IN THE LAST DAYS OF AZRAEL

A House fan-fic

By entercreativename


Day Five:

Insanity. In the years since I've graduated high school, the world had changed drastically. What were once guaranteed rights by our constitution were now fables told in history classes about the dangers of absolute freedoms. Everywhere you turned, a police officer stood waiting to check your identification. Every phone call made, e-mail sent, fax received was being monitored by a man in a black suit in an office across the nation, wearing a badge and hiding behind a gun. People used to say the future was bright, but I haven't seen the sun in over a month; it's only hazy and dreary out.

Loss of revenue in the health care industry had changed the course of medicine as we once knew it. Though the US was never really known for its health care system, everything degraded after Bush Jr. left office and handed over to his cronies. Now that no one could health insurance, doctors found that their income had dropped drastically. I made only a little over $22,000 a year, and am still paying off a large debt; only a mere fraction of what I made as compared to my residency in pathology.

Now, I sit in my office, staring at a note given to me by a crazed patient, one who is laying a puzzle out in front of me for me to solve. A puzzle that I really would care not to solve; I haven't wanted to do anything since my husband died. Yet, each time I try to get up to leave, to go home and find solace in the warm comfort of my bed, that same crazed patient slash homeless man with the cane, is staring at me.

"I'm not going to see this woman from the note you gave me, I'm not supposed to go. All I am really supposed to do is be here for my patients."

"I was like you once, minus the whole 'be there for the patients' part; that part I ignored. Look where it got me," the man pointed down at himself and his shabby clothes he got back after he signed himself out AMA. "By the way, I just used the leg pain as a ploy to see what was going on here in this office."

"Well, you did manage to figure out the salmonella case, I have to hand you that." I looked down at the note in my hand and played with the loose fibers from the corner. "You did get me in trouble with my boss because of it."

The man smiled and picked up a red and gray oversized tennis ball that was found by my co-worker earlier that day behind a filing cabinet. As he spun it around in his hand he said, "Technically, I got you out of trouble too."

I looked up from the note in my hand and stared at him. Was he the man on the phone? Someone did call Foreman during our meeting, someone who had long since disappeared from Princeton. Did that man just recently resurface?

"What do you mean, 'got me out of trouble?'"

He tossed the ball up in the air, "Isn't it obvious? Of course, maybe you're too thick to be in diagnostic medicine. Try thinking for once, or do you need an old pro to do that for you too?" He looked at me, expecting me to read his mind, to connect two distant points with one line, to see what he knew. But I couldn't.

"I don't follow you Bob."

"You moron! I was the person who called Foreman today. I knew you'd get in trouble for following my advice, and I knew that he'd want to meet with you right away in the morning. I asked the nurse when he got in, told her that I wanted to thank him for the care I was given. She told me, I called. End of story."

No one called me a moron, not after completing training in both pathology and epidemiology, not after surviving all these years after nothing.

"But, he said you were dead? He didn't recognize you at rounds today. He doesn't know you Bob!"

"House! That's my name! And you're wondering how I know what I do about diagnostic medicine? I founded this department fifteen years ago. If you don't want my help, fine, I'll go back to my cardboard box on the street behind your apartment, which by the way, used to be mine."

I was furious, though I did not know about what. Though this man was answering questions that I've had for a long time, he was also a paradox; Foreman said this man had died. What was he doing here now? One thing was certain; by him telling me where I lived, and also knowing where I worked, he had officially become a danger to me. "Don't move," I said as I picked up the phone and dialed the extension to psych and informed them of this man.

"Watch me!" He stood up and started limping to the door, but the two orderlies sent down from psych were faster than him. Within a few minutes, Foreman stood in front of my desk, asking what had happened. Before I could tell him though, he picked up the note from that man.

"Allison Cameron? I haven't seen this name or this handwriting for years. Did you find this in your desk?" Foreman smiled at me for the first time since I began to work there. I had two options, the first was to lie and agree with what he said, hearing the end of this whole fiasco. However, that man still knew where I lived and he would be back. Instead I opted for the truth.

"That man, the one you admitted to diagnostics yesterday, gave that to me."

"Gave as in, it was in his pocket and he just handed it to you?"

"Gave as in he wrote it down in front of me. He told me his last name too, House."

Foreman went white and sat down in the chair that the homeless man had been sitting in just moments before. "It's not him, I would have recognized him today during department rounds."

"Doctor Foreman, you asked me earlier today where I had gotten the idea to go to the patients homes? It was his idea, not mine. He was the one who wrote in the red ink in the patient charts. He was the one who solved this case, not me."

Foreman looked at me, for the first time ever showing fear. "Doctor Livingston, Greg House died in a car accident ten years ago. Whoever that man is, he is just an imposter."