Gregory House found himself, at 10AM on a Monday morning, dodging through the sliding doors of the ICU five seconds ahead of a stone-faced Dr. Cuddy wielding several patient charts and storming down the hall in an imposing pair of red Prada heels. As he slid stealthily into a nurse's station, his cane poked out from behind the desk and soundly rapped a passing visitor soundly on the shin.
An affronted "Oy!" later, and the man had straightened up from attending to his sore leg and was staring down at Dr. House with a confusing mixture of cocked-brow reproach and amusement.
"The ophthalmology center is two blocks over," House sneered, meeting the dark stare with all the frigidity of his own icy blue glare. He wasn't in the mood to waste time on the lay folk, and another thirty seconds would likely cost him five extra hours in out-patient care this weekend. "You'll want to call a cab," he continued, "can't risk you running into any taxis on the way there."
This elicited a huge, silly grin, a reaction not typically met with on House's normal rounds through the hospital.
"You're Dr. House," the other man exclaimed, grabbing the chief diagnostician's hand and giving it a vigorous shake. Before House could protest, the man pulled him closer and gave him a great clap on the back. "Fancy running into you! I'm the Doctor, by the way. Nothing medical; just call me an 'intergalactic anthropologist'. But you—oh, you're brilliant, you are. Still having trouble with the leg?"
House would have thought this was quite obvious, and was about to say as much when the "Doctor" cut him off.
"Love to stay and chat, but I've got a rift to jump." Already he was halfway down the hall, leaving House wondering whether he ought to call security.
Oh!" the Doctor exclaimed just as he was nipping around the corner and out of sight. A second later his head poked out from around the white-washed edge of the adjacent wall, an admonishing hand accompanying it to gesture towards the nearest hospital room.
"Bloke in 307? Nice man. Little chatty. If you lot ever get around to taking a stab at a proper diagnosis," and here he paused to cut off what would have been a suitably nasty rebuke to the offhand comment on the ineptitude of his staff, "No no, I've had a look at his charts. Nice try, but you're just not up to it yet. Anyway, you'll be running an V.R.I., yeah?"
The look House shot the other man would have stunned any other man into open-mouthed silence. But this was no man, and the twinkle in the Time Lord's eyes as he laughed deeply and slapped his palm to his forehead as if hit by some grand epiphany had quite the opposite effect. Dr. House was seething.
"Right! You're still doing M.R.I.s. Pity, it'd save you a lot of a time, but there you are. So! You'll notice Mr. 307 doesn't have a brain… well, to be fair, he has a brain, just not where you'd expect. Think you'll find he has a surprising lack of a gall bladder, too…"
Dr. House finally had the sense to slam his cane down loudly against the tiled floor and earned, at last, a reprieve from the rambling monologue that had half of the floor's medical staff peering out of their respective rooms.
"Who the hell are you?"
"Told you, didn't I? I'm the Doctor, and if you're as smart as you're supposed to be, Greg House, you'll send Mr. 307 home before the conspiracy theorists start poking around. Tell 'em…" he paused, eyeing a crack in the ceiling in a dramatic attempt to look pensive. "Tell 'em it was lupus."
And with that, the Doctor dodged out of sight and had disappeared somewhere down the hall by the time Dr. House had the presence of mind to follow. He was still standing there three minutes later when Dr. Cuddy finally caught up with him, chalking up to sheer luck the fact that House didn't argue when she informed him that he had amassed twenty clinic hours to be served by the end of the month.