Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Yet I still pay renters' insurance. Go figure.
AN: First House fic. Please be gentle. I am still catching up on the episodes, so this may be a bit off-canon, but I did my best to be just to the character. Feedback would be appreciated. Constructive criticism is useful, but I find flames demotivating. (Though, I suppose if you want to flame this, demotivating me would not be a deterrant . . . .) Anyway, thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy it.
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Despite her medical degree, physics had been Cuddy's strongest subject in school—Newtonian in particular. Fma. Inertia. And, of course, Newton's third law—cause and effect.
"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
A seemingly self-evident, yet overly simplistic statement to be a governing law of the universe.
Of course, it wasn't the universe as a whole that she was concerned with at the moment; it was the much more immediate impact of that law on her own microcosm.
She didn't advance to her level in life by underestimating the impact of universal scientific laws on her everyday life. She studied well and graduated second in her class. She exercised and owned all her suits in the same (small) size. She let men (and women) look, but not touch, and capitalized on their distraction.
She had been so close to executing Newton's third truth overwhelmingly in her favor in the balance of her life when it happened.
After years of spotty—at best –correspondence, Cuddy and House were finally working in the same hospital, and their friendship was as competitive and explosive as their Michigan days, when it struck.
She couldn't allow herself to think of it in any other terms. To give it actual descriptors and nouns seemed to give it more power, and more power was not what it needed. It (muscle death, infarction, his freedom, her mind whispered to her) was already poised to smash at least four lives.
And she hated that she would hammer the last nail into the coffin for it.
The fact that she was using her metaphorical hammer in order to prevent the need for a literal coffin registered insomuch only as it allowed her to make the necessary choice, to take the middle ground, to ensure that for her action, he would at least be able to have a reaction.
Even though that reaction would never be kindness from her friend Greg.