A/N short little one-shot that was an idea I was playing with, that may expand into a series of one-shots, about the what-if's, if House, knowing what he does now, would do presented with situations over again.
He wishes life had a "reset" button. He finds himself reaching for an invisible control-z when he makes a mistake in real life. His left hand automatically reaches for the magical button combination that fixes any error. Go back a step, and pretend that it never happened. Make a mistake? Simply go back to before it was made, and start over again, so that all is right again in the world. That was the problem with technology, he thinks. He's become reliant upon the "undo" button.
He wishes life had quick-saves. The ability to save at any point in time when faced with a decision. It's why he has a love-hate relationship with his gameboy, and why he more often plays games on his computer. Although it's harder to do so at work. He refuses to play anything with a plot on his gameboy, because he can't save before every plot-changing decision. He never wants to make the bad choice-if things don't work out in his favor, if he loses the big boss fight, he can just go back to the menu and reload, and start over and make things better.
Some might even call him obsessive about the amount of saves he keeps in games.
He plays because it's a good distraction from real life. Where there's no automatic undo button. Where he can't just hit control-z and hope that everything will be better. When he accidently closes out one chapter of his life, he can't bring it back up with control-shfit-t like a carelessly closed wikipedia article that was actually proving fascinating reading.
It's amazing how much technology has integrated itself with his life. When he was in college, cell phones were a new invention, the size of bricks and only for the very rich. Now, he couldn't imagine a life without one, without being in constant contact with everyone around him. Same thing with his PC-it's slightly scary when he thinks about it, that he can't go for more than a few days without the obsessive urge to check his email, to see what was going on in the world. But at the same time, it's taught him that nothing is ever permanantly gone.
Except in real life.
In real life, there's no such thing as "undo". He's learned that lesson well enough by now, but it always comes back up. He can't just go back to a save from before the infarction. He can't go back knowing what he does now, and tell the doctors to just do the damn ultrasound on the first day, or better yet, do it himself, and save his leg. Save Stacy. Save his life as he knew it. He can't go back to Johns Hopkins and not steal the test from his professor's desk the morning of the exam.
He can't go back to this morning, and the patient that had just died. He knew now that it had been his own hubris that had killed the patient. Of course, it couldn't always not be lupus. Of course there would be the one patient that he had categorically denied as having lupus, despite all the symptoms fitting. How the hell could he just ignore the malar rash? The one sign that should have pointed him right to the disease, he'd ignored simply because of living by what had become something of a motto to him-it's never lupus.
Life didn't have an undo button. Life doesn't have a quicksave. He can't just bring up his savestates and the level select, and replay certain points, as much as he'd like to. It's with that thought that the gameboy goes crashing through the window. He can't stand losing to the Elite 4 yet again, despite all the hours he's poured into the game, not now. He sees Wilson peek in at the sound of the crash, but his friend doesn't come in, doesn't say anything, Wilson knows better than to interrupt him at a time like this.
Without the distraction of the gameboy, he turns to the computer to start the M&M paper. It's funny that something so grave has such a light name. Mortality and Morbidity. The conference that would be held between himself, Cuddy, and the team, pointing out what should have been done, and how much of an idiot he was to miss it. He starts typing up what happened, trying to find clever ways to abstain himself of guilt.
But there's none that come. He finds himself backspacing, erasing giant portions, wishing that the key applied to real life as well. Wishing he could just erase his entire childhood, and act as though it never happened. Not quite the same as an undo, but a systemic erasure of everything that turned him into the hateful, bitter man that he had become. Erase it, and rewrite it, the same as he was doing right at the moment. Spin up a new tale of where he came from. A new life for him.
Technology made things easier, but it also made him realize how much he had royally fucked up his life. After ten years of being used to simply hit control-z and watch the errors fade away, he'd gotten used to just correcting mistakes rather than not making them. After two decades of playing games, and saving before every pivotal decision so that he could go back and make the right choices if he made the wrong ones, it simply reinforced to him that in real life, he'd made all the wrong ones, and that hurt.
It was only when he sent a rather exhausted looking Cuddy out of his office snappishly that he gave a sigh, head hanging limply, staring at the floor. The first thing he'd done after she'd walked out the door was feel his left pinky start to reach for the control key, and his ring finger hitting the 'z'. No, life didn't have an undo button, and that was what bothered him the most.