Doctor Who / House MD: Bolt from the Blue
(Note: avendya's on holiday and ressie_noldo's ill; direct questions/complaints/complimentary chocolate to me. This ficathon seems to have a curse.)
Title: Bolt From the Blue
Recipient's Name: settiai
Fandom: Doctor Who/House MD
Rating: G
Characters: House, Cameron, Chase, Foreman, Ten
Warnings: Spoilers for S3 of both House MD and Doctor Who
Author's notes: Written for the prompt "Ten, House, unexpected." Set just before the end of S3 for House, and just after for Doctor Who. Thank you to L and M, my lovely betas.
...and unexpected thunderstorms have caused electrical outages across the state. Keep your flashlights handy!
The storm hit late in the afternoon, leaving much of the hospital in darkness once evening fell, as non-essential lights were switched off to reduce the load on the emergency generators. Rain and wind pounded against the walls and windows, but offices and consulting rooms were still and dark. Still, despite the empty corridors, there was an electric atmosphere inside, as though the storm was sweeping through the corridors as vigorously as it was the night sky. In the heart of the main building, where the air was usually sluggish from innumerable passes through filters and coolers, there was a crisp bite to every breath, and even staff at the end of a long shift filled with storm-related crises found an extra ounce of energy in their step.
Doctors Chase and Cameron, however, huddled in the corner of the MRI room, failed to find this excess energy inspiring. No amount of Ativan would sedate their patient if they couldn't get it into her. She prowled around the room, brandishing an IV stand and occasionally snarling at the two bickering doctors. Doctor Foreman was in the control booth, with his back to the glass, negotiating parking privileges with a prospective employer. He'd already been bitten and spat upon enough times in this job.
"She was fine until we put her in the tube." Cameron loaded the syringe and uncapped it. "I took a full history - she didn't report ever experiencing claustrophobia. Or any phobias."
"So, we'll be able to add a new symptom to the board - psychosis." Chase stepped forward, his hands held out in a placating gesture. He raised his voice, and spoke clearly in a soothing voice. "Mrs Higgins, nobody wants to hurt you." He ducked as the metal stand whistled past his head. "This is the third scan you've had this week - you had no problems with the first two. This one will be no different, I promise. Let me help you back in the tube."
"I won't! I can't! I want the endless blackness! I want the open space!" The elderly woman's distorted grimace went slack - snaking around behind the patient, Cameron had snagged the IV line, and injected a sedative. She looked at Chase and mouthed, "Endless blackness?"
Chase shrugged, as perplexed as she was at the transformation of the meek, cat-loving widow into some kind of aggressive beat poet. They assisted the woman, still protesting weakly, onto the central bench, restrained her limbs, and retreated to the control booth.
Foreman cupped his hand over the phone cradled against his shoulder. "Can we get on with this scan now? I have an interview tomorrow, and I'd like to have some preparation time."
Cameron initiated the program and the magnet began to thump its way through the scanning sequence. A rising wail from the central chamber cut through the rhythm of the scan, and Chase flipped the microphone on.
"Everything is fine, Mrs Higgins. Try to remain as still as possible, and we can get the scan over with."
Foreman swiped his hand across the suddenly cloudy observation window. "Is that smoke? Or steam?"
In the MRI room, a shimmering cloud boiled forth from the central chamber. Hands moving swiftly over the keyboard, Foreman hit the emergency stop sequence. As Chase and Cameron dashed into the room, with Foreman not far behind them, Mrs Higgins gave one last dwindling shriek of terror which faded into silence.
"... and Emergency Services continue to warn of danger from electrical surges, fallen powerlines and lightning strikes. Stay tuned for further updates."
Aside from refrigeration, services in the morgue were deemed non-essential, so the dim emergency lighting was all they had with which to examine the body. The stainless steel cabinets hummed and whirred to themselves, each square door gleaming dully in the half-light. House had snaffled the only comfortable chair, and had his feet propped on the edge of Mrs Higgins' gurney with a half-eaten sandwich balanced on his chest.
"It had to be electrocution - equipment failure." Foreman spoke around the penlight in his mouth as he examined Mrs Higgins for scorch marks. "We just need to find the entry and exit point of the current."
Cameron sat on the gurney opposite and flipped through a file. "There's nothing in her history that indicates any form of psychosis or hysteria. Why did she panic?"
Chase was directing the beam from a flashlight onto the films from Mrs Higgins' final scan so that House could view them. "This is crazy - we can't tell how she died until there's a proper autopsy. And they won't be doing anything till the storm is over and there's full power." He turned the beam of light onto House's face. "We should be over in ER, doing something useful."
House squinted into the light. "We could do that." He took the flashlight from Chase's hands and angled the light onto the ceiling, then intersected the beam with the MRI film, scattering spots of light across the roof of the morgue in an eerily familiar pattern. "But wouldn’t you rather find out how the constellation of Orion got inside Mrs Higgins' chest?" He held the flashlight up to his own face. "We can do no more for Mrs Higgins, my children. But rejoice, for we have a new patient, one that not even you can kill."
All three of them looked at him expectantly, and he scowled into the beam of light, a gruesomely illuminated expression. "The MRI! The MRI is sick. Go, fix it."
"… Emergency Services have asked us to remind everyone out there that if your home has suffered electrical damage, it is vital that you wait for qualified professionals to attend. Do not attempt to repair any damaged electrical appliances yourself."
Foreman grumbled all the way back to Radiology. "We're not technicians. An MRI costs millions of dollars. What does he think we're going to do? Flip up the hood and change the oil? All because of some random noise on a scan."
"It wasn't random, though," Chase stopped to feed coins into the vending machine in the empty waiting room. "When it comes down to it, we can only read the MRI scans because the computer system translates the data for us. Maybe there was some kind of interference - like a crossed line in the phone system?" He sipped the murky brown liquid gingerly and winced. "Maybe it's not the only system that's affected by the storm."
The dim light in the waiting room dipped even lower, then a familiar pattern of clunks and thumps began, slightly muffled by the insulated door to the MRI. Cameron pried the door to the control room open and the three of them spilled into the tiny glass-windowed chamber. The computer system was in rest mode, and yet the MRI was cranking its way through a scan routine. In the scanning room, where the MRI was active, a man in a brown pin-striped suit balanced neatly on his toes on the scanning bench, his arm immersed up to the shoulder inside the casing that housed the magnet. His face was unfocussed, looking up at the ceiling, as though he was trying to reach something a long way inside the machinery. For the second time that evening, Foreman hit the emergency stop button. The man was immediately dismayed.
"Oi! Do you mind? I'm in the middle of something really quite technical here."
Foreman switched on the microphone. "Yeah, well, this is a restricted area, and unless you're wearing some kind of lead underwear or something, you've just been irradiated. Who let you in here?"
The man jumped down from the bench and fished in his pocket for a leather wallet. "Oh, I think this will explain everything." He pressed the open wallet against the glass, so that the three of them could see identification from the company that serviced the scanning equipment. "I'm, well, I'm the Doctor, you know. I fix, uh, things." He slipped on a pair of glasses to squint at the ID badges clipped on the white coats behind the glass. "Ah! Doctors! I love it - it's like a convention."
"How did you get here so fast?" Cameron was impressed. "With the storm and everything - we only had the malfunction an hour ago."
The Doctor narrowed his eyes. "Yes, tell me about that." Tucking his glasses away, he sat down on the bench and swung his legs. "I'd really like to know what went wrong with your giant magnet."
"There was an electrical surge, or something like that," Chase was tapping on the keyboard to bring up the last scan. "The MRI picked up some kind of interference, I thought maybe some other data source." He turned the screen around to show the Doctor the dense spread of spheres across the scan of Mrs Higgins' torso.
"Orion! Good old Betelgeuse, up to your old tricks. Oh, well, that makes all the difference, doesn't it?" He pulled his legs up onto the bench, and vanished inside the scanning tube, which began to glow with a blue light. "It's a big star, old Betelgeuse. Unpredictable. Going to go nova one of these days. Gets cranky when other stars make a ruckus, like an old man grumbling about the noise, starts spraying the local kids with the hose."
"There was a solar flare?" Cameron ventured.
"That's right!" His voice drifted encouragingly from inside the tube. "Of course, it wasn't from your star, as such, but the principle is the same." The MRI started up, gave a few tentative clanks, then fell silent. "I wonder if that's a good sign or a bad one?"
"Why would that have any effect on anything?" Foreman looked sceptical. "Solar flares happen all the time - if a patient died in the MRI every time there was a solar flare, we would never have approved this as a medical procedure."
The Doctor scooted out of the tube on his back. "Well, of course, you people would never use a medical procedure that wasn't one hundred percent safe, would you? I mean, you'd never have got past leeches - very scientific that is, whacking a leech onto someone's leg." He jumped off the bench. "Wait a minute, you had a patient in here? When the flare happened?" The easy-going expression had fallen away. "Where would this patient be now?"
"We do use leeches, actually," said Chase. "Post-recovery from microsurgery on amputated limbs." In his pocket, his pager went off.
"Of course we had a patient in there," Foreman pulled the scan back up. "What do you think we were scanning? A sandwich?" He pointed out the shapes that surrounded the constellation. "Heart. Lungs. Ribs." He pulled his pager out and looked at it. It started to bleep. "And the patient is where all deceased patients end up."
"In the morgue," Cameron had one hand on her pager and the other on the door. "It's House. There's something going on at the morgue."
"Sounds like a grim kind of house to me." The Doctor rolled up his sleeves and followed behind.
"…and above all, once you've started CPR, it's vital that you continue until a qualified medical professional instructs you to stop."
They piled through the double doors of the morgue to find the neat rows of gurneys disturbed and the glass-fronted drug cabinet broken. House stood astride the huge steel basin, precariously balanced with one arm wrapped around a light fixture, as he swept his stick at the shambling form of Mrs Higgins, who bumped and batted against the stainless steel edge of the basin like a moth.
"I'm having your medical licenses revoked for failing to correctly diagnose death!" House prodded his stick against Mrs Higgins' chest, pushing her back a few steps, and she turned slowly and awkwardly towards the new arrivals. As her bare feet padded about on the linoleum floor towards them, her toe tag fluttered and spun.
"Keep her distracted, but don't let her bite you!" House spoke with teeth clenched around a syringe. "I don't know what the hell is going on, but I'm guessing that biting would probably be bad," He started to clamber down from the basin, hissing with pain every time he put weight on his bad leg.
"Oh, it's not blood-borne, I wouldn't worry about that." The Doctor pushed his way towards the dead woman. "Don't inject her! Whatever it is, it won't do any good. I don't think she's operating under her own steam at the moment."
House uncapped the syringe with his mouth. "What's the worst it can do? Make her more dead?" He spat the plastic cap on the floor and flicked the barrel of the syringe with his nail. "Who the hell is this? Some kind of specialist in the undead? A professor of zombology? Another one of Chase's zany relatives?"
"I've told you, I'm Australian, all right? He's British." Chase and Cameron were crouched down beside the fire hose, unspooling long lines of wide canvas.
Foreman walked a slow and careful circle around Mrs Higgins as she ambled towards the Doctor. "He came to fix the MRI. I don't understand - she's pink. She's perfusing blood - she should be in rigor."
"Oh, magnetism's a wonderful thing." The Doctor reached across a gurney blocking Mrs Higgins' path and took her hand, angling his fingers along her wrist. "Lovely! Eighty beats per minute - she's chugging along like a steam engine. What do you use as a contrast medium for these scans, then? You have to fill them up with something that scintillates, give a nice clear picture of the innards."
Cameron stood up, with yards of hose looped over her arms. "Omniscan. Sometimes Magnevist. We infuse it intravenously before the scan."
The Doctor peered into Mrs Higgins' eyes. "Yeah, but what's in it? What makes it sparkle?"
"Gadolinium," said House. "It's a superconductor. Why?" His eyes were narrowed, but he capped his syringe.
"Chelates of gadolinium, very nice!" The Doctor moved his finger in front of the woman's eyes, watched them tracking slowly. "Give it the right kind of electromagnetic stimulus and what do you get? Paramagnetic stasis!" He gave Mrs Higgins a gentle push on the shoulder and she shuffled slowly towards House.
"She was in stasis?" said Foreman. "Like falling in a frozen lake. It's where we get our protocols for brain surgery now - lower the body temperature, slow down the brain's need for oxygen."
"Except," said House, "We didn't lower her body temperature. But if there was a power surge…" He held Mrs Higgins off with the end of his walking stick. She kept walking, taking slow steps on the spot.
"Yes…" said the Doctor, waggling his fingers to coax more explanation.
"In the presence of a powerful magnet, it could create a kind of neurological EMP."
"Yes!" The Doctor was delighted.
"But you knew that," said House, "And you still wanted to hear me say it."
"Ah, yes?"
"And you're that much of an egotist that you'd let this poor woman suffer while we do clever tricks of deduction for your entertainment?"
"Ah." The Doctor looked a little taken aback.
Foreman glared at House. "Now, there's the pot calling the kettle black."
"You'd know," House snapped back, but it sounded more than a little half-hearted
Chase and Cameron, with the hose stretched out between them, launched an attack on Mrs Higgins' slow moving form, wrapping the canvas material around and around her body from neck to knee, until she could no longer move.
"I guess the real point," said Chase, leaning against a gurney, "Is whether this stasis-thingy is reversible."
"...Emergency Services advise that now is a dangerous time to travel. People, this means stay off the roads until the storm has passed."
They ushered Mrs Higgins down the corridors, shuffling along in her improvised restraints, and she proved pliant enough to allow the younger doctors to ease her body onto the scanning couch, and strap her down. The Doctor and House watched each other from opposite corners of the MRI room as Foreman, Chase and Cameron retreated to the control room.
"Go on then, dazzle us with your inexplicable knowledge." House leaned into his corner and crossed his arms. "You're going to reverse the poles of the magnetic field, and undo the technical whatchamacallit."
The Doctor's gaze was wary. "That's right." He propped one sneaker-clad foot on the bench and scrambled up. Once settled astride the tube, he popped off a panel, and started working with a tool that hummed and glowed blue.
"There used to be a website about a man like you." House watched the Doctor with an unblinking gaze. "He appears in the middle of a terrible crisis, speaks nothing but gibberish, sometimes people die, sometimes people live, and sometimes people disappear, never to be seen again."
"Interesting." The Doctor didn't appear to be interested at all, so engrossed was he in the internal workings of the MRI.
House twirled his walking stick thoughtfully. "That website disappeared a year or so ago. All of those websites went down, pretty much overnight. One thing I do remember, there was a number we supposed to phone - one of those UN type groups. Supposed to protect us from this incredibly dangerous mystery-man."
The Doctor switched his tool off with a click. "Oh, I think you'll find that the phone lines are all down - terrible storm outside." He fixed the panel back on.
"I'm sure someone down in ER has a functioning cell phone." House straightened up. "It'll give me a chance to scope out the blue box that's supposed to be hanging around whenever he appears."
The Doctor slithered to the ground with a neat jump. "It's parked outside on the pavement - too slippery for you, I'd think. You wouldn't want to fall."
House winced unconvincingly. "Oh, lovely! Very tasteful, pick on the crippled guy."
The Doctor grinned. "No, what have you been reading? I have only your best interests at heart." He gave the control room a wave. "That should be right to go now, I think." He turned and watched House. "After you."
"So kind." House made his way into the control room, and prodded Chase to vacate his chair. The Doctor gestured to Foreman. "Exactly the same scan - in reverse." He took the door to the external corridor, and Chase followed him out to the waiting room.
"Aren't you going to wait and see how it goes?" Behind Chase, the MRI began to thump through the scan protocol.
The Doctor screwed up his face. "No, I have faith in your abilities." He turned and walked towards the lobby. "This century is turning out some excellent physicians, really very good." He gave a wave over his shoulder, and vanished through the glass doors.
Chase frowned in confusion, then rejoined his colleagues in the control room, where the scan was almost complete. From inside the MRI tube, small sounds were coming across the mike - Mrs Higgins gave a soft sigh. "Oh, are we finished already? My word, that scan did go fast. I must have fallen asleep."
"It would be interesting to find out what she remembers about the whole thing," Foreman was clicking through the most recent scans. He paused at one image, a cross-section through the chest.
"What is that?" Chase tilted his head to one side. "A double exposure?"
Cameron traced the glowing shapes on the screen with a frown. "A double exposure would mean everything was duplicated, not just the heart. Hearts."
House leaned over and hit the delete key, and the image disappeared. "Look, if you want to dwell on the gruesome details, there's an alien autopsy posted on Youtube. I think you'll like it - there's lots of goo and crunchy noises." He made his way to the door. "Speaking of which, I'll be in the cafeteria."
They waited as his footsteps were no longer audible over the sound of the rain, then Foreman brought the intriguing scan back onto the screen.
"Maybe we should tell him that delete doesn't really mean gone forever," said Cameron.
Chase snorted. "And miss all the fun of pulling porn from his recycle bin? I don't think so."
Title: Bolt From the Blue
Recipient's Name: settiai
Fandom: Doctor Who/House MD
Rating: G
Characters: House, Cameron, Chase, Foreman, Ten
Warnings: Spoilers for S3 of both House MD and Doctor Who
Author's notes: Written for the prompt "Ten, House, unexpected." Set just before the end of S3 for House, and just after for Doctor Who. Thank you to L and M, my lovely betas.
...and unexpected thunderstorms have caused electrical outages across the state. Keep your flashlights handy!
The storm hit late in the afternoon, leaving much of the hospital in darkness once evening fell, as non-essential lights were switched off to reduce the load on the emergency generators. Rain and wind pounded against the walls and windows, but offices and consulting rooms were still and dark. Still, despite the empty corridors, there was an electric atmosphere inside, as though the storm was sweeping through the corridors as vigorously as it was the night sky. In the heart of the main building, where the air was usually sluggish from innumerable passes through filters and coolers, there was a crisp bite to every breath, and even staff at the end of a long shift filled with storm-related crises found an extra ounce of energy in their step.
Doctors Chase and Cameron, however, huddled in the corner of the MRI room, failed to find this excess energy inspiring. No amount of Ativan would sedate their patient if they couldn't get it into her. She prowled around the room, brandishing an IV stand and occasionally snarling at the two bickering doctors. Doctor Foreman was in the control booth, with his back to the glass, negotiating parking privileges with a prospective employer. He'd already been bitten and spat upon enough times in this job.
"She was fine until we put her in the tube." Cameron loaded the syringe and uncapped it. "I took a full history - she didn't report ever experiencing claustrophobia. Or any phobias."
"So, we'll be able to add a new symptom to the board - psychosis." Chase stepped forward, his hands held out in a placating gesture. He raised his voice, and spoke clearly in a soothing voice. "Mrs Higgins, nobody wants to hurt you." He ducked as the metal stand whistled past his head. "This is the third scan you've had this week - you had no problems with the first two. This one will be no different, I promise. Let me help you back in the tube."
"I won't! I can't! I want the endless blackness! I want the open space!" The elderly woman's distorted grimace went slack - snaking around behind the patient, Cameron had snagged the IV line, and injected a sedative. She looked at Chase and mouthed, "Endless blackness?"
Chase shrugged, as perplexed as she was at the transformation of the meek, cat-loving widow into some kind of aggressive beat poet. They assisted the woman, still protesting weakly, onto the central bench, restrained her limbs, and retreated to the control booth.
Foreman cupped his hand over the phone cradled against his shoulder. "Can we get on with this scan now? I have an interview tomorrow, and I'd like to have some preparation time."
Cameron initiated the program and the magnet began to thump its way through the scanning sequence. A rising wail from the central chamber cut through the rhythm of the scan, and Chase flipped the microphone on.
"Everything is fine, Mrs Higgins. Try to remain as still as possible, and we can get the scan over with."
Foreman swiped his hand across the suddenly cloudy observation window. "Is that smoke? Or steam?"
In the MRI room, a shimmering cloud boiled forth from the central chamber. Hands moving swiftly over the keyboard, Foreman hit the emergency stop sequence. As Chase and Cameron dashed into the room, with Foreman not far behind them, Mrs Higgins gave one last dwindling shriek of terror which faded into silence.
"... and Emergency Services continue to warn of danger from electrical surges, fallen powerlines and lightning strikes. Stay tuned for further updates."
Aside from refrigeration, services in the morgue were deemed non-essential, so the dim emergency lighting was all they had with which to examine the body. The stainless steel cabinets hummed and whirred to themselves, each square door gleaming dully in the half-light. House had snaffled the only comfortable chair, and had his feet propped on the edge of Mrs Higgins' gurney with a half-eaten sandwich balanced on his chest.
"It had to be electrocution - equipment failure." Foreman spoke around the penlight in his mouth as he examined Mrs Higgins for scorch marks. "We just need to find the entry and exit point of the current."
Cameron sat on the gurney opposite and flipped through a file. "There's nothing in her history that indicates any form of psychosis or hysteria. Why did she panic?"
Chase was directing the beam from a flashlight onto the films from Mrs Higgins' final scan so that House could view them. "This is crazy - we can't tell how she died until there's a proper autopsy. And they won't be doing anything till the storm is over and there's full power." He turned the beam of light onto House's face. "We should be over in ER, doing something useful."
House squinted into the light. "We could do that." He took the flashlight from Chase's hands and angled the light onto the ceiling, then intersected the beam with the MRI film, scattering spots of light across the roof of the morgue in an eerily familiar pattern. "But wouldn’t you rather find out how the constellation of Orion got inside Mrs Higgins' chest?" He held the flashlight up to his own face. "We can do no more for Mrs Higgins, my children. But rejoice, for we have a new patient, one that not even you can kill."
All three of them looked at him expectantly, and he scowled into the beam of light, a gruesomely illuminated expression. "The MRI! The MRI is sick. Go, fix it."
"… Emergency Services have asked us to remind everyone out there that if your home has suffered electrical damage, it is vital that you wait for qualified professionals to attend. Do not attempt to repair any damaged electrical appliances yourself."
Foreman grumbled all the way back to Radiology. "We're not technicians. An MRI costs millions of dollars. What does he think we're going to do? Flip up the hood and change the oil? All because of some random noise on a scan."
"It wasn't random, though," Chase stopped to feed coins into the vending machine in the empty waiting room. "When it comes down to it, we can only read the MRI scans because the computer system translates the data for us. Maybe there was some kind of interference - like a crossed line in the phone system?" He sipped the murky brown liquid gingerly and winced. "Maybe it's not the only system that's affected by the storm."
The dim light in the waiting room dipped even lower, then a familiar pattern of clunks and thumps began, slightly muffled by the insulated door to the MRI. Cameron pried the door to the control room open and the three of them spilled into the tiny glass-windowed chamber. The computer system was in rest mode, and yet the MRI was cranking its way through a scan routine. In the scanning room, where the MRI was active, a man in a brown pin-striped suit balanced neatly on his toes on the scanning bench, his arm immersed up to the shoulder inside the casing that housed the magnet. His face was unfocussed, looking up at the ceiling, as though he was trying to reach something a long way inside the machinery. For the second time that evening, Foreman hit the emergency stop button. The man was immediately dismayed.
"Oi! Do you mind? I'm in the middle of something really quite technical here."
Foreman switched on the microphone. "Yeah, well, this is a restricted area, and unless you're wearing some kind of lead underwear or something, you've just been irradiated. Who let you in here?"
The man jumped down from the bench and fished in his pocket for a leather wallet. "Oh, I think this will explain everything." He pressed the open wallet against the glass, so that the three of them could see identification from the company that serviced the scanning equipment. "I'm, well, I'm the Doctor, you know. I fix, uh, things." He slipped on a pair of glasses to squint at the ID badges clipped on the white coats behind the glass. "Ah! Doctors! I love it - it's like a convention."
"How did you get here so fast?" Cameron was impressed. "With the storm and everything - we only had the malfunction an hour ago."
The Doctor narrowed his eyes. "Yes, tell me about that." Tucking his glasses away, he sat down on the bench and swung his legs. "I'd really like to know what went wrong with your giant magnet."
"There was an electrical surge, or something like that," Chase was tapping on the keyboard to bring up the last scan. "The MRI picked up some kind of interference, I thought maybe some other data source." He turned the screen around to show the Doctor the dense spread of spheres across the scan of Mrs Higgins' torso.
"Orion! Good old Betelgeuse, up to your old tricks. Oh, well, that makes all the difference, doesn't it?" He pulled his legs up onto the bench, and vanished inside the scanning tube, which began to glow with a blue light. "It's a big star, old Betelgeuse. Unpredictable. Going to go nova one of these days. Gets cranky when other stars make a ruckus, like an old man grumbling about the noise, starts spraying the local kids with the hose."
"There was a solar flare?" Cameron ventured.
"That's right!" His voice drifted encouragingly from inside the tube. "Of course, it wasn't from your star, as such, but the principle is the same." The MRI started up, gave a few tentative clanks, then fell silent. "I wonder if that's a good sign or a bad one?"
"Why would that have any effect on anything?" Foreman looked sceptical. "Solar flares happen all the time - if a patient died in the MRI every time there was a solar flare, we would never have approved this as a medical procedure."
The Doctor scooted out of the tube on his back. "Well, of course, you people would never use a medical procedure that wasn't one hundred percent safe, would you? I mean, you'd never have got past leeches - very scientific that is, whacking a leech onto someone's leg." He jumped off the bench. "Wait a minute, you had a patient in here? When the flare happened?" The easy-going expression had fallen away. "Where would this patient be now?"
"We do use leeches, actually," said Chase. "Post-recovery from microsurgery on amputated limbs." In his pocket, his pager went off.
"Of course we had a patient in there," Foreman pulled the scan back up. "What do you think we were scanning? A sandwich?" He pointed out the shapes that surrounded the constellation. "Heart. Lungs. Ribs." He pulled his pager out and looked at it. It started to bleep. "And the patient is where all deceased patients end up."
"In the morgue," Cameron had one hand on her pager and the other on the door. "It's House. There's something going on at the morgue."
"Sounds like a grim kind of house to me." The Doctor rolled up his sleeves and followed behind.
"…and above all, once you've started CPR, it's vital that you continue until a qualified medical professional instructs you to stop."
They piled through the double doors of the morgue to find the neat rows of gurneys disturbed and the glass-fronted drug cabinet broken. House stood astride the huge steel basin, precariously balanced with one arm wrapped around a light fixture, as he swept his stick at the shambling form of Mrs Higgins, who bumped and batted against the stainless steel edge of the basin like a moth.
"I'm having your medical licenses revoked for failing to correctly diagnose death!" House prodded his stick against Mrs Higgins' chest, pushing her back a few steps, and she turned slowly and awkwardly towards the new arrivals. As her bare feet padded about on the linoleum floor towards them, her toe tag fluttered and spun.
"Keep her distracted, but don't let her bite you!" House spoke with teeth clenched around a syringe. "I don't know what the hell is going on, but I'm guessing that biting would probably be bad," He started to clamber down from the basin, hissing with pain every time he put weight on his bad leg.
"Oh, it's not blood-borne, I wouldn't worry about that." The Doctor pushed his way towards the dead woman. "Don't inject her! Whatever it is, it won't do any good. I don't think she's operating under her own steam at the moment."
House uncapped the syringe with his mouth. "What's the worst it can do? Make her more dead?" He spat the plastic cap on the floor and flicked the barrel of the syringe with his nail. "Who the hell is this? Some kind of specialist in the undead? A professor of zombology? Another one of Chase's zany relatives?"
"I've told you, I'm Australian, all right? He's British." Chase and Cameron were crouched down beside the fire hose, unspooling long lines of wide canvas.
Foreman walked a slow and careful circle around Mrs Higgins as she ambled towards the Doctor. "He came to fix the MRI. I don't understand - she's pink. She's perfusing blood - she should be in rigor."
"Oh, magnetism's a wonderful thing." The Doctor reached across a gurney blocking Mrs Higgins' path and took her hand, angling his fingers along her wrist. "Lovely! Eighty beats per minute - she's chugging along like a steam engine. What do you use as a contrast medium for these scans, then? You have to fill them up with something that scintillates, give a nice clear picture of the innards."
Cameron stood up, with yards of hose looped over her arms. "Omniscan. Sometimes Magnevist. We infuse it intravenously before the scan."
The Doctor peered into Mrs Higgins' eyes. "Yeah, but what's in it? What makes it sparkle?"
"Gadolinium," said House. "It's a superconductor. Why?" His eyes were narrowed, but he capped his syringe.
"Chelates of gadolinium, very nice!" The Doctor moved his finger in front of the woman's eyes, watched them tracking slowly. "Give it the right kind of electromagnetic stimulus and what do you get? Paramagnetic stasis!" He gave Mrs Higgins a gentle push on the shoulder and she shuffled slowly towards House.
"She was in stasis?" said Foreman. "Like falling in a frozen lake. It's where we get our protocols for brain surgery now - lower the body temperature, slow down the brain's need for oxygen."
"Except," said House, "We didn't lower her body temperature. But if there was a power surge…" He held Mrs Higgins off with the end of his walking stick. She kept walking, taking slow steps on the spot.
"Yes…" said the Doctor, waggling his fingers to coax more explanation.
"In the presence of a powerful magnet, it could create a kind of neurological EMP."
"Yes!" The Doctor was delighted.
"But you knew that," said House, "And you still wanted to hear me say it."
"Ah, yes?"
"And you're that much of an egotist that you'd let this poor woman suffer while we do clever tricks of deduction for your entertainment?"
"Ah." The Doctor looked a little taken aback.
Foreman glared at House. "Now, there's the pot calling the kettle black."
"You'd know," House snapped back, but it sounded more than a little half-hearted
Chase and Cameron, with the hose stretched out between them, launched an attack on Mrs Higgins' slow moving form, wrapping the canvas material around and around her body from neck to knee, until she could no longer move.
"I guess the real point," said Chase, leaning against a gurney, "Is whether this stasis-thingy is reversible."
"...Emergency Services advise that now is a dangerous time to travel. People, this means stay off the roads until the storm has passed."
They ushered Mrs Higgins down the corridors, shuffling along in her improvised restraints, and she proved pliant enough to allow the younger doctors to ease her body onto the scanning couch, and strap her down. The Doctor and House watched each other from opposite corners of the MRI room as Foreman, Chase and Cameron retreated to the control room.
"Go on then, dazzle us with your inexplicable knowledge." House leaned into his corner and crossed his arms. "You're going to reverse the poles of the magnetic field, and undo the technical whatchamacallit."
The Doctor's gaze was wary. "That's right." He propped one sneaker-clad foot on the bench and scrambled up. Once settled astride the tube, he popped off a panel, and started working with a tool that hummed and glowed blue.
"There used to be a website about a man like you." House watched the Doctor with an unblinking gaze. "He appears in the middle of a terrible crisis, speaks nothing but gibberish, sometimes people die, sometimes people live, and sometimes people disappear, never to be seen again."
"Interesting." The Doctor didn't appear to be interested at all, so engrossed was he in the internal workings of the MRI.
House twirled his walking stick thoughtfully. "That website disappeared a year or so ago. All of those websites went down, pretty much overnight. One thing I do remember, there was a number we supposed to phone - one of those UN type groups. Supposed to protect us from this incredibly dangerous mystery-man."
The Doctor switched his tool off with a click. "Oh, I think you'll find that the phone lines are all down - terrible storm outside." He fixed the panel back on.
"I'm sure someone down in ER has a functioning cell phone." House straightened up. "It'll give me a chance to scope out the blue box that's supposed to be hanging around whenever he appears."
The Doctor slithered to the ground with a neat jump. "It's parked outside on the pavement - too slippery for you, I'd think. You wouldn't want to fall."
House winced unconvincingly. "Oh, lovely! Very tasteful, pick on the crippled guy."
The Doctor grinned. "No, what have you been reading? I have only your best interests at heart." He gave the control room a wave. "That should be right to go now, I think." He turned and watched House. "After you."
"So kind." House made his way into the control room, and prodded Chase to vacate his chair. The Doctor gestured to Foreman. "Exactly the same scan - in reverse." He took the door to the external corridor, and Chase followed him out to the waiting room.
"Aren't you going to wait and see how it goes?" Behind Chase, the MRI began to thump through the scan protocol.
The Doctor screwed up his face. "No, I have faith in your abilities." He turned and walked towards the lobby. "This century is turning out some excellent physicians, really very good." He gave a wave over his shoulder, and vanished through the glass doors.
Chase frowned in confusion, then rejoined his colleagues in the control room, where the scan was almost complete. From inside the MRI tube, small sounds were coming across the mike - Mrs Higgins gave a soft sigh. "Oh, are we finished already? My word, that scan did go fast. I must have fallen asleep."
"It would be interesting to find out what she remembers about the whole thing," Foreman was clicking through the most recent scans. He paused at one image, a cross-section through the chest.
"What is that?" Chase tilted his head to one side. "A double exposure?"
Cameron traced the glowing shapes on the screen with a frown. "A double exposure would mean everything was duplicated, not just the heart. Hearts."
House leaned over and hit the delete key, and the image disappeared. "Look, if you want to dwell on the gruesome details, there's an alien autopsy posted on Youtube. I think you'll like it - there's lots of goo and crunchy noises." He made his way to the door. "Speaking of which, I'll be in the cafeteria."
They waited as his footsteps were no longer audible over the sound of the rain, then Foreman brought the intriguing scan back onto the screen.
"Maybe we should tell him that delete doesn't really mean gone forever," said Cameron.
Chase snorted. "And miss all the fun of pulling porn from his recycle bin? I don't think so."