House glanced up from his GameBoy as the clinic doors swung open to admit a rushed-looking Wilson. "Why are you so dressed up?" House demanded leisurely, sizing up the oncologist with a single glance.

"Dressed up?" Wilson repeated in confusion, pausing to look down at himself. "I'm not dressed up." He couldn't see that he was wearing anything unusual: shirt, pants, tie, lab coat. He was missing his stethoscope, but that was the reason he was in the clinic; he thought he remembered leaving it in one of the exam rooms.

"Fine," House acquiesced, "you're not dressed up. You just ironed your lab coat and wore a new tie just for the hell of it. Who is she? Anyone I know?"

"I'm not dressed up!" Wilson asserted.

House fixed him with a stare. "Your lab coat has…"

"Fine," Wilson broke in with a sigh. It was easier just to admit it. "But there's no girl."

"Who's he then?" House questioned, raising an eyebrow.

"It's new intern day," Wilson told him, staring back levelly.

"So you're trying to make a good impression on the snot-nosed medical neophyte unfortunate enough to be entrusted to you now so that when you show up next week having forgotten to comb your hair, they'll still think of you as a professional?" House demanded derisively.

Wilson just shook his head and glanced at his watch. His intern would probably already be waiting for him upstairs. They were always early on the first day.

"That's what I thought," House commented, taking Wilson's silence as agreement. "It's pathetic," headed, returning to his game without a glance over at the waiting room full of patients that he was supposed to be seeing. Cuddy wasn't in yet, so he could be a little more brazen than usual.

"You know," Wilson observed, deciding to take a moment to chat seeing as how he was already late, "you're back working in the clinic again this year, and what with the close shave you had with Vogler…"

"If you can count what I do around here as work," House interrupted lazily.

"Anyway," Wilson remarked, continuing back on his way to Exam Two in search of his stethoscope, "you might wind up wishing that you'd ironed clothes. Or that you'd worn a tie. Or, maybe, I don't know, a lab coat…"

"Cuddy wouldn't dare," House declared confidently.

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

"Did you forget to turn off the lights when you left last night?" Cameron asked as the three fellows rounded the corner and saw an unfamiliar light coming from their offices. Unless one of them had stayed to work an overnight shift or on the rare occasion that House beat them in to work, the offices were always dark when they first arrived.

"No," Chase replied, shaking his head for emphasis, "I turned them out. We're just not the first ones in this morning."

"Don't you remember House saying yesterday he was going straight to the clinic?" Foreman said. "Cuddy's busy with the new interns and he wanted to get the time out of the way before he could get stuck with something that would saddle him down for the weekend. So that rules him out, and the three of us are here."

"It's no big deal," Cameron assured Chase. "It's just not like you to forget."

"I didn't forget," he protested again.

"Don't tell me that working with House has given you an inflated sense of your own infallibility," Foreman groaned.

"No," Chase repeated firmly, "but I turned out the light. I would bet, however, that whoever is waiting for us in there turned them back on." He pointed. The others, following the direction of his outstretched finger, finally saw the same dark silhouette that Chase had already spotted.

The fellows exchanged curious glances before wordlessly speeding up their paces and bursting into the room, anxious to find out who was waiting. It had been apparent from the silhouette that it wasn't House, who wouldn't have been waiting patiently anway, and they were keen to discover who was there and why.

When they entered the outer office, they found a slight blonde perched nervously on one of the chairs pulled up around the table. Dressed soberly in a pleated grey skirt and a blue sweater, her short lab coat immediately identified her as an intern. "Would any of you happen…" she started, turning her blue eyes questioningly to each of the three in turn as she stood to greet them. One hand anxiously fiddled with the hospital ID clipped to her pocket and the other rested flat on the glass tabletop.

"Nope," Foreman interrupted with a grin. "But we'll be happy to page Doctor House up here right away."

The girl nodded, smiling hesitantly back at him. "Thank you," she said. "I had been told that this was his suite of offices and that I would be best waiting for him here." Although her English was flawless, it became quickly obvious that she hadn't been American-born. There was a soft foreign inflection to her voice, but it was neither as strong nor as familiar as Chase's Australian twang.

"You're in the right spot," Cameron assured her as Chase moved off to the telephone to page House. "I'm Allison Cameron, one of Doctor House's team."

"I'm Eric Foreman," he said, offering his hand to her, "and over there is Robert Chase." Chase offered a wave from the telephone as Foreman performed the introduction for him. "We're the rest of the team."

"Katrien Verhoeven," she reciprocated, stepping across the room to take Foreman's offered hand.

"Oh, shit," Foreman breathed softly as he watched her cross over to him.