This really, really sucks. Rachel swallowed thickly, tongue a slab in her mouth. Water would be good.

At least the hospital room was nice, even if whoever decided to make one wall completely glass ought to really experience what it was like to have to strip down with just a set of flimsy blinds for privacy. Whatever moron designed this ought to be shot. Seriously.

Her internal rand didn't quite distract her from the tiny, pinching pain of the IV needle; this was the third time she'd been stuck today, and she'd only been in the hospital for two hours. A good half-hour of that had been spent getting the most carefully thorough scrubbing of her life. The cold slide of metal, inside her arm, was creepily uncomfortable. Rachel couldn't pull her eyes away for a long moment. "What's this for?"

Another doctor had stopped by earlier, taking blood and giving her a cup to pee in, and sticking a needle in one of her blisters to collect some of the puss, which was just gross. He was going to be back to do an allergy test, he’d told them, but he hadn't shown up yet.

"You're losing a lot of fluid from these blisters." The woman doctor - Dr. Cameron - had a pleasant voice and a nice smile. Gloved fingers were gently turning Rachel's arm as she examined the seeping protrusions. "We're just making sure you don't get dehydrated. We're also putting you on medications to treat Childhood Linear IgA Disease."

Say what now? Not surprisingly, Rachel had never heard of it. "So that's what you think I have?"

Dr. Cameron nodded, sticking a needle into a bit of hard plastic that joined into the flexible IV tubing. "It's one of the possibilities we're exploring, yes."

"What does that mean?" Mom was sitting in a chair along the wall, purse clutched ion her lap and both feet tapping back-and-forth on the floor.

God, here we go again. "The doctors know what they're doing, Mom," she hissed. As if she wasn't enough of a freak already, everywhere they went her mother insisted on making a scene.

"I'm just asking a question, Rache. Am I not allowed to do that?" Her mother's face was perfectly composed, brown eyes serious under a shock of dark hair that Mom joked Rachel was turning gray. Her face had a summer glow to it from the tanning salon; it was too early in the year for a real tan. Plus the weather's been crappy lately.

Sometimes Rachel hated her, just a little.

"Aggggghhhhhhh!" The teen turned her head away. "Everywhere we go you do this. God, can't you just back off, already?" Not a chance. No matter what she did, her mom was still embarrassing.

Dr. Cameron's voice was careful. "Linear IgA disease is an autoimmune disorder. Basically, your immune system gets confused, starts attacking your body."

Rachel scraped a black-painted nail over the bed rail. She kept her head turned toward the glass wall, away from her mom. "Why?"

Dr. Cameron was checking the machine that was attached to her IV. "Usually, it's genetic, though sometimes the symptoms are the result of an allergy. But there are a whole lot of other things that can cause blisters. Bedbugs, for one."

"Bedbugs? Seriously?" Rachel almost laughed, but made the mistake of shifting her legs against the sheets to find a more comfortable position. The tender, slightly painful sensation that roared awake all along her skin had her stifling a wince instead. "This would have to be a lot of bedbugs. Mom makes me chance the sheets pretty often."

"I keep the house clean." Mom was frowning.

Didn't Rachel know it. You mean I keep it clean. It wasn't like she didn't get an allowance out of it, because she did, but it was still really annoying to wake up every Saturday and have to vacuum as soon as she rolled out of bed.

"It's not likely," Dr. Cameron smiled. "The treatments we're giving you generally sort everything out pretty fast. You'll clear up in no time."

"Good," Rachel nodded sharply. She didn't particularly love school, but it was better than being stuck home - or in the hospital - with Mom fussing at her.

There were a few shifting and clicking noises as the doctor adjusted the equipment Rachel was hooked up to. More than I need just for my skin acting up again. There was something she recognized as a heart monitor from watching too much General Hospital, but the squiggly lines tracing in red and yellow below the one that matched every beat of her heart were beyond her. There was another plastic box on the IV pole, and it beeped loudly as she bent her arm and the tubing twisted. That's . . . really freakin' obnoxious. Rachel scowled, tugging it straight.

"Dr. Cameron?" her mom stopped the doctor just as she was about to leave. "I just have a quick question."

Rachel sighed, loudly. Right. A quick question. Hope you don't have anything to do for the next hour or so. It was going to be more of the same, 'medications', 'side effects', 'do you really know what's going on with my daughter', blah blah blah. She really didn't need to hear this. "Take it outside," Rachel advised, voice raised enough to carry across the room and probably a little into the hallway beyond. "I'm gonna read." She held up her book.

Fourteen pages later there was a tapping on the glass door.

Rachel looked up. Oh. Wow. Maybe there were some perks to being stuck in the hospital after all.

"Hi, Rachel. I'm Dr. Chase," said the hunk that had just walked into her room.

Australian accent, Rachel stared. After a few minutes of silence, she remembered her manners. Oh, God. Could I be any more of a dork?! "Nice to meet you," she blurted. Really, really nice.

The eyes that met hers were a bright blue, and didn't flinch at too-pale skin and white hair on someone who wasn't even old enough to vote. Rachel looked away, fighting not to blush and losing as she felt her face heat.

"Alright. How are you feeling?"

"Okay," she mumbled. "Dr. Cameron just gave me the medicine."

"Yeah, we expect it to take a bit for the medication to work. Not too long, though." He pulled up a chair from the wall, and sat right by her bed. Rachel snuck a glance as he settled himself, clipboard in hand.

Dr. Chase's hair was longer than hers, and he shook it away from his face before continuing. "I'm gonna take a patient history, okay? I wanted to let you know that anything you tell me stays confidential. The only other people who find out about it are Dr. Cameron, Dr. Foreman, and Dr. House, who're all working on your case. We won't even tell your mom, if you want."

She crunched a bit of blanket between her fingers, still unable to look at him directly. "Don't you have to - tell my mom, I mean? I'm a minor."

"Well, you can't get married," Dr. Chase smiled, but the expression quickly faded into seriousness, "or have an abortion without parental knowledge and consent in the state of New Jersey. But we need to know everything we can, so we can make sure we know exactly why you're sick. And generally if we want you to tell us, you have to trust that we won't run and tattle if you do."

"I'm not pregnant," Rachel assured him.

"You're not sexually active?"

He didn't mean anything by it, but still. Rachel laughed bitterly. "I've never even had a boy ask me to dance. Look at me." She was horribly conscious of the huge blisters on her face and the backs of her hands and arms. Dr. Chase's eyes went from short, spiked white hair down the length of her thin, gangly, flat-chested body.

"It's not so bad," he said softly.

He probably saw worse, saw people dying, every day.

"I know," Rachel closed her eyes. She was one of the lucky ones, she was. Her eyes weren't red, and she didn't need intense glasses or surgery to fix her vision. "But I'm not - pretty, like the other girls in my class. I'm not normal. And none of the really nice boys want to date me." Because everyone will laugh at them. "Because I'm . . . different. And the ones who say they don't care about it want to brag that they got the freak to give it up. They're all druggies and losers anyway."

Last year. She'd been one row of lockers over, and heard a bunch of guys from her PE class debating the physical assets of the girls they'd want most to bang. She'd been lucky enough to hear about the bet they'd started beforehand, so she knew exactly what was going on when the first one had approached her, asked her if she wanted to go to Rita's for a slurpee. She'd said no, and told him to tell his friends to go to hell.

Then she'd taken her allowance, gone to the hairdresser after school, and gotten her waist-length hair chopped off. Her parents had flipped, and Rachel had told them about the bet. It had been a bad month.

"Give it some time," the doctor advised gently.

Right. Time. Rachel looked away.

There was a shuffling noise as Dr. Chase messed with the papers on his clipboard. His question, when it came, was businesslike. "Do you wear makeup? Anything that might irritate your skin?"

"No," Rachel shook her head. "Just nail polish and some lipstick. Sometimes eye shadow, but only a little bit. There's a line between Goth and slut, y'know?"

Dr. Chase's head turned toward the tangle of black cotton and leather, with the occasionally gleaming silver stud, which Rachel had tossed at the foot of her bed when she'd undressed. Surprisingly, he smiled. "Goth, huh?"

She shrugged, pulling the flimsy hospital gown closer. "People always stare at me, y'know? When I try and dress like everybody else. The skin, the hair, the eyes - I'm a freak. I thought they always would. But this way, - they see all the black, and the nail polish and everything else, and think it's makeup and dye and contacts. And . . . then they don't actually see _me_, y'know? They see some emo teen with anger issues. Half the time they don't even look." It works for me.

"Protective coloring," Dr. Chase nodded. "People think you dress like that to make them look, to get a reaction. So they don't. Smart."

Her parents hadn't seen it that way. Rachel smiled, blushing. "Thanks."

"What about lotions, skin creams, that sort of thing? Your tile says you've been seeing Dr. Tresler for the past few years?"

Moles, sunburn, sensitive skin, cellulite . . . The teen nodded, and started to explain.

"James Wilson."

The person on the other end of the phone line cleared their throat, then spoke. "James, it's me."

"Julie." The oncologist frowned at the rain pounding down on his balcony; something sounded off. "Is everything all right?"

"I called the lawyer."

He sucked in a breath. Wilson had half-thought that she might, but he hadn't expected it to be so soon. I thought I'd have more time. "What did he -"

"He's started the paperwork."

What? "That's not necessary". We can still salvage this. Wilson gripped the phone tighter, unconsciously leaning forward in his office chair. "I don't think it's gone that far, Julie. There's still time; we can keep this from deteriorating any further."

Every word was terse, clipped. "Can we really?"

"Yes, I-"

"James, I gave Sandman all the details, I promise you. He honestly thinks a divorce is our best option." Julie's voice was surprisingly soft. "At this point, so do I."

Words deserted him.

I thought this time it would be all right. Four years. I thought -

"I know it's a difficult process, and that this is the third time you've had to go through it, but I really do think it's for the best."

“For who?" Wilson asked bleakly. Not for me. Although that wasn't completely true. Julie was trying; they hadn't lived together for six years completely oblivious to one another. But we don't have the same priorities. The nature of their arrangement precluded it. That was in part why he had agreed to it in the first place. I need an objective viewpoint.

But this was jumping the gun.

Rebecca.

Wilson winced at the memory. Maybe Julie wasn't being unreasonable, given his history. But things hadn't ended nearly as disastrously with Bonnie - though that wouldn't be difficult - despite the fact that they too had ended up parting ways.

The barest edge of a sigh caught the receiver on the other end, and traveled to him. "This whole situation is out of control.

Wilson felt rebellion rise up. "How so? I've managed it at the hospital, you're managing it at home. Give it time, and it'll go away; replaced by something more newsworthy.” It shouldn't even take a lot of time. There were more important things going on in the world than the thwarted hold-up of a hospital clinic.

“What about House?" Julie didn't soften the question; it needed to be asked, and Wilson recognized that. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

Because he didn't have an answer. House was notorious for both his driven intelligence and obsessive need to know. Wilson was one of the few people who got to see his playful side, who knew the irrepressible mischief that lived deep in House's heart. He'd been privileged to witness the diagnostician's vast capacity to care, guarded closely by razor-sharp wit and harsh personality. I've gotten him to think, for now. He'll think, then he'll act - somehow - to get more information so he can think, discover, more. There was no predicting House's thoughts or actions beyond knowing generally how he operated. No knowing when or how or even who or where.

"Look, James." Julie had always been good at accurately reading his silences. "I respect that you need to protect -”

She was missing the point. Wilson gritted his teeth. "Julie, he had a gun. He was in arm's reach. If House hadn't distracted him, he probably would have shot me. I know you don't like House, but he tried to save me and came three inches from dying."

Wilson hadn't thought. He'd just seen what was about to happen, and the whole of his mind and body had exploded in pure refusal. No. House!

He hadn't felt anything like that since David.

"And I'm grateful to him for that," she said. The kicker was that she was actually sincere about it. "I am. But it doesn't negate the fact that he's going to be a problem."

Gregory House, diagnostic genius who excelled at puzzles, who was more curious than a litter of kittens, and who was the only person who had known Wilson long enough to have a chance at figuring it all out.

"And your solution is just to wipe the slate clean? Start from scratch?" Wilson, for the first time in a long time, didn't want to. "No. I can't accept that that's the only way."

“James, we can only help you as long as you let us," Julie reminded him.

He fought back the urge to stand and pace. The phone was on a short cord - he wouldn't get very far. "I know."

"And if you don't let us, it's a breach of your agreement," Julie continued inexorably. "We won't be able to continue expending resources on David."

And Wilson's life in Princeton would be over anyway. I still lose.

"I know!" Wilson took a deep breath, curbing hot emotion. "I know," he whispered. He hadn't foreseen this when he'd made the deal. Hadn't thought that there would be a place, or people, that he wouldn't be able to leave behind - especially if it meant that he could keep David from being another of the Agency's lost statistics.

David's disappearance had ripped a hole in his life. Nothing would ever fill it, but House could make him forget it was there.

“Julie, please - ” Wilson broke off, staring sightlessly at the rain pounding down on his balcony. “Look, can we just try? Please?”

He could almost see her on the other end of the line, short hair in an elegant bob as her head shook in the negative. Nothing about her appearance was ever less than austere and classy. “James -” she sounded sorry, resigned. “Okay. I’ll do what I can.”

Wilson had been in the Game long enough not to put much stock in such a pat answer. I have a little time. Not much, but maybe enough. “Thank you.”

Maybe just enough time to figure out what to do next.

“Someone! Help! Please!”

Screaming was not uncommon in a hospital – but cries for help outside the Emergency Room were rarer, and far more urgent. Foreman darted down the hall, towards the woman he recognized as their patient’s mother.

“What’s wrong?” he called, hoping to reach her before her answer reached him.

“She’s burning up,” Mrs. Espinosa said tearfully, hovering just outside the door to the girl’s room. “She was alright for awhile, and then said she wasn’t feeling well – wanted to take a nap. I can’t wake her up!”

Shit, shit, shit!

The labs had come back; Rachel’s white count was in the basement, which was why Foreman had been making his way to check on her in the first place. If Cameron had already started her on the immunosuppressants – God, they’d killed the kid. Maybe not. She’s only gotten a partial dose of the medication, if we – “Pull her IV now!” he directed the nearest nurse. “We need to get her into a clean room, stat!”

His first glimpse of the patient wasn’t promising; the snarky, irritable teen of only an hour ago was a sweaty, flushed, trembling mess. Her eyes were closed and sunken, her whiter-than-white skin had a worrying red tinge. The hospital gown and sheets were sweaty and twisted, and the entire room stank of fever. I’ve seen worse, the neurologist reminded himself. I’ve seen patients survive worse.

The IV was clamped and removed. Foreman could hear the rushing wheels of a gurney in the hall. Good.

“Please, what’s wrong with -”

“Mrs. Espinosa,” Foreman grabbed the woman’s shoulders, steering her into a corner and out of the way. Cameron might disagree, but the mother wasn’t their patient, and he didn’t have the time to sugar-coat things for her. “Your daughter has a dangerously high fever.” He met dark, tearful eyes, and took a calming breath. She wouldn’t be any use to them in hysterics. “Her immune system is compromised, and we need to get her into a sterile environment now.”

The gurney was hurried into the room, and Foreman looked over his shoulder to see that Chase had arrived, and was directing the nurses to shift the girl for quick transport. Good. The Australian might be a little wacky, and Foreman would never understand whatever was going on between him and Cameron, but the intensivist was at the least a very competent doctor.

“Okay, Rachel, it’ll be alright,” Foreman heard Chase’s voice.

She’s awake? The neurologist turned, surprised, and caught the faintest flash of color from underneath struggling eyelids. Or not.

“M - mommy?”

The woman at his side gave a stifled sob, reaching out for the limp form as the gurney slid past them and out of the room. “Baby?” She was right behind the crowd of people rushing her daughter down the hall. “Mommy’s here, baby, it’s going to be all right.”

Foreman made sure she wasn’t getting in the way of any of the nurses or doctors, and decided to let her be for the moment.

“Temperature’s 104.3 degrees and rising,” Chase called, and everyone was suddenly moving much, much faster.

“Mommeee?!” came the plaintive cry.

Mrs. Espinosa’s hands were gripping the rail, knuckles white, and tears were running down her face. “I’m right here, baby. Right here. It’s gonna be okay, I promise, everything’s going to be fine -”

The teen didn’t hear her, thrashing weakly against the hands placing icepacks at her armpits and groin, continuing to call out. The gurney hit the elevators at a run, and Foreman nodded to Chase. “Cameron will meet you at the clean room. I’ve got this.” He pried the woman’s fingers loose from the gurney, holding her back as she tried to crowd into the overpacked elevator car. “Mrs. Espinosa.”

She pulled free from his hold just as the doors shut and left her standing, directionless, in the hall. The two nurses who hadn’t been able to fit in the elevator car dispersed slowly.

“Mrs. Espinosa -”

“Why didn’t you let me go with her?” their patient’s mother burst out. Heels clicked angrily against linoleum as she paced back towards him, across the deserted hallway. “She’s my daughter, why did you -”

Kids were always the worst. Foreman didn’t hate treating them, he actually managed to get along with them better than with adult patients most of the time. But he hated the way he could never stay uninvolved or detached when he saw a child suffering. He’d gotten a definite kick out of the snarky attitude and blithe aplomb Rachel had displayed on admission. He wanted to hear those amusingly sarcastic quips again, not the fearful cries of a child in pain, begging for protection.

His voice, when he answered her, was softer than he’d like. “Mrs. Espinosa. I’m sorry, but we needed to get your daughter to a sterile environment as quickly as possible. She was delirious with fever, and even though she was calling for you, she wasn’t really conscious. Rachel didn’t know you were there.”

“Why – why is she sick like this?” Mrs. Espinosa was fumbling in her pockets, pulling out a tissue and scrubbing it over her face. Makeup smeared beneath her eyes, but the woman still managed to pin him with a glare. “She just had some blisters! She wasn’t running a fever or throwing up, she didn’t even feel sick! Why is she -”

“She was sick,” Foreman interrupted. “She just wasn’t showing symptoms yet. That’s why I was coming to talk to you. I tested Rachel’s blood, before we gave her any medication at all. Her white blood cell count was very low, which means her immune system wasn’t ready or able to fight off an infection.”

“And that’s what she has now? An infection?” The tissue was crunched into a misshapen ball in one of Mrs. Espinosa’s fists; the woman had her arms crossed protectively over her chest.

“We have to do some tests to determine that,” Foreman kept his tone calm. The woman in front of him was a heartbeat from breaking down or lashing out, and he wanted to avoid both of those scenarios if possible.

The face that turned toward him was incredibly lost; the suave woman who had asked probing questions about his every move, earlier, had been transformed into a distraught mother. “What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with my baby?”

We don’t know. But he wasn’t about to tell her that; there was no better way to lose a patient’s confidence, and Foreman wasn’t willing to admit defeat. “We’re going to find out. Come on. I’ll take you to Rachel.”

“Well, I guess that rules out Linear IgA,” House mused, back to them as he scribbled Fever on the whiteboard. “And autoimmune is off the board.”

There goes poison ivy and spiderbite too. Chase scratched at his collar, tie loose and shirt a little sweaty from the frantic work of depositing Rachel in a clean room. Not that those options were ever really likely. His mind flipped over to their patient, and the ice bath he’d instructed the nurses to put Rachel in as he’d left her, in hopes of getting the fever down.

“Not entirely,” Cameron protested. Her fingers were interlaced, resting on the journals still spread across the glass table, whole body leaning forward toward the whiteboard. “The blisters could still be symptomatic of -”

“No way,” Foreman cut her off. “Autoimmune disorders result from the immune system going haywire and attacking the body. The girl doesn’t even have an immune system at this point. Can’t be an allergy, or contact dermatitis. It’s got to be an infection.”

Cameron’s face was set in stone; Chase kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t just a mistake in diagnosis, it was a mistake that might kill their patient. Giving immune-system suppressants to someone whose immune system was already going down the drain. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t known she had a depleted white count; they should have waited for the test results before giving her any medication at all. There were drawbacks to learning from House; becoming comfortable with discarding regular medical procedure was one of them.

“Foreman’s right. Not that it does us much good.” House was pacing back and forth in front of the whiteboard, marker in one hand. “Antibiotics don’t work without an immune system to work with.”

But there could still be a chance. “We might have gotten her off the Prednisone and Dapsone early enough that if we treat the symptoms aggressively, she could survive the fever,” Chase offered. “It won’t be more than six hours for the medication to clear her system enough that we could see a white count improvement. If the drugs were what tipped her body’s defenses over the edge, she might be able to bounce back enough for antibiotics to get a handle on the infection.” If it’s bacterial, and not viral. If it was viral, they’d know soon enough; Rachel would be dead.

Foreman was shaking his head. “That’s a pretty big ‘if’, Chase.”

“Yeah, but it’s all we’ve got right now,” House cut in. The cane tapped against the carpet; Chase thought he recognized Morse Code, but he’d never bothered to learn it completely. “And we’ve got no time to find out what’s actually making her sick. We’ve got blisters, now fever.” He thumped his way over to the sink, slamming open a cupboard in search of a mug. “What did the tests show?”

“Well, there was no HCG in her blood,” Foreman offered from the doorway.

“Plus the patient was pretty emphatic about not being sexually active.” Chase was immune to the searing skepticism House leveled at him. Everybody lies. Got that the first ten times. “Not that that means anything,” he conceded, just to get his boss directing that obsessive attention somewhere else.

“So no pregnancy,” Cameron murmured. A line slashed through that option on the whiteboard. “I examined her; the blisters were large, filled with fluid – not the result of parasites like fleas or scabies. What about HIV?” she continued.

Foreman shook his head. “Blood test was negative for HIV and AIDS, and her tox screen came back clean.”

“Pure as the driven snow,” House rolled his eyes, sighing in exasperation. “Please. She’s a teenager.”

“So she automatically has to be doing drugs or having sex?” Cameron retorted. Her spine straightened, green eyes narrowing. Sexy. Chase pushed the thought away, but the lines of her body were still enticing.

“Or both. She’s got to be rebelling against authority somehow,” their boss maintained, back to the room. There was a glint of white as House yanked a mug from the cupboard and set it beside their coffeepot.

Chase grinned to himself. “She is.”

All eyes turned his way. “Care to explain that?” House glanced his way, pouring coffee.

“She’s a goth. Black clothes, silver studs, makeup, the works.” Chase laughed a little. “You could tell her mom wasn’t happy about it at all, especially when she cut all her hair off so it was short enough to spike.”

“Huh. Albino going Dark Side,” their boss smiled a little. “Cool.”

Cameron’s mouth pressed into a tight line. Chase bit his lip, and kept his eyes on the whiteboard. She never did like it when House let fact overrule tact. This time at least, she refrained from giving her opinion.

“We need to narrow it down and find out what she’s got before it kills her,” House sipped from his mug, and left it on the counter as he made his way to the balcony door. The rain was coming down again, after the brief break they’d gotten a short while ago. “Blood tests. Cultures, sample everything you can. And pray it’s not viral, or she’s already dead.”

Foreman nodded, hands deep in the pockets of his white lab coat as he headed towards the door. Cameron was half a beat behind the neurologist when an idea hit Chase. “What if it’s the other way around?”

“Explain.” House didn’t turn, still peering out at the rain-soaked brick that made up his balcony wall.

Chase stepped into the middle of the room, left hand at his waist while the other gestured at the symptoms listed on the whiteboard. “We’re assuming here that she has an infection that’s destroying her immune system. What if it’s not? What if it’s something else, and she just caught the first disease she came into contact with?”

That finally got the diagnostician’s attention; House turned. “Oh?”

“Cancer,” Chase said definitively. Cameron and Foreman had paused, listening, as the differential apparently wasn’t complete.

Their boss shook his head. “Nope, no cancer. Tresler already ran it by Wilson."

“For melanoma," Chase pointed out. "If she's got a low white count, her immune system's depressed. Paraneoplastic pemphigoid presents with blistering and usually indicates an underlying Lymphoproliferative disorder.”

“Lymphoma," Cameron breathed. It was a death sentence.

“Two diseases instead of one?” Foreman had never liked that idea, preferring Occam’s Razor whenever possible.

“It’s possible,” Cameron agreed, head bobbing.

“Fine. Biopsy a lymph node,” House ordered. “And find out what infection decided to move in and set up shop, so we can keep her from dying before we figure out if cancer is killing her. Go.”

They went.