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“House, we need to cure this patient,” Chase says from the doorway to House’s office.
“Go away,” House replies from under his desk, his back turned to Chase. “I’m playing with my rat.”
Chase immediately closes his eyes and holds his hands up in surrender. “Look, if this is another one of your weird euphemisms for masturbating, I really have seen your dick enough times this month —”
“Jesus. No. Get your head out of the gutter.” House twists around to look at Chase, and with him come his cupped hands — and the rat sitting in the middle of them. “I’m playing with my rat,” he repeats.
Chase slowly opens his eyes, and almost jumps backwards when he sees the rat that’s currently sniffing at House’s fingernail curiously. “What the hell is that?!” he says, voice high-pitched and shrieky.
“Huh,” House says. “Here I was thinking Foreman was the only brain-damaged one on this team, but…” He trails off, raising his eyebrows and shrugging in a What do I know? kind of gesture.
Chase rolls his eyes and glares at House. “I mean, why the hell do you have a rat in the hospital?”
“So called progressives,” House mutters. “Obviously, little Steve the third here —” he ruffles the rat’s head fur affectionately with his finger — “just spent the morning terrorizing Wilson.” He puts on a baby voice and coos at Steve III, “He shrieks like a girl, doesn’t he? Aww, doesn’t he?”
Chase stares blankly. House pats the rat on the head with his finger.
“Ahem,” Chase says pointedly, and House finally glances up from Steve III. “Our patient has extreme thirst, asthenia—”
House rolls his eyes. “Boring!” he says, and looks back down at Steve III.
“— and fang bites.”
House freezes. He slowly raises his gaze to Chase’s face, eyebrows knitting together. Chase crosses his arms and stares back smugly.
“You mean he’s…?”
“Yep,” Chase says, popping the P.
“…A real-life vampire,” House finishes, voice hushed.
—
“Differential diagnosis for Dracula!” House says as his team members file into the room. He gestures with a flourish to his whiteboard, where he’s written VAMPIRISM above the symptom list in big red letters drawn to look like they’re dripping blood. Foreman rolls his eyes as he takes a seat.
“That bite could’ve come from anywhere,” he says.
“The patient said he doesn’t remember being bitten,” Taub says.
“Everybody lies.”
Taub shrugs.
Foreman raises an eyebrow. “You seriously believe he’s a vampire?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Oh, you just said we shouldn’t eliminate it as a possibility, huh?”
“As much as I’d like to watch this catfight,” House interjects, and Taub and Foreman both glare at him, “our patient is, you know, wasting away. So…”
“It could be diabetes,” Chase suggests.
“He’s not getting hungrier, he’s completely lost his appetite,” Thirteen says, scanning his ER admission form.
“Maybe he has diabetic gastroparesis. That’ll kill your appetite pretty quick.”
“Diabetes doesn’t explain the bite,” Taub says.
“Maybe the guy just got 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂!” Foreman exclaims, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “Like I said, it could’ve come from literally anywhere. We’re wasting our time treating a bite as a symptom.”
“Not a symptom,” Thirteen says. “But a cause, maybe.”
Foreman huffs out a derisive laugh. “What, you think this guy got bit by a vampire, too?”
“No, I don’t. But I don’t think a bite showing up around the same time as his symptoms should be dismissed.”
“Chase, check his blood sugar,” House cuts in, “but Thirteen’s right; we shouldn’t rule out other explanations.”
“Well, he’s definitely not dehydrated,” Taub comments as he flips through the file. “ER gave him —” he whistles, impressed — “five liters in two hours. But his symptoms persisted.”
“What if it’s something with his kidneys?” Thirteen says. “If they’re failing or there’s a cyst blocking something, then they’d have to work harder, and they could accidentally excrete fluid with the effort. And when you’re losing fluids and your body’s working overtime…”
“You get weak and thirsty,” House finishes. He nods approvingly. “Test the blood Chase takes for elevated creatinine. You—” he points to Taub and Foreman with his marker — “check his house for a coffin. Or, you know, anything that could cause kidney failure.”
The two of them nod in unison, and the fellows all get to their feet. Chairs and papers shuffle as they gather up their things and file out of the office, but House pays the noise no mind; he’s too busy staring at their list of symptoms. When the door clicks behind the last duckling, he grabs his cane from the chair he’s leaned it against and limps closer to the whiteboard. He bows his head in thought, but it’s only a few seconds before his eyes drift back upwards to the board. He glares at the list of symptoms, examining them through his eyebrows like he’s giving them a Kubrick stare.
Bite glares back at him, equally menacing.
—
“Mason?” Chase asks from the doorway to the patient’s room, peeking his head in.
At the sound of his voice, the patient, Mason, pauses mid-conversation with a woman in a head kerchief and wheelchair sitting by his bedside and looks to the door. “Oh!” he exclaims. “Dr. Chase! Sorry, I didn’t see you.”
“It’s all good,” Chase replies with an easy smile. He steps into the room, and Thirteen follows after him, wearing a similar comforting smile undermined somewhat by the threatening-looking syringe in her hands. “This is my coworker, Dr. Hadley. She’s just going to take a bit of blood, and then we’ll leave you alone again with your…?”
“Friend,” the woman at his bedside fills in helpfully. “I’m Margot.”
“Nice to meet you,” Chase says with a smile. He hesitates. “Er, forgive me if this is impolite, but…I assume you’re a patient here?”
She nods. “Cancer. Ewing’s sarcoma.”
“I was actually visiting her when the symptoms started,” Mason interjects. “That’s why I was able to get down to the ER so quick.”
Chase hums in acknowledgment, and at his side Thirteen prepares to draw Mason’s blood.
“So, d’you visit here a lot?” Chase asks Mason as Thirteen wipes down his elbow.
“As much as I can,” he says. “Maggie and I have been friends ever since we were ki—ow!”
“Sorry,” Thirteen says, taking the syringe from his arm.
“Since we were kids,” Mason finishes.
“Did anything…out of the ordinary happen during this visit?” Chase asks.
Mason shrugs. “I mean, one of the nurses let me into the oncology lounge to use their vending machine ’cause I wanted a little healthier of a snack. If you’re talking about the bite, I think that’s where I got it.”
“Why do you think that?”
“’Cause when I was just bent down getting our nuts from that little, you know, slot thing, I felt my neck sting really sharply right where my bite is now. And then only a few minutes later I started feeling really thirsty. Like, really. I drank Maggie’s whole pitcher of water, but it still didn’t get any better. And then when I went to go refill it — the pitcher — halfway there I got this, like, overwhelming feeling of exhaustion. At first I thought I was gonna pass out so I sat down, but I wasn’t dizzy at all. But it took me so long to just muster up the energy to stand back up. I felt like all the energy had been sucked right out of me.” Thirteen and Chase exchange a glance, and Mason looks at them with concern. “…Do you guys have any idea why?”
“We have a few theories,” Thirteen says. “Our main one’s kidney failure. Have you felt itchy at all recently?”
“Or had any unexplained weight changes?” Chase adds.
“No,” Mason says. “To both.” He frowns. “…Should I?”
“Not necessarily,” Thirteen says.
He looks at her nervously, and her expression softens.
“Don’t worry, Mason,” she says gently. “We’ll find out what’s going on with you.”
“...Okay,” he replies, but he still looks far from comforted by the statement. Margot reaches out and takes his hand, and he squeezes it weakly. “Um. Thank you, doctors.”
“No problem,” Thirteen says with a smile, and with that Chase nods at her and they leave the room.
“So…you doing anything for Halloween tomorrow?” Chase asks the moment they step into the hallway.
Thirteen gives him a look, and he stares back at her quizzically.
“What?”
“You think we could at least wait until we’re out of earshot to talk about that?” she says. “I mean, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s this thing called professionalism…”
Chase shrugs, and Thirteen rolls her eyes.
“You trained under House. Of course you haven’t.”
Chase makes an indignant noise. “Okay, you’re one to tal—”
“Doctors?”
Chase and Thirteen turn around. The patient’s friend sits in the doorway to his room, hands on her wheels and a panicked expression on her face.
Chase jogs towards her. “What’s wrong?” he asks.
“That itching you asked about?” Margot says, and Chase peeks around the doorframe as Thirteen comes up behind him. Mason looks at the both of them from his bed with a wild expression, scratching frenetically at his arms. “…It’s started.”
—
“It’s official,” Thirteen says, brandishing a lab printout as she enters the outer office. House, standing at the whiteboard, and the rest of the team members turn to look at her. “His kidneys are failing. His creatinine’s through the roof.”
House frowns, capping his marker. “And you didn’t find anything at his place?” he asks Taub.
“Nope. I called his work, too, and no one’s sick there either.”
“Plus, his friend’s immunocompromised, and she isn’t showing any symptoms,” Chase says. “So if it’s any kind of infection, it probably isn’t airborne.”
“So it must be tied to the bite,” House muses.
“Come on,” Foreman says. “There are still plenty of other explanations.”
“We get it!” House says. “You don’t believe in vampires! Well, I know you think you’re smarter than all of us, but, just guessing here, I don’t think anybody actually believes a vampire snuck into the oncology lounge and bit this guy.” He pauses. “Well, maybe Chase does. But being smarter than him isn’t exactly hard.” Chase glares at House, and he continues, “So, I think we’d all appreciate it if you took your head out of your self-righteous ass and actually started considering one of our biggest pieces of evidence.”
Foreman rolls his eyes, but he picks up his file and flicks back through it nonetheless.
“Maybe he got something from a tick?” Chase proposes.
“Yeah, one he picked up in the deep forests of the oncology lounge,” House says dryly.
“I’m just saying, it fits! Both Lyme disease and ehrlichiosis can cause renal failure. And maybe the tick…hopped on his clothes and was lying in wait, or something. I don’t know.”
“What if it’s a spider bite?” Taub says.
“Doesn’t look like one,” Thirteen says.
“It doesn’t look like anything!” Foreman says. “Probably a hundred different animals could’ve bitten this guy and caused the same symptoms. We’re wasting our time throwing —”
Their beepers all go off, and he jumps. Thirteen pulls hers from her coat pocket.
“Shit,” she mutters.
The rest of the fellows get their pagers out as Thirteen gets up and runs towards the patient’s room. The moment they read the message, each follows suit.
When they get to Mason’s room, they find him lying on his bed, gasping for air. His mouth is swollen, his eyes are bulging, and his dinner tray lays discarded on the ground with spaghetti strewn around it. A frantic nurse is at his bedside, pushing epinephrine into his vein.
“What the hell happened?” Chase asks.
“I think he’s having an anaphylactic reaction to his garlic bread,” the nurse says, and the fellows all exchange a look. “But his chart says he doesn’t have any allergies!”
“He didn’t,” House says from the doorway. His team parts to look at him, and he pushes past them to the patient’s bedside. “But I don’t think that’s what we should be most worried about.”
He grabs Mason’s arm and holds it up towards the light, and everyone, including the patient, freezes to stare at it in shock.
It’s yellow.
“This is the skin of a killer, Bella,” House says.
—
The next morning, House is leaning against his whiteboard with his arms crossed awkwardly across his chest. When Foreman, Taub, and Chase enter, he opens them up to reveal the graphic on his tee: TEAM EDWARD and a heart in big block letters.
“Happy Halloween!” he says cheerily. The fellows, all sporting matching eye bags, glare at him.
“Not for the patient,” Foreman says tiredly. “We stopped the allergic reaction, but his liver’s still failing, and none of the PCRs we ran turned up anything.”
House hums in acknowledgment and turns to the board. “So…differential diagnosis for kidney failure, liver failure, and a—”
He’s cut off by the sound of the door opening, and with the rest of his team he turns to look at the source of the noise.
It’s Thirteen, standing in the doorway in an all-black outfit under her lab coat and with a pair of black and green cat ears on top of her head. “Sorry I’m late,” she says, and moves to sit down at the table.
“Nice costume,” Chase comments, amused.
“You are what you eat!” House says cheerfully.
Thirteen rolls her eyes.
“So,” he continues. “Kidney failure, liver failure, sudden allergies, and a mysterious bite. Differential diagnosis.”
Taub drums his fingers in thought for a moment. “…What if it’s cancer?” he says. “If he has a mast cell tumor it could explain having too much histamine, and paraneoplastic syndrome could cause the organ failure.”
House nods. “I’ll ask Wilson.”
“Maybe he really is allergic to garlic, and he just forgot to tell us,” Chase suggests. “Then it could still be an infection.”
“Do you not remember us staying up until midnight running blood tests?” Foreman says. “It’s not an infection.”
“We could have missed something.”
“We didn’t.”
“Run a scratch test on Edward anyway,” House tells them. “I’m gonna go talk to Wilson about Taub’s theory.”
“Shouldn’t we just start treatment?” Taub asks.
“If it is an infection, chemo would kill the guy,” Thirteen says.
“And besides, who would ever start a dangerous treatment without confirming the diagnosis first?” House asks, and with that he limps into his office and over the wall to Wilson’s.
—
“Honeybunches!” House announces as he opens the balcony door to Wilson’s office.
“What?” Wilson snaps, looking up from the referral form on his desk.
House’s eyebrows shoot up. “Woah! Someone’s on their period.”
Wilson sighs. “Sorry, just…busy. I barely got any work done last night.”
“Partying hard?” House asks sarcastically.
He rolls his eyes and stands up. “What is it that you need?”
“Do you think a tumor could cause an anaphylactic reaction?”
“It depends,” Wilson says as he walks to his door.
“Where are you going?”
“…Bathroom,” Wilson replies. “Walk with me.”
House complies. “So, what do you mean, it depends?” he asks as he walks into the hallway alongside Wilson.
“Well, it does. What kind of tumor are you thinking?”
“Mast cell.”
“That definitely could. But if you’re sure it’s cancer, it could also be—”
House’s cane snaps.
He clatters to the floor along with it, and Wilson stops talking abruptly. His closed mouth twitches, clearly trying and failing to hide his amusement.
House huffs and grabs his broken cane as he pushes himself onto his elbows. He turns it in his hands to assess the damage.
The bottom has splintered off above the tip, and a ring of bite marks around the break reveal its cause. House glares up at Wilson. “What are you, a beaver?”
Wilson smiles calmly and shrugs. “I was just giving you a taste of your own medicine,” he says. “…That being mouse bites.”
It dawns on House.
“Help me up,” he says urgently. Wilson stays completely still. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”
Begrudgingly, Wilson holds out his arm, and House grabs on to it as he clambers to his feet. Using the wall to help himself balance, he pulls away from Wilson and hobbles off towards the patient’s room.
“You have lupus,” House says from once he reaches his doorway. The patient looks away from the show he’s watching and to House, confused.
“What?”
“Lupus,” House repeats as he limps into the room and takes a seat on a stool. “It’s an autoimmune condition — your body basically starts attacking itself.”
“Wh— how did I get it?”
“There are a lot of triggers. Given your age and how quickly you deteriorated, you were probably on the verge of it flaring up for the first time. But the bite you got expedited it.”
“But I don’t even know what bit me!” Mason says.
“I do. There was a rat loose in the oncology lounge when you were visiting it.”
“Why the hell does the oncology lounge have a rat loose?”
“…That’s not important. Anyway, the rat bite would have been harmless to almost anyone else. But since your kidneys were probably on the verge of collapse already, they weren’t able to filter out the foreign agents in the rat’s saliva. Instead, your body tried to attack it, and that triggered a full-blown lupus flare-up, which hit your liver and gave you anaphylaxis.”
“A— am I gonna die?”
House shakes his head. “No. Now that we know what caused it, it’s reversible. You’ll be fine.” He pauses. “…As long as you don’t get any more mouse bites.”
—
“Trick or treat,” Wilson says softly.
House looks up at him. It’s the middle of a hospital Halloween party. His team are all costumed and mingling — and, knowing all of them (including Taub), probably flirting — but he’s sitting on a bench in the corner with a can of hard cider, doing what Wilson would call “brooding” and what he would call “looking cool and mysterious.” Wilson’s currently standing in front of him, looking stupidly adorable in his Puck costume. House smirks and moves his taped up cane aside to clear the spot next to him. Wilson takes a seat.
“I heard you solved your case,” he says.
“Apparently it is actually lupus sometimes,” House replies.
Wilson smiles. “Well, congratulations.”
“Couldn’t have done it without you hatecriming me!” House says with fake cheer. Wilson laughs.
“Happy Halloween, House,” he says, looking out at the bustling party.
House stares at him. “Happy Halloween, Wilson.”