Disclaimer: I don't own House, nor its characters.
Author's Note: I never planned or thought of writing fanfiction--about anything, but after an idea came to me, I started writing and wasn't able to stop. :D
Thanks to Georgina for suggesting I should write something, to Pandorashollow for all the "pushing" ;), and both of you for reading and motivating me to write. :)

Good Coffee

Paperwork.

This was one of those aspects of being a doctor that Cameron did not dream about or even anticipate, and the one aspect that seemed to consume every hour of her working day, and in the case of today, "night—again", she thought as she glanced up at the clock on the dimly lit wall of her chart-littered office. A loud yawn and the stretching of her cramped arms up to the ceiling woke her to the realization that she had been reading the same sentence on a patient's chart for the last fifteen minutes. Her mind finally grasped what her eyes kept combing over. Rosa Mendez: six years old. Caught in a cross-fire between two gangs while playing in her front-yard. The bullet had passed through her left ventricle. Likely dead on the scene, she read as she reviewed the file and set it aside.

She tightly closed her eyes and pressed her knuckles to them. The unwelcome memory flooded her overtaxed senses. A frightened, sobbing man running into the ER, his sweaty desperate face and white t-shirt covered in his daughter's blood as he holds the limp figure in his arms, clearly unaware or in denial that his daughter is already long dead. Unfamiliar with the language or the country he had not known how to call the paramedics. He had run five miles to the hospital. Resuscitation would have been fruitless.

Cameron sighed as she opened her eyes and tried to shake the image from her mind. She pressed on her red eyes once again, and this time only saw chart after chart flashing through her mind. Exasperated, she laid her head on the cool surface of the desk and tried to wipe it of all thought. After her mind had drifted through a series on nonsensical images, it rested on another little girl, her bright eyes smiling up at her. It had been an almost undetectable blood-clot. They had given her another year to live. Then her mind drifted to a pensive, grumpy-looking man lurking in the shadows of his office bouncing an oversized tennis ball and looking intently at a white board, determined to solve the puzzle of the little girl's symptoms. After that, more piles of charts decided to invade her mind, and she opened her eyes in a tired half-smile.

She looked at the clock again. It was 1:15 AM. Another 15 minutes had gone by, and she was slowly losing her mind and getting nothing done in return.

Time for coffee.

She got up and tripped on a foot-long pile of charts, scattering them on the office floor. Being too tired to care she navigated her way around the other piles of papers and charts stacked on the floor and left her office.

Cameron's footsteps echoed lightly as she made her way down the dark, peacefully deserted hallway towards the elevator. At least she wasn't on call tonight, so the only patients she needed to see lay stocked in neat piles patiently awaiting her return. There was a coffee vending machine on the floor of the diagnostics department she remembered, as she pressed the button and watched the doors close.

A knot had formed in her stomach as she stared at that innocent number glowing in the dark. "Why did this keep happening?" she thought, as the elevator slowly rose to her desired destination. The doors opened and she walked out into the familiar, now darkened hall. As she made her way forward, she looked to her left at the deserted conference room, longing for a nice red mug full of some good coffee. Tonight she would have to settle for some second-rate machine coffee in a paper cup.

Her eyes tried to avert what she knew lay ahead, but a soft golden light caught their attention. There he was. She couldn't suppress a smile as she saw him sitting in his chair rubbing that ridiculous tennis ball between his hands; facing that symptom-filled white board. The image was almost identical to the memory that had invaded her mind a few minutes ago. Her eyes followed the light from the lamp until they rested on his pensive, absorbed face. It was during moments like this when she felt he would unknowingly open a window into the person she knew lay within.

The lack of the sound of footsteps startled her as she realized she had stopped. Pushing her line of thoughts aside, she continued to walk away, letting go of the breath she had been holding.

Back in her dark office, Cameron sat slowly working through her charts. The cup of now cold coffee stood on the edge of the desk, abandoned after a few unsatisfying sips. Yet again, she looked at the clock: 3:20AM. Pulling stray bangs back behind her ears, she bent over a chart and positioned her pen on the line reserved for signatures.

The door to her office flew open shooting light from a now lit hall into her eyes; startling her hand into making a heavy black line across the paper she was signing. There was no need to look up.

"What do you want, House?" she wearily asked.

"What!?" House exclaimed in a whining, unconvincingly innocent tone. "Believe me" he continued, "I've spent enough late nights here to know just where the medical waste from this hospital goes, and it's sitting on the edge of your desk" he said, nodding towards her abandoned cup of coffee. She looked up from her ruined chart to see House juggling two store bought coffees while staring with disgust at her own discarded one. One was clearly the largest size the store offered, while the other was clearly the opposite.

"Ok, give it back" she said in a bored voice planting her elbow on the surface of the desk and making a platform with the palm of her hand. "What!?" House identically exclaimed again. "It's a late night, the coffee is crap, give it back" she knowingly ordered as she brought her elbow closer towards him. He responded by rolling his eyes, smiling mischievously and putting the coffees down, took a wallet out of the pocket of his leather jacket and dropped it on her waiting hand. "Let this be a lesson for you:" House sarcastically lectured, "Don't leave your wallet laying around the vending machines unless you want some maniac stalker drooling over naked pictures of Chase." Cameron's lips upturned as she reached for the big coffee cup. Too late, House had anticipated her move and had quickly lifted the cup off the desk and above his head. Cameron grabbed the small one and took a sip. Now this was good coffee.

While she turned her attention back to the charts, House busied himself walking around Cameron's office picking up pens and clicking them repeatedly, upturning books looking for loose papers to fall to the floor, and sniffing the sleeve of her lab coat hanging behind the door.

A sudden ceasing of his fidgeting prompted Cameron to look up. He was standing in the middle of the room staring fixedly at the floor, scratching the back of his head with an index finger. Cameron waited for him to speak.

Sensing the silence of her pen, House also looked up to find a waiting Cameron innocently sipping his big cup of coffee, the half-empty small one now standing on his side of the desk. House sat down in front of it, picking up his now doubly reduced portion.

"28-year-old male, was brought in after suffering a seizure." House said as he took a chart out from underneath his jacket and threw it across the desk to her. "Fever, weakness, vomiting, diarrhea, severe weight loss, back, stomach and leg pain, irritabi—" "well, autoimmune fits" Cameron interrupted. House smiled, "you pick your specialist, you pick your disease."

"Well, look here" she retorted showing him the chart. "it says there's hyperpigmentation on the skin covering her mouth and nose. That's a sign of Addison's, and the rest of the symptoms fit."

"Addison's!?" House exclaimed in mock astonishment. "Wow! You're good! I could have never thought of that! Especially since all the symptoms fit…boy, I wish I was a doctor too—" "I wasn't done you know" Cameron interrupted again, throwing his chart back across the desk; looking down and resuming the tedious task of reviewing and signing. "I'm assuming the first idea you jumped on was infection, seeing that's your specialty. Obviously you would have thought of an Addisonian crisis brought on by an infection considering the patient came in having suffered a seizure probably caused by the temperature of 105. After the blood tests came back normal, and the MRI showed no damage to the adrenal gland, you probably thought to test for Celiac's. When the blood panel and biopsy came back normal, and you had sent your henchmen to test for all the usuals, you brooded in your office for a couple of hours, then went to get vending machine coffee and seeing my wallet there, you decided to really treat yourself, getting me an 6 ounce peace offering so you could burst into my office at 3AM and mock my ideas while making mental notes to write them down on your white board during tomorrow morning's differential." Cameron calmly finished, not looking up from her signing.

House leaned back in his chair with a smile and admired the woman in front of him. After a couple of silent minutes of drinking his small coffee, looking at her golden bangs dangling over her charts and at her pen weaving what he assumed to be loopy, girlish letters, he spoke again.

"Why are you here?" he seriously asked.

"I'm signing charts. Why are you here?" She avoided, not taking her eyes off the papers.

"The patient went into cardiac arrest at 10 PM tonight" House said, ignoring the true intent of her question. "We can't control his tachycardia and his liver has started to fail"

Cameron looked up. She took House's chart again and examined it.

As the hours discussing possible illnesses and theories passed, Cameron felt increasingly alert and awake. She hadn't experienced this sort of mental challenge in a really long time. There was something exciting about quickly having to summon up all of her medical knowledge. She had missed House's differentials where she would constantly be compelled to remember diseases and complications she hadn't read or thought about since medical school. Sometimes she would even recall trifles commented on in passing by her professors, or seemingly insignificant paragraphs in the back of immunology textbooks. Those sessions would open her eyes to the knowledge she didn't even know she had, while acquiring more. This last year her mind had been closed to dealing with hardly anything outside the realms of car crash victims, pneumonia, and bullet wounds.

House was feeling the sense of progress he had been trying to feel all night with this case. It was satisfying not having to explain any metaphors for once, or having to highlight the stupidity of comments. He was free to move as fast as his mind was willing to go.

The golden hints of dawn entered Cameron's office, shedding light on a theory-filled sheet of paper sitting between two exhausted, but satisfied doctors.

House wordlessly took his chart and piece of paper and headed towards the door. Resting his hand on the doorknob he looked back over his shoulder. Feeling his eyes on her Cameron looked up. For the first time that night, their eyes truly met. It seemed to her that for a split-second his look betrayed an almost imperceptible melancholy and longing. Quickly averting her searching eyes, House looked down at the now empty coffee cups still sitting on her desk.

"Good coffee huh?" He remarked as he closed the door behind him.