Author's Note: Wow, thanks for the reviews, didn't expect to get this many :D I'm getting a bit anxious about this now, though. Hopefully I'm not going to disappoint you... I'm also worried it'll seem like I'm repeating myself, since, as a h/c writer, I've already done several stories where the main character has a mystery illness. Of course, none of them have had House in them, so this one's bound to be at least a bit different. And, as always, keep in mind that I've no medical background whatsoever, I'm just reading the stuff on the net, so there's bound to be a huge lot of mistakes and stuff that really doesn't make sense.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

"You can't stay like this forever, Tony," Pepper told him, exasperated. She'd spent most of yesterday arranging the decontamination of Tony's swimming pool and its surroundings, and now she was standing in a full protective suit in his hospital room.

Tony had been here, in the hospital, in quarantine, in his suit, for almost a day now, and there'd been no change, no news, nothing. As annoying as House was, he had pretty much convinced Pepper that Tony wasn't seriously ill, just seriously overcautious.

"I'm still feverish," he replied, pointing at the computer display by his bedside. They'd set it up to show what little medical data they could get out of his suit. It showed his temperature was at 101.4. "I can stay like this until I'm no longer sick."

"You could just take the suit off, let them have some blood samples and whatever else they want, find out what the problem is, and then continue convalescing at home. If you're not seriously sick, it wouldn't change anything, and if you are, then hiding in the suit will just make things worse. I mean, can you even eat in that thing?"

"I'll survive a few days without eating, and everything else I've taken care of, I've got water in the suit, and, uh, waste-management. We've been through this twice already, Pepper, and I'm not about to change my mind. Besides, that nurse with big brown eyes is really pretty, and I'd hate to leave before I've gotten to know her better."

She shook her head, huffed indignantly and headed out of the room. Like every time she came here, she had to go through the meticulous process of getting off the protective clothing and decontaminating everything and herself. Leave it to Tony to make such a spectacle of being sick. If he'd just stayed at home, in bed, drinking tea and watching TV, like normal people did... Still, underneath the annoyance, there was still the tiniest hint of worry. He was right most of the time. What if he was right now, too, and everyone else was wrong? What if scolding him and trying to coax him out of the suit and the isolation were a huge mistake?

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

On his way to talk to Tony Stark, Kutner ran into the man's red-headed assistant, nearly knocking her over. She was really pretty, like all the girls Stark surrounded himself with, but right now, she looked cross.

"Please tell me you have some news," she said, sounding as irked as she looked.

"Sorry, no," he answered. "I'm just going to talk to him, in case he can come up with any details we don't know that might be useful."

"Good luck to you, then, I really wish you learn something. If he'd only listen to reason..."

"You don't think he's doing the right thing here, then?"

"What, and you do?"

"Well, I suppose he knows what he's doing, he's Iron Man, after all."

"Oh please!" she cried, and walked away, leaving Kutner staring after her, baffled - but wow, was she impressive, the way she walked with those heels!

Kutner gazed until she'd disappeared from sight, then returned to what he'd been about to do, getting into a protective suit and entering Stark's room. Boy, was it weird seeing Iron Man like this, in a drab, featureless room in all his gleaming red-and-gold glory. He was sitting on the bed, talking. Kutner frowned. There was no one else in the room, so who was Stark talking to?

"Yes, I've contacted Santos's next of kin, yes, all that's taken care of. No, I'm... sort of occupied at the moment, I won't be able to stop by anytime soon, I'm afraid. Maybe next week. I'll have Pepper schedule something when it's possible. Great. Let me know instantly if there's anything new."

Of course, Stark was on the phone! He had an inbuilt phone in his helmet. Wow. Kutner could guess he couldn't probably even imagine all the gizmos Stark must have in that suit. Of course he'd want to be able to answer his phone everywhere in the world. Cool.

Unwilling to disturb the billionaire-superhero, Kutner knocked on the wall to announce his presence. "Mr. Stark? If you're not too busy, I'd like to ask some questions."

"Sure. I was just talking to my representative in Brazil. They've still got nothing. What about you?"

"Well, we've got a lot of ideas, but we can't really know if any of them are close to the truth. How're you feeling? Still the same?"

"Pretty much, yeah. Definitely not better," he answered, and coughed a little, the sound coming through strange and metallic. "Oh, and this is new, I think."

Kutner wrote "cough" on the file on the clipboard he was carrying. Too bad it was yet another nonspecific symptom. "So, I thought I'd ask you a bit more about Brazil. That biotech center of yours, what sort of things are they researching there, exactly? They haven't publicized anything, as far as I could find out."

"They haven't, since they've only been in operation for a bit over a month. I already told House we don't do bio-warfare, they haven't got anthrax or smallpox in there. They do have some hazardous materials, but no infectious disease. The main projects have to do with nanotechnology, particularly ways to utilize it in medicine."

"Couldn't that be relevant to your situation?"

"I sure hope not, it's all pretty much theoretical so far, they have are no finished products and nothing that's even been tested on humans yet. Still - I'm starting to feel like a parrot here - they weren't working on making people sick. Not my company. I've killed enough people already."

"But you've saved many, too," Kutner remarked. "You're a superhero, after all."

"I think I've harmed more than I've helped," Iron Man bowed his armor-clad head. "People like you are the real heroes. The ones that get hardly any thanks and no attention, and save more lives."

Kutner was glad he wasn't the blushing type, because if he were, he'd surely have blushed at that. He was even more convinced now than before that House hadn't got the slightest idea about what Stark really was like. He really wasn't attention-seeking and self-centered, he was a true hero. "Thank you, Mr. Stark. And for what it's worth, I believe in you. I think you're right to be cautious. Don't mind House, he doesn't like anyone and he thinks all people are lying morons."

"I figured as much already, Doctor... what was your name?"

"Kutner."

"Thanks, Doctor Kutner. Glad to know there's at least one person here who doesn't think the old rustpot has gone off his rocker."

"I'm sure I'm not the only one. Anyway, where were we..." he muttered, glancing at his clipboard. "Right. I've got a few more questions."

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Kutner seemed over-eager and naive, but Tony found talking to him a refreshing change. During the day he'd spent in this hospital, nearly all conversations had been either contests of wit (with House), clinical and impersonal (with House's subordinate Doctor Taub) or more or less aggressive disputes (with Pepper). It was nice to have a conversation where the other person didn't take him for an idiot, an object of study or a five year old.

The questions Kutner asked also helped Tony to shape the ideas and theories he'd been thinking over. After the young doctor left and Tony finally had some peace and quiet, he asked Jarvis to show him the data from the Amazon biotech center again.

He wasn't at his best, his thinking slowed by the fever, the dizziness and the nagging uncertainty of whether or not he was just on a mindless wild goose chase. Still, he'd been able to figure out things, and what he'd come up with was alarming.

Doctor Jose Santos, the late head researcher at Stark Industries biotech, was the man who had first contacted Tony about something weird going on. His first report had only mentioned some missing equipment, accompanied with computer glitches: someone had taken the stuff and removed any records of it, but Santos or someone under him had noticed the theft nevertheless. Later, Santos had sent a report concerning trouble with some of the personnel, who had lots of poorly explained absences from work on one hand, a lot of overtime at odd hours on the other.

Something had been going on, and Santos had known about it. And now Santos was dead - he was the man who had taken his life right in front of Tony's eyes. Why exactly, that was one thing Tony couldn't figure out. The most worrisome thing was, Santos' body had disappeared. Tony had had a very difficult time explaining it to the man's next of kin. It'd been taken right under his nose, because he had been at the biotech center all the time after the incident. He'd even talked to the guy whose job it had been to transport the body. This suggested that the enemy, whoever they were, had infiltrated the local authorities. If they had, then it was no surprise that the investigations there had lead to nothing. The bad guys had cleaned and covered their tracks.

There had also been another death, one that hadn't raised any suspicions at first. A younger scientist, a man by the name of Jonas Blakely, had died in a supposed accident on the river Amazon, two weeks ago. No one really knew what had happened, just that he'd gone canoeing and then his body had been found in the river. He had drowned, it had looked like a free time accident that had nothing to do with his work, but maybe, just maybe, he had found out something and someone had silenced him.

Or then Tony was just being paranoid and building theories on nothing. That was always a possibility. Still, the more he studied this, the more worried he grew.

He coughed a little. It didn't feel serious, but it'd probably been wise to mention it to Kutner anyway, because he hadn't had a cough before today. All in all, he thought he felt a bit worse, but then again, the longer he stayed in the suit, the worse he was bound to feel. He had designed it for sustained use, but this was pushing it. There were moments when he actually felt a bit claustrophobic in the thing, short of breath, as if there wasn't enough air inside the metal shell...

Ah, damn. He needed to stop feeling sorry for himself and concentrate on the company trouble.

He'd had Jarvis go through the personnel records for any worktime irregularities, and it was easy to point out two scientists who'd clearly been up to something. Tony tried to contact these people, but not surprisingly, he wasn't able to reach either of them, and no one who knew them had been in contact with them during the last few weeks or so. There were a few others who were suspicious, but less clear. One of them actually answered his call - and he learned that the guy was a single dad with a little baby girl, which was why he had some trouble with his timetables. So, a false lead.

Tony re-read the files on the two missing scientists. A woman and a man, possibly friends, since they had graduated the same year from the same school, though with different disciplines. The man was a microbiologist, the woman specialized in nanotechnology. They had been working on different projects at SI biotech, he on ways to utilize biological components in nanotechnology, she on self-replicating nanotech. Neither of the projects had had anything even nearly finished and functional, and especially the former had been mostly theoretical. Still, combining the two added up to... Yeah, he didn't even want to think about it. Self-replicating half-biological nanobots?

Of course, it was unlikely that just two, or even four people (counting the other suspects) could come up with such a breakthrough, so Tony set Jarvis to search for any other missing scientists with similar specializations.

Tony sincerely hoped he was wrong about this.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

House had had a busy and active morning of avoiding work, and after a modest lunch break of about two hours, he sat down in his office to waste a few minutes thinking about Stark. After all, he was House's only active case at the moment.

Kutner had interviewed the patient earlier, and had learned of one new symptom: cough. That told as little as the earlier ones. The flu was still a likely diagnosis.

"And, I just thought I'd say... I don't think you're being fair to him. He's not a bad person. He's not here to annoy us, he's here because he wants to protect others," Kutner had also told House. He smirked at the memory. Kutner was blissfully oblivious to the fact that the world wasn't all good and sunny, and that superheroes were just people, just like the rest of them, maybe even a bit worse.

"He's here because he wants it to look like he's protecting others while he's really just protecting himself," House had answered. "But I know that understanding such complex motives is beyond you, so don't even try, it might fry the few neurons you've got left."

House opened Stark's file on the laptop, checking the current situation - still feverish, respiratory rate and pulse still on the fast side, but not notably so. EEG showed beta waves, suggesting that he was thinking actively. Probably hitting on some nurse.

House scrolled the data backwards, checking the readings some hours ago, during the night and yesterday. Gazing at them gave him the intuitive hunch that he'd missed something important here. He hadn't had anyone actively follow the readings, just someone glancing at them every now and then to see there was nothing alarming. That might've been a mistake - but he'd been certain that there wouldn't be anything.

He scrolled back to the readings on admission, and then onwards again, towards the current moment. There was a trend. The respiratory rate was clearly higher now than before. House had thought the tachypnea was due to the fever, but that didn't seem likely anymore, since the patient was breathing faster now than yesterday. Combine that with the cough, and it could suggest a pulmonary problem. It might suggest that House had been wrong to take things for granted.

They really needed to get Stark out of that suit and start diagnosing him properly. House had spent enough time playing with Stark's insane rules. It was time to quit playing and get serious. He'd flood the room with an anesthetic to knock Iron Man unconscious and strip that suit off him, if that was what it took.

House picked up his cane and hobbled to Stark's room as fast as he could.

"All right, Stark. Your time is up. Get out of that suit, or I shall use my magical doctorly superpowers to get you out against your will."

"Ooo, I'm so frightened," Stark answered. The suit distorted his voice so much that House couldn't tell if he actually sounded out of breath. "To what do I owe the pleasure of you harassing me personally? I've already had Taub and 'Thirteen' tell me the same thing today."

"Obviously, they failed. I won't. You're sick, Stark. Think of all those cute little children and puppies who die and those bad guys who go free while you're stuck here, refusing to let us do our job," House told him in a mock accusing tone.

"So now you've noticed I'm sick? Well done, Doc! The fact that I'm in a hospital should've given you some clue about that."

"I could have you declared incapable of making decisions for yourself. I'm sure your secretary would back me up."

"No way she would!" Stark was starting to sound genuinely angry. "You leave her out of this."

"Oh, that struck a nerve. Do you treat all the girls you buy with such chivalry?"

Iron Man stood up, his menacing armored figure towering over House, but he didn't speak - instead, almost as soon as he'd gotten off the bed, he fell on his knees, and then toppled backwards and landed on the floor with a loud clank.

House glanced at the screen. Stark's vitals were stable but high, which wasn't a wonder since he'd been so ticked off. House knelt by Stark's side, took hold of his metal-covered shoulder, shook and yelled, "Hey! You still with me? Stark?"

He got no answer, the patient seemed to be unconscious. House's best bet was that it was simply a combination of too little food and water, slight lack of oxygen and the change in blood pressure when Stark had stood up. There was no way to confirm that since the suit readings didn't include BP or O2 sat, but if he was right, Stark was likely to come to very soon. House hadn't got any time to waste.

This wasn't exactly what he had had in mind, but it worked just fine. He called for help and began scrutinizing Iron Man's suit to find out how to open it.