Allison Cameron arrived at Princeton Plainsboro early that morning. Her boss, Dr. Virginia Dare, was a stickler for punctuality, and her definition of punctual was to be there before her. Allison thus decided to arrive before almost everyone else so that her boss would find no more problems with her. She arrived in the office, made herself some coffee and looked over the patient notes from yesterday. She knew that there was something else there, something that Dr. Dare had missed when she diagnosed lung cancer, but she couldn't prove it nor could she tell what it was. She decided to take a walk around the hospital hallways to allow herself time to think. As she passed the maintenance stairwell, she heard music piping up from below. She wasn't too young that she didn't recognize the tune: The Who's Baba O'Reilly. She wondered who would be listening to music like that at four-thirty in the morning. Her curiosity piqued, she decided to take some time to investigate the source of the music. She reached her hand into her pocket, feeling the comforting weight of her pepper spray before she made her way downstairs. She followed her ears, tracking the familiar tune and lyrics: Out here in the fields/I fight for my meals/I get back into my living/I don't need to fight/To prove I'm right/I don't need to be forgiven . . . She found her way to the locked grate at the bottom of the staircase, but right now it wasn't locked, nor was it closed. It was open, as was the door beyond it. Tightening her grip on the pepper spray, she walked through the pair of portals and into the room beyond.

Her eyes widened as she took in the expanse of the room that was locked off beneath the hospital. This cavernous expanse was nearly as large as the main floor of the hospital proper. She noticed columns in various locations, presumably to hold up the weight of the building. She walked further in, looking for the source of the music and wondering who exactly could be down here. Finally, as she passed a certain point, the music was cut off, and she could here rhythmic thumping coming from somewhere off to her left. She turned, and was met by an unknown man. As she looked him up and down, lyrics from a song she'd heard recently came unbidden to her mind: I met a man from New Orleans, wore a half suit with dark blue jeans/Kicked his heels together, winked at me real nice . . . She noticed, though, that this man wouldn't be kicking his heels together anytime soon, as he walked with the assistance of a cane, though his clothes seemed to fit the description perfectly. He was taller than she, with stubble on his face and the most piercing blue eyes she'd ever seen. His hair was dark, but he had wings of gray at his temples. He wore Nike Shox shoes, dark blue jeans, and a suit coat over a rumpled button-down sky-blue shirt, which he apparently wore over a black t-shirt of some sort. She noticed that while she was looking at him, his gaze hadn't wavered from her face. Finally, he broke the silence that had gone thick as they stood there. "Ah. Dr. Cameron, I presume. I recognize you from your picture in your employee records. What are you doing down here?"

She looked at him, amazed that he knew her name, and realized that he had asked her a question. "I—I don't . . . that is, I heard . . . how do you have access to my files?" she stammered slightly.

He smirked at her discomfort. "I know everything that goes on in this hospital, Dr. Cameron. Like I know that you arrive extremely early because your boss is some sort of ass with a medical degree bought off of e-bay and a high-class lawyer husband that keeps her from getting sued by the families of those patients that she inadvertently allows to die. I know that you get ignored by her, probably because she doesn't respect you, though I don't know why. I have heard you complain to your friend and colleague Dr. Eric Foreman that your boss makes pat diagnoses and doesn't explore other avenues. I happen to agree with you. Some of your patients that you complain about that live are my work, not hers."

Allison was taken aback at the strange man's comments. "What do you mean, your work?"

"I've often gone up and changed the patient's chart to accommodate new medication. It shows her ineptitude that she doesn't check the charts after making the initial notation."

"But . . . who are you?"

"Me?" he grinned lopsidedly, "I'm the Hospital's resident ghost."

"You're what?"

He chuckled slightly, "You heard me. I haunt this place, making the changes I see necessary, I even make sure that Dr. Arthur knows his place around here."

"Why?"

"Because they wouldn't want me to be up there," he said bitterly as he used his cane to gesture upwards. "People don't want a sick doctor." He looked at his watch. "Oh. You better go. Your boss will be arriving in ten minutes, and it'll take you about that long just to get back to her department." Allison nodded and turned to walk away. She got almost all the way to the door before he spoke again. "One more thing, your patient doesn't have small-cell lung cancer, she has Lupus, which is threatening her lungs. You need a biopsy to confirm, but it'd just be easier to start her on proper treatment." Allison tossed a hurried thanks over her shoulder as she quickened her pace to get back upstairs.

Author's Notes: I understand that there has been some confusion regarding how this story is going to turn out. For the most part, you're just going to have to wait and see while I take creative and artistic liberties with the characters and have a little fun in the process. However, in response to a review I received about my cast list, I thought I'd set the record straight. While House may indeed still have feelings for Stacy, he also has feelings for Allison Cameron, though he's less open about showing them (I will not speculate as to why, too many fanfictions have done that already, and I'll probably end up doing it in my other work, which is titled Lashes and Strokes and is a CSI/CSI:NY/House Crossover as of now). My evidence that he has feelings for her are as follows:
1. The Date (Love Hurts, first season): Ironically one of the largest pieces of evidence for the fact that he likes her even though he pushed her away rather hard during the dinner. First off, no doctor except for a few exceptional ones, are worth the hassle of a date to get to return to work after they've resigned. Dr. House is the only one at PPTH who is of that caliber. Since she's not at his level, but he agreed to the date anyway . . . that tells us something. Also, he bought her a corsage and took her to a very fancy restaurant. He could have made do with a moderately fancy one and she wouldn't have minded.
2. The Flinch (Three Stories, first season): As he was attempting to teach the diagnostic class using his own experience with poor diagnostics, no one could come up with the option that he wanted them to do, which was muscle death. When Dr. Cameron came in and spoke up, he flinched. Could he have been surprised? Probably was, but he flinched and didn't have a witty comeback. She caught him out and he didn't try to hide it.
3. The Sarcasm (Post-Control, first season): After the end of Control, when Cameron had asked him if he liked her, his sarcastic and biting remarks towards her showed a marked increase in frequency and harshness. If you look at all the main characters, you can rate his sarcasm by frequency and intensity. He's pretty bad to Foreman and Cuddy, and post-Control he's quite harsh to Chase. However, he's at his harshest to Wilson, who everyone knows is House's friend, who House obviously cares about (especially since House allows Wilson to crash at his place when his wife throws him out). Thus, logically, you can measure how much House likes the person by how nasty he is with his verbal remarks. He's at his second-harshest to Cameron, thus he likes her particularly well (if this logic sounds like it's based off of immaturity, well, it's House).

Ohter notes: Ummmm . . . as to that question about whether Cameron will end up with Chase, did you read what character labels I put on the primary entry?
The song lyrics used came from the Who's Baba O'Reilly and Scott Stapp's Justify