(no subject)
Title: Goodness Gracious Me
Fandom: Doctor Who/House MD crossover.
Pairings: Gen
Summary: Rose and the Doctor (Ten) are fresh and glowing from their latest saving-the-world gig when Rose comes over a bit funny and ends up in hospital under the tender, caring wing of House's team. A TARDIS malfunction (yes, one of those, a very rare occurence plotwise I know) leads to House being rather more curious about Rose's popping-up-in-odd-places friend than the actual, y'know, potentially life-threatening illness.
Note: the title does not have anything to do with the comedy show, so people expecting amusing Anglo-Asian hijinks may be disappointed. It's just because the song starts 'Oh doctor, I'm in trouble..'. Also it continues into a confession of heart-palpitating lust for the good doctor, and I know there are lots out there with similar feelings towards Mr Laurie and Mr Tennant.
‘…And let that be a lesson to you to never play with mysterious glowing green objects again!’ the Doctor said sternly to the frightened-looking woman standing next to him, and then he and Rose saved the world. Again.
‘All done, then?’ asked Rose afterwards, sitting down thankfully on a handy wall. Averting a potential catastrophe (for the third time in one week) that could doom the entire human race to, well, doom, could really take it out of a girl, she thought. The Doctor beamed at her.
‘Yep! Medals all round and buns for tea. Ooh, no, hang on a minute, I should probably nip round the corner and give that short fella with the nose his shoes back.’ They looked at the shoes, without which the history of the twenty-first century would almost certainly have involved a lot more in the way of purple alien overlords. ‘Coming?’
It really was a very comfy wall, and Rose was now feeling slightly light-headed; the result, she assumed, of having to hang upside-down for the better part of five minutes in restraints designed for aliens with seven limbs while the Doctor ran around trying to find the ‘Free Rebellious Prisoner’ button.
‘No, you go ahead, I’ll just wait here. You know, look at the nice trees. Enjoy a few moments of not being in life-threatening danger. Put my feet up.’
‘There’s lots of girls’d be very grateful for a quality piece of life-threatening danger like that, Miss Tyler. Normally life-threatening danger is a lot more boring than that.’
‘Go on, go and give the poor man his shoes back.’
‘Right, back in a minute then.’ The Doctor started to walk off, then spun on his heel and pointed one of the shoes warningly at Rose. ‘No wandering off, mind.’
‘Nossir. Yessir,’ said Rose, and saluted.
‘You know, on Galapagostrinius Five that gesture actually means-’
‘Go!’ He went.
Unfortunately, mere seconds after the Doctor disappeared around the corner, Rose’s body chose that exact moment to quietly, and with a minimum of fuss, slide gently off the wall and into a neat heap on the ground. When the Doctor returned in ten minutes, after explaining to the man that while his shoes were now bright pink, they were also now the first shoes to have saved the universe, (so wasn’t that a lot better really, and besides, with that gorgeous colouring he was probably one of the few men who could really pull off pink shoes, no, he wasn’t trying to be funny, yes, he’d just be going) he was very put out to find a definite lack of cheerful blonde travelling companion.
Gentle enquiries on the subject put to the closest native led to an answer of ‘What, the blonde chick that collapsed? They took her to the hospital. Hey, are you from- right, yeah. It’s on the other side of town. Could you let go of my shirt? I kinda have to get to class.’
*
For House it starts yesterday, when he is looming over the nurse on duty and trying to convince her to let him sign off early. Normally he considers this to be a refreshing mid-afternoon mental exercise (far superior to Sudoku), but it has got much less fun since Cuddy taped a copy of his clinic schedule to the counter, went to town with the pink highlighters and told all the nurses they could enforce it by any means necessary. As he bats his eyelashes at the nurse (worth a try, but to no apparent effect-- his mother always told him he had beautiful blue eyes, but apparently she never told the nurse) he does a few mental calculations; two minutes to reach the end of this particular thread of the argument, thirty-two minutes until the end of her shift, two and a half hours since the nearest coffee machine broke down, so he’ll be out of here soon enough to watch his TV show as long as there are no--
‘Excuse me!’
--interruptions. Damn.
‘Excuse me, I think my friend may have been admitted here. Rose Tyler? Blonde, this tall, English, possibly unconscious, about twenty?’
The interruption is skinny and slightly mad looking, with messy brown hair and an accent, and to his irritation the nurse is now checking the admission records instead of paying attention to him.
‘Hey!’ He raps his cane on the top of the counter. ‘It was still my go. I need to sign off.’ The nurse glances up, exasperated, but the other man just looks at him, briefly, and then turns back to the nurse, clearly dismissing House as unimportant.
‘No, I’m sorry.’ The nurse shakes her head. ‘We don’t have any record of-’
‘Great. Wonderful,’ says House. ‘Now can I sign off? Some of us have better things to do with our Thursday afternoons than run around looking for comatose English blondes. I mean, I’ll certainly keep it in mind for Saturday nights, but-’
‘Thursday afternoon?’
House pauses, aggrieved.
‘I had a whole riff coming up there, you know.’ The other man stares straight ahead for a split second, then gives a wordless yelp of frustration and bolts off towards the exit.
House shrugs, and signs off.
*
‘One move. One simple jump, just in space, not in time, was that really too much too ask? Why did you have to- hammer, hammer, where did I put the hammer? -go wandering off to Thursday when I was specifically meant to be in Friday? Was there a reason for that, because as far as I can see it makes absolutely no sense at- oh. Well. Yes. Perhaps I should have pressed that. And not kicked that.’
The TARDIS remained diplomatically silent.
*
It continues on Friday, when House is lurking in an empty sleep lab to eat his lunch (to be picky, it’s actually his best friend’s lunch, which is why he’s lurking, because although it’s really fun when he manages to make Wilson’s voice go all squeaky and flustered, he also stole Chase’s fancy imported yoghurt, and Wilson gets so tedious when he’s on a ‘do not abuse your position of power to get dessert’ kick) and then unfortunately the kids all file into the room, with Cameron waving a file. He’s going to have to think up some new hiding places.
‘We’ve found a-’
‘New case, which is probably going to be pathetically boring. You each have one sentence to convince me otherwise. Go!’ He points at Cameron with his spoon.
‘One of the lab techs I know was telling me about it, it’s got the whole lot of them confused and once I’d looked at the printout I thought-’
‘Too long, too irrelevant.’ He swings round the spoon to Chase. ‘Go!’
‘There’s this- hey, that’s my yoghurt!’ House makes an obnoxious you-got-it-wrong quiz show buzzer sound and points at Foreman, who says smugly,
‘Unconscious Jane Doe admitted early this morning, hasn’t woken up yet, whose test results are all normal apart from a completely unidentifiable substance in her blood.’
‘Which explains the unconsciousness. Weird, yes, interesting, no. Not a diagnostic problem, not my problem. Leave it for the lab techs.’ Cameron and Chase stare at him piteously with their big, pretty eyes. Foreman’s big pretty eyes just do their standard exasperated upwards roll.
‘…She’s young, blonde, and cute?’ Chase offers lamely, and House turns to stare at him, a memory rising from the back of his brain.
‘Is she British?’ he demands. Chase looks put out.
‘She’s unconscious, how am I supposed to know? I don’t have…Commonwealth detector superpowers. Foreman just said she’s a Jane Doe. No ID on her.’
‘…But she did have three ten pound notes in her pockets,’ says Cameron in startled tones, looking up from the file. ‘How did you know?’
‘Not important. Tox screens?’
‘They already-’
‘Redo them.’
‘We’re taking the case then?’ asks Foreman.
‘Oh yes.’
*
So. Second go. Thankfully there was a different nurse on duty, because the Doctor had to admit looked slightly odd for him to be checking daily for unconscious friends. He’d just leaned on the counter and put on his most endearing grin (which, if he said so himself, was pretty damn endearing) when a scruffy man with a cane- the same one he’d seen a few minutes ago yesterday, the Doctor realised-- levered himself out of a nearby chair and said,
‘You. I’ve been waiting for you. Come with me.’ The man turned and walked off without waiting for answer. As summons went it definitely wasn’t the most cryptic the Doctor had ever had, but it still merited a ‘mildly intriguing’ classification. He did need to find Rose though.
‘Not that I’m not always up for a jaunt, but I am trying to find my friend, actually, Mr…?’ he called ahead. The man, who moved surprisingly fast for someone with a cane, stopped and waited for the Doctor to catch up.
‘Doctor. House. We’ve got your friend here. Her condition’s stable.’ Doctor House started off again.
‘And…not much to worry about, she’ll be up and about in no time, you’re taking me to her now and it’s just round the corner, sir?’ This earned him a sardonic sideways glance.
‘No, we are going…here. This’ll do,’ House said, stopping outside a nondescript-looking door. He motioned the Doctor through.
‘Well, this is a nice…cleaning cupboard. What’s wrong with Rose, Doctor House?’
House stepped forward slowly, and reached behind him with his cane to shut the door with a bang.
‘At the moment? I’m thinking poisoning. By you.’
*
It wasn’t her bed. She knew it wasn’t without even opening her eyes, because even though her bed in the TARDIS could occasionally get a bit creative and decide to change shape while she was asleep, she still always knew it was her bed by the comforting now-you-are-home feel of it, and the ever-present hum of engines.
Rose opened her eyes and thought, I am somewhere very very clean. Then she frowned, because her head felt…heavy, and strange, and thinking was like trying to wade through treacle, and the Doctor wasn’t there, where was the Doctor?
‘Where’s the Doctor?’ she said aloud, but it came out more like ‘Wzdr?’ and a woman in a white coat came over to the bed.
‘Oh, you’re awake.’ The woman smiled. She had very white teeth. Rose took a deep breath and asked again, clearly this time. The woman’s smile faltered slightly.
‘…I’m the doctor.’
Rose’s first mad, slow thought was that the Doctor had gone and died again while she wasn’t looking. If it turned out that not only had he regenerated into a woman, but he’d regenerated into a woman several dress sizes smaller than her, they were going to have words, she decided. Then common sense reasserted itself, and the word hospital floated hazily through her mind.
‘Right. Sorry. Meant…my friend. He’s…’ Rose trailed off, finding herself at a loss for words. ‘Never mind.’ Chances were if she needed to describe him, he wasn’t here. Noticeable. That was a word she could have used. Why wasn’t he here?
‘I know you’re probably feeling a bit disorientated at the moment, uh--’
‘Rose.’
‘Rose, but we need to know. Have you taken anything that could be causing your symptoms?’
Rose giggled weakly. That purple cocktail which the Doctor had insisted would do wonders for her skin, but had tasted like a cross between a Mars Bar and nail polish remover? Those weird triangle sweets which burst in your mouth from that rainforest planet? Alien Happy Meal from the future?
‘I…beg your pardon?’ Oh dear, she’d said the last one out loud.
‘Sorry. Er…private joke. I don’t think I’ve…’ What had she been about to say?
‘Rose? Rose, are you still with me?’
‘Nope,’ she murmured, and drifted back into oblivion.