affairs, the card in his hand read Detective A. McCullough. They were turning to leave. "So what does the A. stand for? Adolf?"

Her glance back seemed to hold genuine curiosity. "Am I really that bad?" she asked, the question so abruptly personal, so…searching – as though his opinion mattered - that he opened his mouth to say no, then she smiled that tiny smirk again, a clear gotcha, and left without waiting for an answer.

His two fellows collided with them as they went out the door, Cameron's gaze following the Australian down the hall.

"Christian Affairs," he told them just to savor Cameron's shocked expression. "Whew, am I glad they didn't find the Bible hidden in my desk."

Foreman shook his head and sank into the chair that A. McCullough had just vacated. "You and the law, yes," he reasoned. "You and religion – no."

"Listen up." He turned to contemplate the rain, the long drive. "You two are holding down the fort – and the patients - this afternoon. There's somewhere I have to go."

****

(Chp 2 will be ready soon. Reviews are always welcome.)