Author's ramblings: This is for my entry at Housefic50, a community at LJ. I'm still on the waiting list, but I really wanted to get this out for the prompt "White Board." I am in no way affiliated with House, M.D., the FOX network, or David Shore.
A Simple Thing
It was the only object that everyone knew of in the hospital. That one oncologist that spends his afternoons napping on the oncology break room's old, beat up sofa knew of it. The newest nurse in pediatrics had only been working at Princeton-Plainsboro for a few days, and she had already heard of it. Even the hospital accountant had caught a view or two of it. House's white board was something that was a part of him. If somebody mentioned a white board, one would associate it with House. It was famous for all the lives that it had helped save, it was famous for being a lifeline to Dr. House. It was famous for a lot of things, and everybody knew that it was property of House, and only House.
But to some people, lots of people, it had slowly just become a white board. Though House had had a total of three since he had hired his team, the people closest to House had always just regarded it as the whiteboard, House's whiteboard. Cameron, Chase, and Foreman see it everyday when they step through the doors to the diagnosis room. Each day that Wilson walked past the diagnosis room to the cafeteria, he would see it. The white board had faded into the background, becoming simply what it was. A white board. Nothing special, nothing amazing, just a white board.
To Dr. Cuddy, the white board never had any real significance. She hadn't climbed on board with the white board appreciation, she hadn't ever been impressed by the life-saving skills that people liked to joke that it possessed. On a warm June evening, Cuddy had gone to the diagnosis room to turn off the lights that had been left one. She stood in the doorway with her hand over the off-white line of three light switches, until it had caught her eye. For the first time in all the years that she had worked with House, Cuddy never paid much attention to the white board. But this time it had been different. Instead of switching off the lights, she walked to the board, standing directly in front of it. Written in a script that Cuddy wasn't sure she recognized was: Will you go out with me?
She felt herself smirk. It was more pathetic than the time somebody had sent her flowers asking to go out with her. Cuddy reached for the eraser that sat in the metal tray below the board itself and brought it up to the message. Who would even go out with somebody who asked them out via white board, anyway? Then she stopped and put the eraser back. What if the person that was to receive the message really needed the person who wrote it? She sighed and turned back towards the door, flipping off the lights on her way back.
Cuddy's walk down the corridor of Princeton-Plainsboro had been no different than the hundreds of times she had walked down it before. Her mind found itself wondering if she still had the take-out menu for that one Chinese restaurant by her house, if there was enough gas in her car, if she had locked the front door before she left that morning. Never once did it occur to Cuddy that the white board's message could have been intended for her.
Out of the corner of his eye, House had watched Cuddy during her entire one minute and twenty-eight second visit in the diagnosis room. As he stood, he wondered if she had ever gotten the flowers he had sent almost six months ago. Before picking up his notorious blue backpack that slung over the back of his office chair, House pushed back two of his even more notorious Vicodin pills. House leaned on his cane momentarily, then reached over his desk and turned off the lamp. It wasn't usually something he did, but House wanted to save Cuddy the trouble. For once.
It took him a moment or two to get into the diagnosis room from his office when using his slow, crippled pace, but when he did, House reached for the same eraser that Cuddy had touched only minutes ago. He brought it up to his message and slowly erased it, "Before Cameron sees it," he muttered.