Re-write of the previous chapter 1. Just to clarify some things: I will continue in the same general direction the previous chapters were going, but the development will be a lot slower than it was, and (hopefully) more believable. Chapters may take some time to come out because of college, but they will come out. Thank you for your attention and please don't hesitate in reviewing and adding your constructive criticism, which will be taken into consideration.
Chapter 1
Feeling that night's barely digested dinner gallop up her throat at a reasonable speed, Bella Swan got up violently and dashed towards the first floor bathroom, promptly emptying her stomach's contents before she could reach the toilet.
"Great." She droned, frowning at the mess she'd made on the floor. "I'm going to have to clean that up." But first, she had to get cleaned up.
After drinking some water to get rid of the bad taste in her mouth and changing into some clean, comfortable clothes, and just as she was finishing mopping up the horrible goo she had spilled out of her guts, she heard a car pull up in the driveway and the familiar sound of Charlie Swan unloading his rifle.
"Bella?" He called out, upon noticing she was nowhere in sight.
Bella sighed, and replied "Here, dad! I'm almost finished!"
"Finished with what?" She heard him ask, right before he appeared behind her. Immediately, he stepped to her side, taking the mop from her hands and lifting her chin so he could look at her properly. "Are you okay?" His voice showed clear concern. "Do you need me to call a doctor?"
At the mention of the word 'doctor', Bella sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to stop the flashing images of a kind-faced, eternally young doctor, which would inevitably bring about unwanted images of a certain hundred-year-old teenage boy, whom she desperately wanted to forget.
"No, dad." She said, trying to force her voice to convey reassurance – and failing. "I'm fine, it was probably something I ate."
"If you say so." Charlie eyed her suspiciously. "I'm going to finish up here, okay? Go upstairs and lie down. Don't worry about dinner."
"Okay. Thanks, dad."
As his daughter dragged herself upstairs, hopefully to follow his advice and lie down, he took some time to think. Nausea wasn't a symptom of depression, that he knew of. After Bella had fallen ill, as a consequence of the abrupt departure of her boyfriend, he had searched everywhere he knew of for information about the mental illness. Nowhere in any book or website had he come across a depressed teenager who suffered from violent nausea. It had to be something else, then.
He put away the mop, and threw out the dirty water, and set about making dinner, to the best of his ability, trying to distract himself. However, his thoughts kept returning to Bella and the crippling depression she'd been fighting lately. He hoped she wasn't up in her room crying her eyes out, or staring endlessly out of the window, as he'd seen her do over the course of the previous few weeks.
He was trying as hard as he possibly could to make her life comfortable yet stimulating, as the doctor had advised, but it was hard and frustrating to live with someone who was so deep in their own negativity that they failed to see all the wonderful things around them.
He finished dinner and took it to her, feeling a dizzying sense of relief as he saw her peacefully sleeping in her clothing, instead of crying her heart out. Charlie set the plate down on her bedside table and turned to leave, before something that had been scratching at the back of his head finally surged forward and he spun around.
Bella was unable to sleep while dressed. No matter how tired she was, no matter how indisposed, or how depressed, she had always said that she couldn't sleep with her clothes on.
Reaching out with trembling fingers, Charlie felt for her forehead, touching it lightly – it was more than enough to catch on to a sizeable fever. After retrieving their thermometer from the nearby bathroom, he confirmed his suspicions. She was running a high fever.
"Well, our evening just got a lot more complicated." He commented, as he flipped through the contacts in his phone to find the one he needed.
After two quiet rings, a pleasant male voice took the call.
"Hello? Sheriff Swan? Is there anything wrong? Is it Bella?"
"Hello, yes, it's Bella." Charlie said, hurriedly, casting a nervous glace at his daughter. A patient sigh made itself heard on the other end of the line.
"Depression doesn't cute itself in a day, Sheriff." The doctor replied, in a kind voice. "You'll find that some R&R will help both the patient and the families-"
"Never mind that." Charlie cut in. "Bella's running a really high fever, and she was suffering from really bad nausea just a little earlier. I know it's probably nothing, just the flu or something like that, but it'd really put my mind at ease if you could swing by to check on her."
After a short pause, the same pleasant voice floated through the telephone speakers.
"Of course, Sheriff. I don't usually do house visits this late in the evening, but we can help each other out, right?"
The sheriff sighed, and nodded, even though Robert Snow couldn't see him.
"I'll see what I can do for you, doc. Appreciate it."
"I'm sure you do. I'll be there in five, maybe ten minutes. Try to keep your daughter's body temperature down. Use ice water to freshen her face." And he hung up.
Seven minutes and forty-two seconds later, the house's doorbell rang, and outside stood the shot, scrawny, sickly-looking doctor Robert Snow, who did most of the shifts at the hospital now that Doctor Cullen was gone.
The man looks like a rat, Charlie couldn't help but notice, pursing his lips in blatant distaste as he stepped aside to let the doctor in.
"She's upstairs." He said. "And she hasn't woken up, no matter how much I call out her name, or shake her."
"I would think it is common practice not to shake potentially ill patients." The doctor coaxed, with barking laughter, and Charlie refrained from hitting him on the head with the butt of his rifle.
A quick check-up from Doctor Snow had the rat-like man frowning, and he ordered Charlie out of the room so he could perform a more thorough examination. Charlie loathed the idea of leaving him alone with Bella, but he was no medical expert and, as such, had to comply and resort to sitting tersely on the couch, ready to spring up whenever he heard the doctor call.
The doctor didn't call him. Instead, he came down the stairs with a heavy step and sighed.
"I am afraid the matter is slightly worse than we first imagined. It is no flu, and the antibiotics I gave her, which should have worked by now, are not producing the results I expected. I should be able to run more detailed tests at the hospital. You were right on one thing, she is unconscious, not asleep. Her body seems to have shut down completely, save for basic functions."
The old sheriff felt his heart stop.
"She should go to the hospital, then?"
"Exactly. I am going to go home and get some rest and I'll take a look at her tomorrow. I'll leave instructions with the nurses as to how to take care of her until morning, so rest assured, she will be taken care of." The rat-like man patted Charlie's shoulder. "I'll also call ahead to let them know you're coming, top priority."
After saying their goodbyes, and after the doctor got in his car and left, Charlie prepared a bag with necessities for Bella, and then picked her up and placed her carefully in her own pickup truck, as he thought to himself how empty his life would be if his daughter had not come to stay with him.
Bella ended up staying at the hospital for a full three nights, as she kept drifting in and out of consciousness with no apparent reason. Charlie was firm, and maintained a 'no visitors' policy that kept her pestering high school friends away from her recovery path, but still she wouldn't be awake for more than four or five hours at a time, taking the time to eat and drink before once again falling into unconsciousness.
At the end of the third night, as Charlie nodded off in his chair next to her hospital bed, Doctor Robert Snow came in, holding in his hand a stack of papers. At Charlie's inquisitive stare, he waved them around.
"Transfer papers." He clarified. "We don't have the means to treat Bella here. We need to transfer her to a hospital that can. I would highly recommend a hospital that has a competent diagnostics team. I know of one in New Jersey, but it's up to you, Charlie."
"New Jersey…" He considered it briefly. He had money saved, mostly money he'd put together to send Bella to a good university, but her health came first. He could also ask her mother for financial help in treating her. "New Jersey sounds good. We'll need to arrange for transport…"
"The hospital can handle it, if you don't mind. All you have to do is pay the fees.
And that is how Sheriff Charles Amadeus Swan found himself on a plane to New Jersey, worried sick about his darling daughter, whom he was starting to regret not spending more time with.
Clinic hours were nearly over. In just about one, one and a half hours, Doctor Gregory House, Head of Diagnostic Medicine, would be free to go pester his team of doctors, instead of having to put up with insufferably common people, with every-day, common problems such as minor headaches ("It's a cold. Ever heard of it?"), bruises ("Madam, I assure you, you can't bruise your side like that unless you fall from somewhere, so unless you want to cover your ears and go 'la la la', I recommend you actually start paying attention to what your son is doing.") and broken bones ("Yes, I'm sure your wife falling from your bed is what caused her arm to snap like that. Tell that to the police.").
He had sneaked out to grab a coffee, and was making his way back to these people's utterly uninteresting lives, scanning the file he had on his other hand with critical eyes, when a familiar voice interrupted his thoughts.
"House!" He turned to face James Evan Wilson, Head of the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital's Department of Oncology, poking his head out of his office with a cocked eyebrow. "Aren't you supposed to be doing clinic hours? Y'know, helping people with not-impossibly-difficult-to-diagnose-and-solve ailments?"
House frowned in a thoughtful façade, looking at his file and then looking around, as if he was only first noticing where he was.
"I was beginning to wonder where all the Easter eggs had gone." He took a sip of his coffee, ignoring Wilson's eyes rolling. "It would be impossible for Cuddy to hide them that well."
"Yes, well, Cuddy has been looking for you while you were egg-hunting. Apparently, you have a new case, which she thinks might get you to stop meddling with everything she does." Wilson shook his head. "Your team is already with the patient, it seems. Have fun."
House didn't deem it necessary to reply to him, instead tossing the file through Wilson's door, smirking slightly as he saw the papers scatter on the floor of his friend's office. Wilson's mouth turned down in dismay.
"Hooray." House deadpanned, offering him a smug grin and he turned around and sauntered away.
He found his teammates Remy Beauregard Hadley and Eric Foreman standing outside examination room 2-16, leafing through their copies of the case file, discussing it openly with relaxes stances. Inside, his other teammate, Christopher Taub, was adjusting the patient's IV with expert fingers. House approached them gingerly.
"Hello, my fellow doctor." He said to Foreman, grinning. He turned to Remy. "And hello, number Thirteen."
"Right. Because that hasn't gotten old." She rolled her eyes, thrusting a case file folder at him. "Here. Patient's name is Isabella Swan; Caucasian female of eighteen years from Forks, Washington. Symptoms are abrupt loss of consciousness, extreme nausea and supposed internal bleeding, though we are having some trouble recognizing the origin."
"What, is it very difficult for you to cut her open and see what's bleeding?" House commented absent-mindedly as he scanned the file.
"We have done that, House, and although we were able to confirm that there was, indeed, bleeding, we couldn't find the source or identify any problem that might have caused the bleeding." She crossed her arms and nodded towards the examination room. "Ready to meet your new patient?"
House widened his eyes at her and took her hand in his, startling both her and Foreman, who eyed him wearily.
"But mom… What if she doesn't like me?"
"Oh, come on." Thirteen smirked and pushed him lightly in the direction of the door. "What's there not to like?"
"Very funny, Thirteen."
He pushed the door open and contemplated the brown-haired, brown-eyed, pale eighteen-year-old woman in front of him.