His hair was longer, then, long enough to curl back into the collar of his shirt and he loathed dress shoes with a passion, preferring sneakers to all but the most formal of events. Like the ones he wore now, crossed in front of him on the concrete steps, and he had time to sit and cross his ankles because he'd been kicked out of two classes in that time slot.
His mind, a constantly-turning still that took in information from every corner and distilled it into conclusions at an almost terrifying speed, was never satisfied with facile answers, with easy explanations. Everything had an explanation, if you only put together all the facts, and he had a habit of pressing even the most lauded professors to the furthest edge of their patience. Why? he'd ask, neat and calm in the middle row, his wiry athlete's legs sprawled easy beneath the too-short desk. You took these facts and drew a conclusion. Fine. But what about the other two conclusions that it's just as easy to draw? Do they not matter in your hypothetical reality?
It didn't take him long to understand, even at the tender age of twenty-one, that most people who claimed to be 'seekers after knowledge' simply stopped seeking once they knew enough to brag about. They didn't want to understand; they only wanted to reach that plateau of self-improvement and remain forever stunted to the truths that Greg House spent every moment craving details of. He was fascinated by the things that other people wrote off too-quickly as nonsensical; he was already infamous for taking an approach completely out of left field to get to the end of a process his classmates spent semesters trying to find the beginning of.
Genius is the ability to get from Point A to Point D without ever having to cross B and C, one of his professors had once told him, and when he came up with bizarre solutions like he always did they never knew whether to mark him highly or kick him out for breaking rules. Two of them had; one, red-faced and sputtering, who claimed it was because You're not above the rest of us, Mr. House, and until you learn to follow the rules you're never going to gain any respect, but Greg himself was fairly certain that the man just hadn't been impressed with looking stupid.
None of them ever were, really. They needed to lighten up.
He learned, then, that while certain concepts were immutable -- like the laws of conservation, or the fact that body and brain needed oxygen to survive -- and for every fact there was an answer, people were flawed little universes all unto themselves, subject to pride and greed and self-aggrandizement, and that what you saw on the surface was never the real reason that they did the things they did. Lying came as naturally as breathing to them -- for image, for money, for sex -- and it was a natural progression for Greg House to turn his gunsight eye on the things most other people missed. Later he'd be convinced that he'd lost his innocence, then, when all of childhood's assumptions were blasted away by the mortar shell of humanity's cheap and neon-gaudy reality.
An island unto himself, then; watching, learning. Observing. Rebuilding a picture with the colors of these lessons: stark, brutal, and more than a little disheartening.