"Hi, Martha," the nurse at the counter looked up long enough to shoot her a sympathetic smile. "Let me guess. You're looking for a weird enough case for Dr. House?"
"Was the coffee too obvious?" Masters groaned as she set the steaming styrofoam cup down on the counter. "It's a vanilla latte, which might be considered a good incentive to give me all the gory details of the most interesting chart."
"Deal," the nurse smiled before taking a long gulp of the coffee and releasing a sigh. "We got a homeless man in about an hour earlier to be treated for severe burns on his right arm."
"A burn victim isn't going to spike House's interest," Masters interrupted, already ready to resign to digging through piles of charts.
"Not usually, but if you had let me finish…" the nurse glared, tapping her pen against the pile of paperwork on her desk.
"Sorry," Masters eyed the ground. "You were saying?"
"We got a homeless burn victim in about an hour ago," the nurse paused, raising her eyebrows in challenge. Masters motioned pulling a zipper across her lips, locking it, and tossing the key over her shoulder with a smile. The nurse shook her head with a chuckle before continuing, "Who claimed that his burnt flesh smelled like licorice."
"Licorice?" Masters eyes widened.
"And he said that the antiseptic smelled like blueberry muffins," the nurse nodded.
"Dysosmia," Masters grinned triumphantly. "House would probably like that."
"Curtain five," the nurse pointed over her shoulder to a sectioned off area while handing Masters a chart.
"Thanks," Masters smiled before scanning the chart. She frowned quickly. "Wait. It says that his name is John Doe?"
"He refuses to tell us who he is," the nurse shrugged, her focus already returned to her paperwork. "But we've been calling him everything from Gummy Bear to Marshmallow to Grizzly Adams."
"Grizzly Adams?" Masters raised an eyebrow as the nurse chuckled to herself.
"You'll see," the nurse looked up long enough to wink at Masters before going back to her paperwork. Masters started to speak up, but then the nurse gave her this oddly familiar short little wave that caught her off guard. She quickly shrugged off the invasion of feelings she had spent many years burying under the layer of an entirely different persona before she went to check out what was behind curtain five.
"I'm all bandaged up now, why can't I leave?" a gruff voice from behind the curtain groaned.
"I already told you," Masters slipped through the curtain to find a young nurse who was hanging a bag of IV fluid and arguing with the patient. "It's hospital policy..."
"Excuse me, nurse?" Masters held a finger up as she interrupted the debate. "Is this the John Doe burn victim with the olfactory dysfunction?"
"Yeah," the nurse sighed. "You're one of House's right? Thank goodness. He's all yours."
"Thanks?" Masters watched curiously as the nurse fled the area before turning back to the patient. He was curled up in a ball, so she couldn't tell much. The fact that he was homeless was pretty clear from the smell, but otherwise he was as much of a mystery as his case. "Excuse me Mr. … well, excuse me. But would it be alright with you if I just do a basic examination?"
"Look…" the patient rolled over to face her with an exasperated grunt, but froze instantly as their eyes met. Masters frowned at the familiar face before her. Besides those piercing eyes, he looked so entirely different. His hair had grown out wild and untamed, deep wrinkles and circles under his eyes made him seem far older than she knew him to be, and he was constantly fidgeting and flinching as if uncomfortable in his own skin. In just five short years, the Adam she knew was long gone and replaced with a ghost of a man, but he was still instantly recognizable. Then again, she thought to herself, she wasn't exactly the same person he had known either.
"Masters?" both she and Adam jumped at the sound. Masters turned to find Chase behind her.
"What are you doing here?" Masters asked, though she wasn't sure if she had directed the question at Adam or Chase, and she was even less sure who she wanted to answer.
"I was consulting on a case a couple curtains over. I saw that you were here as I was headed to the office." Chase eyed the homeless man quickly and then turned back to her. "Looking for a case?"
"Yup," Masters gulped. "Just the usual bribing nurses and digging through charts. You know the drill."
"Yeah," Chase looked at her skeptically before shaking his head. "Well, we better get down to the office. Wouldn't want the one day we show up late to be the one day that House is on time."
"Right," Masters nodded. She looked at the floor, unable to bring herself to look at Adam again.
"Are you coming?" Chase had already started walking but had turned around to call back to her.
"Yes," she nodded once more, and without even a glance at Adam, she followed Chase to the elevators.
After the unusually quiet and seemingly longer than usual trip to House's office, Masters focused on trying to sit still and think about work. She was using every technique she had learned about in psych rotations – breathing slowly, counting, and meditation – to keep her emotions in check. She asked the others about House's whereabouts, hoping that any nervousness they noticed they would translate to having to deal with their boss instead of what she was really thinking about.
When House eventually wheeled into the office, Masters bit her lip to hold back a sigh of relief. With House in, she would have the distraction of work to keep her from going to find Adam. Then again, she thought while looking down at Adam's file clutched in her arms, she could make House's disdain for normalcy work in her favor, allowing her to get to the bottom of where the Adam she had known and even loved had disappeared to all of those years ago.
She found her curiosity won out as she presented the case to House. Like she expected, he too was disinterested in a simple burn victim at first, but became amused by the addition of the odd sense of smell. Before she had time to think about all that could go wrong, Masters found herself being ordered to leave with Chase to examine the park where Adam had been found. She was so absent-minded, worrying about what Foreman and Taub might dig up about her well-hidden past from talking with Adam, that she found herself the butt of several generational jokes. She wasn't even able to recover in the least bit before House was announcing his engagement and rolling out of the room.
"He's getting married?" Taub looked at the others. "I know he thinks of mockery as an art form, but this low. Even for him."
"Nothing's too low for House," Foreman shrugged as the two of them left the room.
"You ready to go, Masters?" Chase had already shrugged out of his lab coat and was slinging his bag over his shoulder when she finally looked up.
"Go?" she practically whispered as her heart thrummed so loudly she was sure everyone within a mile radius could hear it beat abnormally fast.
"To the park?" he raised his eyebrows before sighing and sitting back down across from her. "Look, I know you're still getting used to things around here, but this is just House. He says and does stupidly shocking stuff. The best way to deal is to just go with it. Now, he always has us check the person's home and since this guy's been living in the park that's not much of a stretch. I know you'd rather be studying the medical testing, but think of it this way, at least we don't have to worry about breaking and entering this time, right?"
"Right," Masters nodded with a weak smile before she got up and hesitantly followed Chase to the "home" of her once beloved Adam, the only person in the entire world who knew her as "Jane."