Sorry this isn't the next chapter of "Collar Redux Season 2". There might be a bit of a delay to that because of RL issues... but here's the beginning of another story. If you're new to the Collar!Verse: there are slaves, Greg House is one of them, he was bought by Cuddy to run the Diagnostics Department at PPTH, Horrible Things Happen To House. The community for all of the stories by me and by others is the CollarVerse. The stories set before this story begins are "Seven Stages" and "Sixteen Days", but you don't have to have read them (or the Collar Redux Seasons 1 and 2) for this story to make sense (insofar as any of the CollarRedux stories make sense, lol).

AB Positive

She noticed him first at a hospital blood drive: a tall, nice-looking man, she thought at first glance: not handsome, exactly, but with a pleasant face, the kind you wanted to see smile. He wasn't smiling then: he was sitting at the end of a row, his head ducked over the blood donor form, looking a bit nervous.

She thought, naturally enough, that he was a new donor - PPTH was running their annual drive to get people to donate blood who'd never given blood before. She'd worked in their legal department for three years, but she'd been a blood donor for years before she started working at a hospital. She wanted to reassure him.

She sat down next to him, saying pleasantly, "Is this your first time?"

"No, ma'am," he said, abruptly, jerking upright. His hand slid over to cover his form, and she realized, with sympathy, that a person might have reason to be nervous - if he'd engaged in a high risk activity, if his blood might be refused for some embarrassing reason. He smiled at her, though his smile looked a bit forced, and said "My first time here. It's been some time since... since the last time."

"I'm Marie," she offered.

"Greg," he said, holding out his hand - his arm shielded the form, though she was trying to pointedly not look. PPTH gave out numbered cards during the blood drives, and his was a lower number than hers: it would be his turn soon, and if he was quick, he might be gone before she was free.

"Do you work here? At PPTH?"

He nodded, and quickly asked where she worked - he called her 'ma'am', again, which she found charmingly formal. They chatted for a while until the number before Greg's was called. Marie pointed it out to him, and added "You'll probably be done before I'm through. But I'd like to meet you for coffee some time when we're not losing a couple of pints between us."

"Sure," Greg said. He sounded absent, but he gave her a stiff smile - by this time she'd decided it wasn't that his smile was forced, but that he just didn't smile easily. He was tense, so he was still nervous about giving blood, but the phlebotomists here were real nice. She told him so, and right then, his number was called. She gave him a reassuring pat on the arm, and he glanced at her, startled. "Good luck," she said, with a warm smile.

A few minutes later, a security guard walked through. Marie glanced up, but didn't think anything in particular of it: there were always one or two around the ER, and the blood donor clinic was part of the ER. When the guard walked back again, Greg was with him - far too soon for him to have given a pint. It looked as if the guard was holding onto Greg's arm. Not supporting him, but just holding him, almost as if the guard expected Greg to run away.

Marie's number was called. She got up and went over - as it happened, a gossipy phlebotomist who knew her as a regular donor. Marie waited till he'd checked her iron levels, and was ready to set the needle in the vein, and said "What was that with Greg?" hoping not to hear that 'Greg' had been some kind of escaped lunatic or a criminal. She didn't think so.

"Greg?" Ted said, absently. He was finding the vein - he was good at it. "Oh, he's a bad boy. He was trying to give blood here." The needle went in and the collector began to fill with blood at once - Ted had got the vein first time, as he usually did. "Good!" he said, as Marie winced involuntarily. "Now just lie back and clench your fist, you know the drill. We'll be collecting a pint from Greg the Sunday after next, he knows that perfectly well. He's one of our AB+, you know."

"So he was too early?"

"Only by a day or so, really, his scheduled time was this Sunday, but with this drive we're giving ourselves this Sunday off. We wouldn't let a rare like Greg miss his Sunday collection, but he's a bad boy, trying to sneak in here while we're busy."

Ted went off and left her then. Marie leaned back against the comfortable padding, clenching her fist to make the blood flow out of her vein, and realized slowly that she had been talking quite normally to one of the hospital slaves.

When she put together the gossip from months ago, about a senior administrator buying a male slave to be her "personal assistant", with the new Diagnostics department that everyone knew they weren't meant to discuss with people outside the hospital because they had a medically-qualified slave acting as a doctor, Marie realised what Greg must be.

She'd giggled with everyone else over the senior administrator, and had been vaguely disappointed when the gossip just died off as nothing interesting happened, and she'd never been tempted before by the idea of having a male slave ... "serve" her? But she'd liked Greg. She made an excuse to visit Diagnostics one afternoon, and was delighted to find that the young doctor who was working as the department's fellowship doctor, under the slave's "supervision", had left the office: there was no one there to see. Only the slave, sitting at a desk like anyone's, leafing through some papers, looking at a diagram on the whiteboard.

She asked where the fellowship doctor was, and Greg said, without indicating if he remembered her or not, "In the labs. Pager number - "

"It's not urgent," Marie said. She put down the papers on the fellowship desk. They could have been delivered by internal mail. She shut the door to the office, and sat down in the visitor's chair. The slave was wearing a roll-top, just as he had in the blood donor clinic. She wondered what his collar looked like. "I wanted to see you again," she told the slave.

The slave looked up from the papers, stared at her. He didn't smile at all. "Working," he said.

"You have lovely blue eyes," Marie said. He really did. "I want you to stop what you're doing for five minutes: I have something to tell you."

"I'm working," Greg said. "Are you from Doctor Cuddy?"

"No," Marie said. That was the senior administrator who'd bought him. "Do you miss Doctor Cuddy?" She smiled sympathetically. "You don't have to answer that question."

"I'm not going to," the slave said tersely. "I have a case."

"Diagnostics has a case," Marie said.

"There's a woman in the Diagnostics ward who's bleeding from several orifices and we can't figure out why, and she has severe headaches which may or may not be connected to the bleeding, and a history of allergic reactions to cats and sheep. Unless you have information on her medical history or any other background information which could help me solve the case, or you're here with orders from Doctor Cuddy, I'm working, and that means I get to ask you to leave this room."

Marie stood up, both startled and angry. "What did you say?"

The slave looked at her. "Cats. Sheep. My patient. Bleeding from various orifices. Headaches." He swallowed abruptly, and Marie suddenly realised he was scared, poor darling, he was hard at work and he probably thought Marie was going to get him punished for being distracted from his job. "Leave this room," the slave added, and Marie smiled at him.

"It's all right," she said gently. "I'll go away for now. But I'll come back when you're not working." She came over to the desk, and patted the slave on the shoulder. Greg jerked a little bit, and tensed, but seemed to calm down as she petted him. "Now I'll let you go on working." He had a nice body, under the rolltop: firm and nicely-shaped. She must find out how she could get him out of the hospital. She knew that medical students sometimes made use of hospital slaves, either for sex or in messy games, but that wasn't what she wanted. She wanted to get to enjoy him somewhere quiet, where she could sit with him or lie down with him for hours... He was a slave. She could tell him to do whatever she wanted.

She was back in her office, actually looking up regulations on proper treatment of slaves, before the bubble burst. Of course she could arrange to take him out of the hospital for a weekend afternoon or an evening. If she were just a bit more senior in the hospital hierarchy she could even have him tagged. But she remembered the giggles over Doctor Cuddy when everyone thought Cuddy had bought Greg for just what Marie was contemplating. She didn't want to expose herself to that.

She glanced down the regulations almost absent-mindedly, coming to the part about taking blood from slaves - no more than one pint every twelve weeks except if there was a serious medical emergency, must be taken by the hospital's blood donor phlebotomists, slave's supervisor must be informed, slave must be allowed to rest or have light duties only for six hours minimum after blood was taken.

So this Sunday, she knew from Ted, after providing a pint of AB+, Greg would be resting, presumably in the Diagnostics office. Greg slept there - there was a bunk and a closet. On Sundays the hospital was quiet. There was really no reason Marie couldn't just come in on Sunday morning to get some paperwork done, and then wander over to the Diagnostics office and have some uninterrupted time with the slave when he wasn't working.

By Saturday night, Marie had managed to talk herself into common sense again. It would be too embarrassing to be caught at it. She wasn't willing to take the slave out of the hospital and expose herself to comments and giggles, and she wasn't willing to risk being caught fooling around with the slave in the Diagnostics office. Besides, if she knew about the arrangements, probably others did too: she certainly wouldn't want to find out the hard way that she wasn't the first to think of making use of the slave while he was supposed to be on light duty after losing a pint of blood.

She didn't have a reason normally to go near Diagnostics at all: she enjoyed the fantasy sometimes of taking the slave home with her, but remembered that it was just an arousing idea, not something she could really do. Over two months after that odd pair of encounters with the slave, she was reminded of him when a request came over her desk to confirm the hospital's medical obligations towards a patient needing a whole blood transfusion: the only donor available was a slave who'd provided blood already within the 12-week legal limit. Marie sorted out the paperwork promptly - the request was urgent, the patient couldn't have surgery until they'd had a pint of blood - and thought of Greg only when she saw the patient's blood type. AB positive.

*tbc*

This is the beginning of a sporadic story intended to take place through all of Greg's years at PPTH. The working titles were "There Shall Be Blood" and "That Bloody Story"... If you want more, it would probably help to give me ideas in the comments (or PM me) about how the next "donations" might go... and Season Two closer and plot twist will be with you as time permits, promise!