A/N: No reviews on the last chapter... okay guys... cool. :( Someone please review and tell me how I did on that last chapter and on this one, too!
Oh, and I just re-watched Last Resort after not seeing that episode in a while... it always reminds me how much of a man House really is, the way he tried to keep Thirteen, the clinic nurse, and the clinic patients alive, even though some of them were extremely obnoxious. Just a great episode all around... sorry, I had to say that.
Disclaimer: Thirteen-year-old girls don't own hit TV shows or great songs.
Alright, here we are with chapter seven of Scars!
The next morning, Dr. Gregory House moaned and rolled himself out of bed as his high-pitched, annoying alarm clock blared into his ear. Pulling his bad leg slowly, slowly over the side of the bed, House pushed the offending noisemaker off his bedside table and began to reassess the previous night.
"Wilson knows," House thought to himself, "he knows, and now there's no going back. He can't forget, he won't forget, and it's all because YOU couldn't control yourself. It's all because YOU don't know how to let go of things that happened a lifetime ago, because YOU are such a damn baby you can't keep from having panic attack after panic attack after falling on some ice."
"Are you really this damn stupid?" Another voice bit at House's ears. "You're able to show this much weakness now? You're lucky Wilson keeps you around, he didn't want to deal with you before. But now, with you whining about a childhood you think was worse than it was, he's really not going to want you. He's going to leave you, as he should, and you'll be alone. All alone," John House's gravelly whisper travelled into House's head.
"No, stop! I haven't seen you in two years, I don't associate with you anymore, you're not even my real father!" House raised his voice and clawed at his ears.
"But you will never, ever be rid of me. You hear that, boy? Never. You will always remember the discipline I treated you to, you will always remember that you should be punished after acting like an idiot, and you will always remember how to be a good soldier. I'll forever be in the back of your mind, along with the ice baths, the beatings, the long nights outside. Remember me." And with that, John House's cold voice slipped away, leaving House on his bed with his head in his hands and his heart dropped down to his stomach.
[Line Break]
It was 8:32 AM when House finally found himself at work, a whole twenty-eight minutes before he was required to. Of course, he wasn't there to actually work, just to be early enough to screw with his team and to avoid Wilson, who was always there at 8:35 on the dot. Quickly limping to the elevator, House stepped inside and pushed the button for his floor and leaned on the back elevator wall, sighing to himself and closing his eyes in preparation for the day. Soon enough, the door popped back open and the diagnostician left the elevator cab and pulled himself and his leg from hell into the refuge of his office. Fully planning on napping until his team arrived, House sat down in his chair and propped his legs up, but stopped when he saw a case file seated on his desk with a note attached.
"You're going to take this case because I told you to. - Cuddy."
Sighing, House flipped open the file and expected to find a middle age, loser patient with cancer, or sarcoidosis, or some other boring, first-thing-that-comes-to-mind diagnosis. Instead, he found the picture of a five-year-old caucasian male, presenting with blood in the urine. Still a boring presentation, but upon closer inspection of the grainy headshot given of the patient, House quickly noticed scarring around the boy's lips and automatically, his brain flipped to kidney failure and self-mutilation, unless there was something else going on behind the scenes in this boy's life. Without the self-mutilation factor, House would've never taken the case, but something about the fact that a five year old was scarred up this much on the face made him do it. House grabbed the case file, not bothering to read the rest of it, walked into the DDx room, and wrote the two symptoms he cared about on the board: Decreased kidney function and scarring near the lips.
A few minutes of sitting in his chair and playing with his cane later, Kutner walked into the room at precisely 8:47 AM, surprised to see his boss already at work.
"What are you doing here so early?" Kutner inquired of House, who rolled his eyes at his most childish fellow. "Because my annoying hooker wouldn't leave my apartment."
"Aw, House, are you looking to make a change in your life? See, I knew you cared about your job, this hospital, even your co-workers..." Kutner let out a boyish grin and trailed off as he noticed the words on the whiteboard. "Do we have a case?"
"No, remember, I'm listing the symptoms my hooker had after a night in my bed," House retorted quickly, now choosing to inspect the curve of his cane.
"What makes this one special, then? I mean, I assume all women leave your place with..." Kutner scanned the board quickly, "blood in the urine and marks where your teeth grazed too hard on soft skin?" House turned to glare at his fellow, who was smirking obnoxiously just as Thirteen and Foreman walked in. "We have a case?" Thirteen asked when she saw the board.
"No, you see..." House began to go into his spiel again when Kutner grabbed the file and read it off to the other doctors. Finally, at 9:00 AM exactly, Taub walked in, looking stressed and annoyed as ever.
"Well, it's great to finally have the whole family here! Tiny Taub," House watched to smirk at Taub's annoyance at the nickname, "trouble in paradise?" Taub glared back at House but didn't respond.
Finally, Foreman realized House had been there before him and Thirteen had shown up minutes earlier. "Why were you early today?"
House was about to go into his hooker story, ready to add more details because the original, dull story was beginning to bore the brilliant man when Kutner decided again to spare the others from the story he knew was made up. "So, what if we don't take into consideration the scarring around the lips? Then we just have simple kidney failure," Kutner proposed to the group.
"You can't just leave out a symptom because you don't want to see it. If the kid is self-mutilating, it indicates some type of mental illness that could be a factor in why his kidneys are failing," Taub answered Kutner, busying himself with his coffee.
"Or, Kutner's idea is right, and we should just ignore the marks around his lips. Just because he bites them doesn't mean he's purposely self-mutilating, it could just be a nervous habit or something he does when he's stressed, or something he did to himself as a baby," Thirteen responded to Taub.
"If he did it to himself as a baby, he should've stopped before he reached that point because it hurt. CIPA," House popped himself out of his chair and circled their second symptom, and then wrote in large letters below, "CIPA."
"No way a five-year-old has undiagnosed CIPA and is still alive. Besides, that doesn't account for the kidney failure that everyone seems to be ignoring," Foreman responded with an edge in his voice.
"Then our other option for the lip chewing is he does it when he's stressed and it relieves the stress, but if a five year old is stressed, there's problems going on that are far too big for a little kid to understand," House paused and the other four doctors looked at him expectantly, "Someone go examine the kid, see if he's hurt himself in any other ways and check for signs of abuse. Abuse would explain the kidney failure due to trauma and the reason as to why it looks like the kid's trying to bite his own face off. On the off chance that I'm wrong, Thirteen and Taub go check the home for environmental factors, see if there's anything the patient could swallow that his kidney's couldn't filter out. Go. Do," House finished as he wrote "abuse?" on the board and leaned back to stare.
[Line Break]
"House," Cuddy started as she ambled into her diagnostic head's office, "what's wrong with Cameron?"
"The skinny brunette?" House asked, opening one eye to acknowledge her presence before shutting it again.
"The patient, you idiot. Did you figure out what was wrong with him?"
"It's been two hours. The team is doing the standard admittance exam right now."
"Well, hurry up! I don't want to be responsible for a dead five-year-old!"
"This is an important patient... or rather a patient with important parents who give the hospital important funding, isn't it?" House asked, quickly figuring out Cuddy's distress over the little boy.
Cuddy, hating how House could read her so easily, let out a puff of air and glared down at the now-smirking diagnostician. "Fix him," she told House, then turned away on her heel and began walking for the door. House just cocked his head and watched her leave.
"And quit staring at my ass," Cuddy scolded, then continued her walk back to her office.
A/N: I wasn't really sure how I should have ended that chapter... a bit of a filler, but the patient is important. Sorry the update took so long, I've been crazy busy and it took me a lot of research to figure out exactly what I wanted to happen with the patient.
Speaking of updates, it's going to be a struggle for the next week and a half - I am leaving on vacation on Monday and will be gone until the next Monday, and that is a full week without my computer. Therefore, we will not have any updates next week. I will, however, try to update again once more before I leave so I give you guys a little something to chew on. Thanks for understanding.
Please, please review - they're great motivation to write and I love to read them!