[PPTH Walk-In Clinic — December 5, 2004, 2:00 PM]
Clinic duty was purgatory with fluorescent lighting.
Isaac stood in Exam Room 3 listening to a forty-seven-year-old woman describe symptoms she'd clearly Googled before arriving — headaches, fatigue, occasional dizziness, the constellation of complaints that could mean anything from stress to brain cancer and almost always meant the patient needed more sleep and less WebMD. The woman was talking at the speed of anxiety, her hands gesturing in broad arcs that knocked the otoscope off the counter twice.
"—and my sister had a brain tumor, so I've been really worried, and the headaches are mostly on the right side, which I read means—"
"Mrs. Patterson." Isaac picked up the otoscope for the second time. "Can I take a look?"
She stopped talking. Isaac examined her ears, throat, eyes. Standard tools, standard findings. Then, because she'd mentioned headaches and family history, he activated Transparent World for a surface scan.
Two seconds. Quick, shallow, like glancing at a map instead of studying it. Mrs. Patterson's vascular system was healthy — no anomalies, no masses, no evidence of anything more sinister than tension headaches and the kind of chronic stress that lived in the shoulders and manifested in the skull.
"Your exam is normal," Isaac said. "I'd recommend keeping a headache diary — when they happen, how long, what you were doing. If the pattern changes or you develop new symptoms, come back. But based on what I'm seeing, this is most likely tension-related."
"You're sure? Because my sister—"
"I'm sure enough to say that nothing in your exam warrants further testing today. But I'm also sure enough to say that if anything changes, we want to see you again."
Mrs. Patterson left reassured. The visit had taken four minutes. A normal clinic visit for the same complaint would have taken twelve to fifteen — history, exam, discussion, possibly a referral to neurology for the anxiety-driven patients who needed the reassurance of a specialist. Isaac had compressed the process because Transparent World let him rule out the serious stuff in a glance, and the conversation became shorter when the doctor was genuinely confident rather than cautiously hedging.
The next patient was already in the hall. Isaac checked the chart: twenty-three-year-old male, sore throat, three-day duration. He walked into Exam Room 4, shook the young man's hand, and activated the surface scan as he did.
Pharyngeal inflammation. Tonsillar exudates — visible to the naked eye once Isaac looked, but the Transparent World confirmation was instant. Strep. Rapid test to confirm, antibiotics, out the door.
Six minutes.
The third patient was a sixty-year-old with knee pain. Transparent World showed degenerative cartilage — osteoarthritis, bilateral, the kind of thing an X-ray would confirm but that Isaac could see in the joint space, the bone-on-bone grinding visible as a narrowed gap between the femoral and tibial surfaces. Referral to orthopedics, anti-inflammatories, home exercises.
Five minutes.
The fourth patient — chest tightness, anxiety presentation, clean cardiovascular scan via Transparent World — four minutes.
The fifth. The sixth. The seventh.
By 3:30 PM, Isaac had seen eleven patients. The clipboard at the nurses' station tracked his numbers alongside the other doctors on clinic duty. Cameron had seen four in the same period. The resident covering the next exam room had seen three. Isaac's column was more than double anyone else's, and the efficiency gap was widening with every patient.
He didn't notice the problem until the twelfth patient — a woman with a rash that Transparent World identified as contact dermatitis in under a second. Isaac wrote the prescription, handed over the aftercare sheet, and walked back to the nurses' station to pick up the next chart.
The station was quiet. Two nurses were looking at the clipboard. Their expressions were the particular blend of impressed and confused that meant someone had done something unusual enough to warrant conversation.
"Dr. Burke," one of them said. The name tag read NANCY. "You've seen twelve patients in ninety minutes."
Isaac's stomach dropped. Not the Transparent World nausea — the strategic kind. The kind that happened when you realized you'd been performing at a level that attracted attention, and the attention was the one thing you couldn't afford.
"I've had straightforward cases," Isaac said. Casual. Dismissive. "Sore throats and headaches. Nothing complicated."
"Dr. Cho had sore throats too. She's on patient number three."
Isaac shrugged. Picked up the next chart. Walked toward Exam Room 6 with the measured pace of someone who was not hurrying, who had not been hurrying, who was simply efficient and nothing more.
The hallway between the nurses' station and the exam rooms had a glass wall. On the other side of that glass, sitting in the clinic waiting area on a hard plastic chair with a medical journal open on his lap and a look of studied boredom on his face, was Gregory House.
He wasn't a patient. He wasn't on clinic duty — House avoided clinic duty the way other people avoided dentists. He was sitting in the waiting room, reading, and watching.
Isaac couldn't tell how long he'd been there. Five minutes? Thirty? The journal on his lap was open to a middle page, which meant he'd been reading — or pretending to read — for a while. His gaze lifted from the page as Isaac passed the glass. Their eyes met.
House looked at his watch. Then at the clipboard the nurses had been examining. Then back at Isaac.
The expression on his face was the one Isaac had learned to dread — not anger, not suspicion, but interest. The bright, predatory engagement of a man who'd just found a new data point for a puzzle he was already assembling. House's free hand dipped into his jacket pocket and produced the notebook. The pen followed.
Isaac kept walking. Entered Exam Room 6. Closed the door. Sat on the rolling stool and pressed his palms against his thighs until his hands stopped trembling.
Twelve patients in ninety minutes. Twice the rate of any other doctor in the clinic. The kind of efficiency that would get you praised by administration and investigated by anyone paying attention, and House was always, relentlessly, terminally paying attention.
Isaac had gotten careless. The Transparent World made clinic work so easy — a glance, a confirmation, a diagnosis — that he'd slipped into the rhythm of it without tracking the output. Like a pianist playing scales too fast because the fingers knew the way, forgetting that someone in the next room might hear the tempo and wonder.
The patient in Exam Room 6 was a thirty-five-year-old with back pain. Isaac forced himself to slow down. Full history — fifteen minutes. Physical exam — ten minutes. Discussion of findings — eight minutes. A total visit time of thirty-three minutes for a case he could have resolved in five.
The deliberate inefficiency chafed. The man was in pain, and Isaac was stretching the visit to avoid looking too competent. The same calculation as the Dawkins appendicitis — slower treatment, more suffering, better cover. Gerald Dawkins' gray face flashed in his memory, and the guilt from that day settled into the guilt from this one, layering sediment.
He finished with the back pain patient at 4:10 PM. When he stepped into the hallway, House was gone from the waiting room. The plastic chair was empty. The journal he'd been reading — or not reading — was gone.
---
[PPTH Men's Room — 4:15 PM]
Isaac locked himself in the same bathroom stall he'd used on his first day. Sat on the lid. Pressed his palms against his closed eyes.
The stall door was the same beige metal. The graffiti was the same — someone had written DR. CHASE IS AN IDIOT in Sharpie and someone else had added BUT HE'S OUR IDIOT underneath. Isaac had read it on November 15th, panicked and disoriented and wearing a stranger's face, and now he was reading it again on December 5th, panicked for different reasons but in the same body, and the body was starting to feel less like a costume and more like a cage.
Three weeks. Three weeks of calibration, of performing competence within acceptable limits, of managing the gap between what he could do and what he could safely show. Three weeks of House watching him with that notebook, adding data points, assembling a picture that Isaac couldn't see but could feel taking shape.
The clinic had been a mistake. Not the first one — the maternity ward had been a mistake too, and the pilot case before that. Each one small, each one containable, each one adding weight to a file that Isaac couldn't read and couldn't erase.
He pulled out his phone — the Nokia, Burke's phone, the one with fourteen contacts and no personal life. Scrolled to the contact labeled "Mom." Stared at it.
Burke's mother. Whoever she was, wherever she was, she hadn't called in six weeks. The relationship was already distant enough that silence was normal. But silence had limits. Eventually, even a distant mother notices when her son stops answering, stops calling, stops being the specific version of himself that she knew.
Isaac closed the phone. Added it to the list of problems he couldn't solve today.
The bathroom door opened. Footsteps — two people, from the sound of it. Voices carrying.
"—seen him do it. Twelve patients." A male voice, unfamiliar. Probably a resident. "Nancy said he barely touched them. Quick exam, diagnosis, done. Like he already knew what was wrong before he walked in."
"Burke?" Another voice. Also unfamiliar. "The new diagnostics guy?"
"Yeah. House was watching him from the waiting room. Just sitting there with a journal."
"That's creepy."
"That's House."
The voices faded. Faucets ran. The door opened and closed.
Isaac sat in the stall and processed. The clinic speed was already gossip. Two residents, talking in a bathroom, spreading the story of the diagnostics fellow who diagnosed patients like a machine. By tomorrow, the story would reach the nursing staff — if it hadn't already — and from there it would spread through the hospital's informal communication network with the speed and inevitability of the maternity ward infection.
House wouldn't even need his notebook for this one. The hospital would hand him the data for free.
Isaac stood. Washed his hands — the twentieth time today, the skin over his knuckles long past raw and into the territory of chronic irritation. The burn on his index finger had healed in the two weeks since the pizza pan, leaving a thin white line of scar tissue that Burke's body had produced without supernatural assistance. Mystic Palm was still dormant, still locked, still the one power that could have let Isaac help people without leaving evidence.
He dried his hands and looked at his reflection. Burke's face — his face now, the distinction eroding daily — stared back with the particular expression of a man tallying his mistakes and finding the total higher than expected.
Three suspicion escalations. The pilot case. The maternity ward. The clinic speed. Each one a crack in the cover, a gap in the mask, a data point in House's growing file. The deliberate miss and the eidetic memory explanation had bought some cover, but cover was a finite resource. Every perfect diagnosis cost him credibility as a normal doctor. Every impossible observation pushed House closer to the question that had no safe answer.
Isaac left the bathroom and walked toward the elevator. The clinic was behind him — twelve patients, ninety minutes, a productivity record that would live in the hospital's institutional memory long after the specific numbers faded. He couldn't undo it. He could only compensate.
Tomorrow he'd be slower. Tomorrow he'd miss something easy, ask a redundant question, take the scenic route through a differential that Transparent World had already resolved. Tomorrow he'd perform the specific mediocrity that safety required.
The elevator doors opened. Isaac stepped in, pressed the button for the fourth floor, and stood in the small metal box listening to the cable machinery above him — the grinding, mechanical sound of a system under tension, bearing weight it was designed for but never comfortable with.
The doors opened on the diagnostics floor. The conference room was dark. House's office was lit — desk lamp, computer screen, the blue glow of someone working late. Isaac couldn't see what was on the screen from the elevator. Didn't try.
He walked to the conference room, collected his coat, and headed for the parking lot. The Civic started on the second try — the engine was learning to complain about December the way it had complained about November, with slightly more conviction. Isaac pulled out of the lot and drove toward Witherspoon Street.
The rearview mirror showed the hospital shrinking behind him, lit from inside, a building full of glass walls and people who watched through them. House's office window was visible for three blocks before the road curved and the hospital disappeared behind a row of bare-branched trees.
Isaac drove home through empty Princeton streets, and the silence in the car was the loudest thing he'd heard all day.
Author's Note / Promotion: Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers! You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be: 🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site. 👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site. 💎 Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them . No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access. Your support helps me write more . 👉 Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1