DRABBLE: Soundboard
TITLE: Soundboard
PLAYERS: Wilson
RATING: G
IN BRIEF: Takes place during the episode 97 Seconds, while House is unconscious, and while the duckling candidates are busy and elsewhere.




One thing I always notice is that House’s office is surprisingly sterile without him in it. You wouldn’t think it would be -- the accumulation of crap has been more than twenty years’ in the making. Seriously, he accuses me of hoarding? He’s practically got ticket stubs from The Beatles in his drawers. Hoarding, as defined by the Gregory House edition of the Oxford, is simply hanging on to things that Gregory House has no interest in or use for.

Unsupervised, I do all the things he won’t let me do while he’s around: flop my heels on top of his desk, put the coffee mug just out of his reach on the window shelves, sling his precious Flying V around my neck and strum a series of chords.

When I finally look down at my finger -- five familiar silver strings, one new gold -- I spy a dust adhered to the surface of the guitar. It’s the kind that’s left after you tear off stickers and tape; I test the sticky surface with a fingertip. It’s then I remember my handy-work with the pliers, and the cold weight of the bridge in my hand. The item I brutally ripped from the soundboard has mysteriously un-ripped itself and is once against buried in the woodwork like I’d never blackmailed House. It’s like House has extended his psychic diagnostic abilities to include the magical repair of treasured artefacts after they’ve been defiled by his best friend.

I lift the instrument to my face, pivoting toward the window. It’s only as I tilt it to catch the light that I see the tiny crease in the wood and the bulge of solid glue. The chunk is so perfectly reattached that you probably wouldn’t even know I’d pried it free in the first place. It’s like some sort of microscopic neurosurgery for guitars, and it’s impressive. I need to start getting him to resect brain tumors for me.

If he wakes up this time, that is.