A/N: Thanks for all the great reviews! I love hearing what people think of what I have to say.
Anyway, I actually have no idea what Katie has, because I started the story out thinking one thing was going to happen and then the story kinda changed itself around and now I'm not sure what's going to happen at all. Right now I'm just putting my fingers on the keyboard. We'll see.
"Are you all right?"
Katie blinked slowly—very slowly, much more slowly than she thought she should have been blinking under the circumstances—and opened her eyes. There was something soft under her back. She must've been moved off the floor. The floor, to say the least, had not been soft.
"Are you all right?" the voice asked again, in an accent that was distinctly Australian—Melbourne, perhaps, Katie thought, but she really had no idea—and Katie squinted until the voice's face swam into focus. The next thing she thought was, "Oh boy, I got the pretty doctor." Then she blacked out again. She didn't realize that the cross was still clutched in her fist, or that its shape remained branded in the pale flesh of her palm. She only realized that wow, did the doctor's hair look hot falling over his eyes that way. Unfortunately, that observation was completely unrelated to her problem. But it was okay, because she was unconscious.
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Chase shrugged and didn't think much of anything at all, other than the brief moment of time in which he pondered whether or not that flash in the girl's eyes had been lust—lust at her age; now that was just creepy. Cameron rushed down the hallway outside breathing hard and he wondered if those had been boxers he'd seen in her hand earlier. Who had she been kissing? He inspected his emotions idly—could he possibly bring himself to feel the remotest twinge of jealousy—decided he could not, and headed out to the main area of the clinic. There was a limp teenage girl on the examining bench, there was—currently—no attending physician in a five-mile vicinity, there was a very poorly scripted soap opera running on the television, there were wood chips from his latest pencil stuck painfully between his molars, and he was still trying to think of a six-letter word for "dumb."
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House stood facing Cuddy in her office, the place to which he had—very unwillingly—been coerced. She was breathing somewhat heavily and her breasts were bouncing in a fashion that said they were not quite heaving yet, but after some additional exertion they might start that direction.
"I have to talk to you," she said.
"What was your first hint?" he said.
She ignored him. That was nothing unusual. "It's about the patient."
"Which patient?" he said. "I got loads. It's 'cause I'm a doctor, you know."
"The one in room 173," she said.
"The one with the sprained ankle?"
"A sprained ankle?"
"It's when you—" House began, in his most annoying, patronizing tone, ready to launch into a lovely and very disturbing speech, but she raised a well-manicured hand and cut him off. He thought about something he had learned awhile ago—that the only people who kept their nails that neat were not getting any—but he couldn't pursue the idea any further, though it led to some very intriguing fantasies, because she opened her mouth again. She had a bad habit of doing that.
"She doesn't have a sprained ankle."
"Funny, I thought I was the diagnostician here. Says that on my door, after all."
"Sprained ankles do not make people faint," Cuddy said.
"Really? But pain makes them faint," House said, "and she was standing on it at the time."
"The hospital has been quarantined!" Cuddy yelled. "Didn't you notice the rushing around, the cops, the news anchor?"
At this, he was taken aback, but he refused to show it. "Did the white rats get loose in the heating vents again?"
"For the last time, there is no animal testing—oh, forget it. She does not have a sprained ankle, she has the plague, and as far as I know, you—as well as the rest of the hospital and the rest of the country—are not immune," said Cuddy, and looked remarkably proud of herself for a woman who had just doomed the state to illness and a very likely death. House felt his stomach fall to a place where it definitely did not belong.
"And you need a diagnostician here for—?" he said instead, and waited to hear her response. In a manner highly untrue to form, they had—thus far—been interesting.