Title: "Six Degrees of Something"
Word Count: 3100 (total)
Rating: T
Summary: Six chronological snapshots into the mind of Greg House: the lessons we take from life aren't always the ones they want us to have.
Author's Notes: Well. I'd originally intended this to be something a little more light-hearted, after the last few stories that I've posted. But once I got past the third section, it turned on me again -- you think I ought to get a leash and license for this thing, before it takes somebody's fingers off? Eeeesh. But my dear Cinco read it through, and said it wasn't awful(I thought it was), and after two days of stewing in it, I finally finished it this morning. So. The choice is up to you.

I.

Five years old, hot and crabby and bored; road-dust clinging to his worn-out sneakers and already tired of his toys. He'd wandered away from his house with no real idea of direction, thinking only vaguely that maybe he'd find some small treasure: he preferred those unusual finds, anyway, those odds and ends, to any toy soldiers or Erector set; preferred to take them -- a broken cog-wheel here, once an old abandoned fishing reel -- and put them together, imagine their origins, create worlds entire from the scraps other people left behind.

Thirsty, now, and just tired enough to turn back when a dark shape humped in the dusty road before him; his eyes widened, little feet slowing to a stop an almost reverent distance away. Run over by a car, most likely, whether skunk or raccoon it had ceased to matter at all -- and he squinted, creeping closer, watching its small heaving sides, the spray of whiskers and fur.

No car came down the road as he watched it, no roaring, sputtering engine to intrude on his fascination, and he didn't know how long it had been when the life simply left it; he saw it. Saw it fight for one last shuddering breath, saw the tremor that ran through it like an electrical current, and then... there was nothing. Something was different about it, then, and even at five he could see that living and dead were nothing even close to alike. This tumbled heap of fur wouldn't scutter across a lawn, wouldn't bring back scavenged scraps for its young, and the emptiness inherent in its moveless hush made him wonder for the first time how such a thing could even be possible.

Here one minute. Dead the next.

He was too young to understand forever, his perceptions too simple to look beyond that basic thought; but what puzzle might lie inside its inner workings, inside his inner workings, whose pieces might add up to the answer to that question? What made people dead, anyway? What made them alive, for that matter? And where was the place where they stopped being one and started being the other? Was there a place? Could you go there, and never come back?

He was uncharacteristically quiet at lunch; his mother clucked, his father absent, gone on maneuvers. As was already his way, he preferred to try and think about his own questions before he pestered a parent for answers. But he never forgot that sight, or the unformed fear it created. Somewhere out there, someone had to know.

Why shouldn't it be him?