A/N: This is probably it for a while, but we hopefully shouldn't have a 2-week gap again. Thanks for reading and reviewing.

(H/C)

As House approached his office, he could see Cuddy and the egglings both there waiting. Should have expected her to drop by as soon as she got to the hospital. He ran a self-check on posture as he reached for the glass door, trying to appear as normal as he ever did. Not only was his leg aching more after the session, but his side had joined the chorus. Medically, he knew that he couldn't expect to be 100% healed from three broken ribs after two months. He was very fortunate that he hadn't punctured a lung either during his fall or in the aftermath while crawling around in the dark, setting shoulders, and signalling with Morse for hours. The reality was still annoying.

He entered the office. "Anyone who's not married to me, scram for ten minutes." He checked his watch. "You're too prompt. Got to change that if you want to be successful doctors. People expect us to run late." Even while dismissing them, he watched to see if any of them had noticed the watch and concluded that Templeton had a vague nibble of something different or off there but couldn't decide what. The other two candidates missed it. Cuddy, on the other hand, scored 100% on that pop quiz, but that wasn't really fair. She had inside information.

She waited until the egglings had left to speak. House glanced over at the conference room; Taub was here already but was reading a medical journal with the connecting door between the rooms closed. He knew the drill.

"Yes, I wore the old watch, and no, that doesn't mean anything except that I was getting dressed in the dark in a hurry," House protested.

"Of course," she agreed far too quickly to suit him. "Good morning, Greg." She came forward for their postponed morning greeting, edited to the public version. He couldn't help a subtle flinch as she gave him a squeeze prior to letting go.

She released him instantly, guilt clouding her eyes. "Did I hurt you? I didn't think I put that much pressure into it."

"It's okay. Good to know you're glad to see me. Care to take this conference somewhere more private where we can really say good morning?"

She was studying him with worried analysis now. "Did you take your meds at breakfast? Are you sure you had breakfast?"

"Yes and yes. I'm fine, Lisa." She didn't look quite convinced, and he reluctantly yielded. She was bound to find out anyway. She was no longer in his back pocket with every-hour checks as she had been after her meltdown last summer, but she did stop by to see him for a minute at times during her day, even aside from hospital business, and there was hospital business to take into account. There was no way he could keep up regularly scheduled PT appointments first thing every morning for long without her noticing the fact.

"I'm starting a course of PT," he said. "Probably do me good after the explosion."

He saw the surprise in her, followed immediately by approval and pride. She didn't mention his leg. "That's a good idea, Greg. So you just had a session?"

"Yep. First one. I've got the first appointment in the mornings with Davis, work permitting."

She gave him a more careful hug. "Good. I'm proud of you. Just don't push too hard, okay? Two months really isn't that long on the ribs."

He'd already heard that lecture once today, that time from Davis. You don't have a halfway gear, House. You go from zero straight to 200 on things. Remember, these are legitimate physical insults, both the short and the long-term. This will work a lot better with some moderation and listening to your body. "I won't."

"Any change with Kutner?"

"Not yet. I'll keep checking."

"I'm going to try to schedule my parents for this morning. I've got 11:00 available. Would that work for you?"

"Good a time as any. Maybe we can order in lunch afterwards - for the two of us."

She gave him a tense smile. He knew how uneasy she was about this parental chat, even if she knew it was necessary. "Definitely not for the four of us. I've got to get busy, but I'll let you know for sure." She touched him lightly on the arm. "Have a good day, Greg. And keep me informed on Kutner."

After she had gone, House limped over into the conference room, filling his coffee cup. Taub looked up at him, then around to make sure the egglings weren't in ear shot. "Foreman is gone," he said.

"Gone as in on vacation, yes." House took a sip of the steaming hot liquid. Good. Discomfort in another point besides the leading two at the moment was a nice change.

Taub shook his head. "He cleaned out his locker. He's gone."

"He'd been here too long, anyway. Time for him to test out his wings, such as they are." House took another cautious sip of coffee. "He wouldn't want people to make a big deal out of it."

"You mean you don't," Taub translated. "You don't want to let up pressure on the candidates now that there are two positions open."

"Pressure is valuable. Tells us things that we might not have known otherwise. That's why cardiac stress tests are conducted on a treadmill instead of with the patient sitting in a recliner."

At that moment, the egglings reappeared in the hall from wherever they had scrammed to. They checked carefully for Cuddy, then entered. House looked at his watch. "Thirteen minutes. You're late to work, kids. That's no way to impress the boss." Taub's eyes suddenly narrowed and fixed on the watch, but he didn't say anything in front of the others. House mentally awarded him two points.

Templeton pushed up to him, cutting off Ramirez. Hollingwood, of course, had paused to react to his chewing them out. Templeton extended a sheaf of papers. "I worked up an analysis on the FDR data last night, Dr. House. There are several ideas, but I really don't think any of them can be proven other than atherosclerosis."

Hollingwood objected to that. "Melanoma is a very attractive theory. Metastasized to the brain, it could explain a lot."

"There's a problem with attractive theories," House pointed out. "Anyone can come up with one to match their own biases, and they don't necessarily come with evidence attached."

"Anything here is a theory," Hollingwood countered. "They didn't do an autopsy. I found a very interesting book on this, FDR's Deadly Secret. But I do think the author might have pushed a little on his case. Here's a study I did last night on the strengths and on the weaknesses of his argument, and of a few others who have favored melanoma. I do think there might have been something there. Yes, it's just a theory, but there are far more unsupported ones." She walked up, handing her own paper to House.

House looked from hers to Templeton's. Very neatly typed and ordered; either could have been turned in in class. "Is this return to med school? You might have noticed that we graduated already." He set the papers down on the conference table, but he didn't dramatically rip them nor throw them away.

He looked at Ramirez, who had backed off and was waiting with an air of polite "gotcha-ism" for the others to finish. She, too, held papers. "Okay, we know Templeton is for atherosclerosis, and Hollingwood favors melanoma metastasized to the brain. What do you think killed him?"

There was an edge of defiant pride in her tone along with a nervousness she was trying to hide. House recognized the look. She was playing a high card here, but she hoped it was the right one. "I didn't work on FDR last night. Mine's on a different subject."

"I said we'd have FDR again this morning," House reminded her.

"You said unless we found something more interesting. I went back to those Star Trek forums where my friend asked about anyone who'd been there who got sick."

"But Kutner wasn't there after all," Templeton reminded her.

"That doesn't mean some other illness wasn't." She held out her offering to House. "Most of it was idiots. Routine GI bugs and URIs and such, probably did get them there. Several hypochondriac idiots, too, trying to join the line. But I did diagnose a case of probable appendicitis and posted a reply, sent that one off to the ER." She waited, on edge. By the time she had finished sifting through and categorizing all the replies into a table of data, it had been too late to do anything else. Appendicitis wasn't much, but it was current rather than historical, and she was hoping that the initiative, even if it didn't turn up a lot, would count for something.

House took her paper and flipped through it quickly, pausing at page two, which was a table of symptoms and timelines, all neatly organized. He looked back up and made her wait just a moment longer before he gave her any feedback at all. "Nice idea. I like it. But this is a summary."

"Yes," she agreed, a little confused.

"Ramirez, if you're want to impress me, learn to do it right. You alone out of the three of you have data. Actual first-hand accounts available, straight from the patients. Yes, mostly from idiots, probably some Munchhausen's going on, too. But it is precisely the thing we don't have from FDR. His whole chart is missing, and he was locked up tighter than Fort Knox about admitting to anything physically in what we do have from him. So where are all these forum threads? Can you guarantee that you found every last drop in them and that the others or myself wouldn't have come up with anything in addition to what you did?"

Ramirez digested that, still trying to figure out if he was pleased or annoyed with her at the moment. "You want to see the actual replies from the posters?"

"Yes. Go down to the computer lab, all three of you. There were threads started on a few different forums, right?" She nodded. "Each of you take a forum until we cover every place that question was asked. Print them off and bring them back." They were all three still standing there, surprised. "That was a hint that you need to start moving." Ramirez started off first, tentatively hopeful that she had his attention at least. The other two followed. House picked up the two papers on FDR and his coffee cup and limped to his office. Taub returned to his medical journal.

Back at his desk, House checked email quickly. He'd read these two papers when he had a chance, but he wanted to know if he had any more email consult requests. He had had a few earlier this morning waiting for him, which he had already printed. He'd run the egglings through those, too, but Ramirez had him curious. Not a bad idea to revisit those threads, even if nothing came of it.

One new consult request and an email from Thomas. He clicked on the latter first.

Good morning, Greg,

Here are the x-rays from the animal clinic. I also took several pictures of the splint from different angles for you this morning. Feel free to drop by sometime and examine him for yourself.

Hope you got some sleep last night.

OM

Thomas had been signing his emails OM for the last few months. House had thought about changing tags just to keep him off balance and prevent things from settling too much into routine, but he hadn't gotten around to it yet.

He opened the x-ray files. Two x-rays, before and after. He looked at the before, making it full screen. The leg was shattered, and the vet was quite right. This was a torquing mechanism with a hell of a lot of force behind it, definitely a throw, not just a hands-on simple twist. This was the difference between x-rays of House's toes, with the tight twisting fractures from the vise grips up close, and what it might have looked like had John managed somehow to throw him across the room by those same toes. House studied the film for a long minute and then forever discarded the thought that Jet might have been a setup. "Son of a bitch," he growled.

The second x-ray was the shot post repair. Fortunately, though there were several fragments, most of them were large. The vet had done an excellent job, the upper leg and shoulder socket nicely reconstructed and held together. Of course, the hardware would have to be removed fairly quickly, just as soon as the leg was healed enough. Jet was too young and growing too fast to leave it; bone would continue to grow and adapt, while hardware would not. But he should be able to walk, probably even scamper and jump, in a couple of months.

House turned next to the attached pictures. Thomas had done his best to get every possible angle, and House scrolled through, assembling the actual 3-d kitten in his head. A stray paw crept in on several of the shots, swiping at the fingers. Jet clearly had thought that Thomas was trying to play with him, not position him.

House finished viewing the pictures. Then on a whim he attached the two x-rays to a separate email and sent them down to radiology to be printed off on film. He wondered who the first eggling would be to determine that this wasn't a human leg and shoulder. They needed to learn once and for all never to make assumptions.

"Taub," he bellowed. He had left the connecting door open, and he heard Taub's footsteps a moment later. "Go down to radiology and pick up two x-rays I just sent them for printing."

Taub didn't reply, just left. House reread the email from the old man and then skimmed back through the pictures. It really did look like an ingenious device. He'd probably have to stop by the house in the next day or two, whether he wanted to or not. Cuddy would give him a hard time about not returning Thomas' book promptly otherwise. He could see Jet in person then.

Taking a longer swallow of his coffee, he finally opened the last consult request.