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  Three Out of Two 
 by leiascully	

 + easy to say but it's harder to feel +

Cuddy was surprised by what a gentleman House could be. She had been sure
any tender feelings in him had been killed by the clot that ruined his leg
until the day he limped into her office with the good news that she didn't
have cancer. There was something a little different in his eyes. She had
never realized he watched her with such intensity; it made her a little
uncomfortable, that he'd been tracking her behavior, that he knew her so
well without her knowing it. Without her knowing him much beyond his
brilliance in the office and his brusque ways and his innuendo and his
incredible focus and attention to detail.

"Cuddy?" he said, in her office again afterhours without Wilson, and the
sound of his voice brought her back. He was watching her with his head
tipped a little to the side and his eyes narrowed slightly. He had an
amazing capacity for focusing when the need was present and all of that
attention was focused on her. She found herself breathing a little faster.
His blue eyes were calm, his face fairly impassive, and he knew this
enormous thing about her and he was offering his help, in some twisted
House way. Her heart was beating sideways, she thought, but she looked at
him and his earnest eyes and she stopped fighting.

He kept her secret. That was the amazing thing. House had never kept his
mouth shut in his life, as far as she knew. Even in college, he had been
legendary for saying all the wrong insightful things in front of all the
wrong people, but never without purpose.

She asked him for help with her shots, and startled herself by almost
looking forward to it. It was erotic, in a strange intense way: she could
see him only as a vague reflection in the window on cloudy days. She
closed her eyes against the chill of the alcohol pad moving in slow
circles over the rounded muscle of her ass, House's fingers firm against
her skin through the cloth. He flattened his palm over the curve of her
ass and the heat and pressure of his hand made her forget the needle as he
jabbed her. There was one moment of sharp pain that made her gasp, and
then the texture of House's thumb against the mark of the needle prick.
Through the day she would shift in her seat or flex just right as she was
walking and feel the momentary ache of the spot and think of House.

"You know, Bach is better than Mozart," he offered one evening, his hand
still warm against her, his thumb rubbing gently to soothe the tiny hurt.
"And Miles Davis is better than either of them, if you're going for sheer
inspiration."

"I'll keep that in mind," she said, straightening and letting her skirt
fall back into place, ruffled briefly by his hand as he withdrew it.

"Is this my audition?" he asked, looking at his hands as he packed away
the syringe and the little bottles of fluid.

She froze. "That wasn't my intention."

"Wilson at least got dinner out of the deal."

"Wilson paid for his own dinner, House. What are you trying to say?"

He looked up. "Want to go to dinner, Cuddy?"

That was the night she realized she had been slowly falling in love with
him for years. He was on a case, so they went to a small close restaurant,
nothing fancy, North African food. She made him eat couscous with his
hands so she could watch the elegance of his long fingers, and they had a
glass of wine apiece and he laughed, even though she knew he was in pain
the way he kept reaching into his pocket for the Vicodin and glancing at
her and coming up empty-handed. He was charming. He licked his fingers and
looked over at her with his eyes dancing, undignified as all hell, and she
knew why Stacy had loved him so much. She remembered House before the
infarction: a little merrier, always a thorn in her side but less brittle,
fewer barbs. Now they were both older and wiser, with the ache of his leg
between them, and something was healing that she had forgotten was
wounded.

There was a magic about him that she had been resisting, but her
resistance was spent. He was still House, brusque and too honest and
sometimes a pain in her ass, but there was a gentleness about him since he
had riddled out the secret of her fertility treatments that she found
irresistible. She trusted him. She liked him. Dammit, he was right, the
way he always was: it should be someone she liked. He paid and called a
cab to take them back to the hospital and she went back to her office and
put all the donor files in her bottom drawer and didn't look at them.

She went to his office the next morning, wanting to say something to him,
anything about the sudden new surge of affection and the frustration she
had always transmuted from her desire, but he looked at her with a concern
touched with an anxiety only Stacy or Wilson or she would know was there
and she was out of declarations.

"Thank you for the injections," she said instead, her expression all out
of step with the professionalism of her words, hoping he could read her
the way he always did.

"You're welcome," he said. His voice was soft and she knew she had to
leave before she kissed him. She turned, walked toward the door, and
paused when he spoke again. "You came all the way up here just to tell me
that?"

She turned, and smiled. "No." He knew. She left.

And then he was shot, and she felt like dying herself, until his miracle
cure. He was happy the way she'd never seen him and she was blissful and
she gave them both a couple of months to settle in to this new life and
every day she loved him a little more. Cuddy loved watching him, striding
firm and square and joyful down the halls, his shoulders high.

"House," she called after him at last, her voice a little husky. She hoped
that he would still need her now that he was whole again. He walked back
over to her with the crooked little smile that was his default expression
these days and crowded up in her personal space the way he always did.
These days her body feinted towards his, like weak magnets.

"Cuddy. To what do I owe the pleasure of this impromptu conference? Need a
consult?"

She hesitated and motioned him down. He leaned in, smelling of good
cologne. "Yes?" he murmured, close to her ear.

"Do you want to have dinner?" she said, as quietly as she could.

"State secrets," he said, and there was laughter in the words. "Should I
ask Wilson?"

"No, just you." She bit her lip, his face unseen by the side of hers.

"Hmmmm," he said, and it was sexy somehow, the quiet vibration of his
throat. "Is this my audition?"

"You passed your audition," she said. He breathed into her hair and it was
almost a kiss, and then he drew back and was off again down the hall.

"We'll go someplace nice," he said over his shoulder, and he whistled a
little as he sauntered away.

They went to a good restaurant and she wished he could eat with his
fingers again, but they weren't that far along in whatever this was for
him to discard manners for her. They had been colleagues for so long that
she was nervous about trying to be friends, and more about trying to be
lovers. Since the ketamine, he had changed, though he was still the
brilliant doctor that he'd always been, hopelessly irresponsible but for
the best causes. She licked her lips and watched him order, trying to keep
the little crease from forming between her eyebrows. House picked a good
red wine and she had a bare sip of it from his side of the glass. Her lips
covered the print of his lips and she thought of how she'd never even
kissed this man and now she was going to try to produce a child with him.

"You're freaking out, Cuddy," he said as she passed his glass back.
"Relax. I've been reading up on this stuff. Besides, how long have we
known each other? Since college. I remember you before you were a babe. In
geologic time, that makes us practically lovers already."

She blushed and he grinned. She turned her attention to her food, but she
could feel his eyes on her.

"Do you want to know what I've been reading?" he asked. "I made Cameron do
a lot of research so she'd get that funny look on her face. I'm hoping one
of these days she'll just drag Chase off into the coma patient's room and
make him knock her up. Having a baby would give her something totally
helpless to take care of and then maybe she'd stop looking at me like she
thinks I'm still a cripple."

Cuddy choked on her salad. "House!"

"Relax," he said again, drawing out the word a little. "Your secret's
still secret. I had an excuse. Some middle-aged mommy I got on clinic
duty. I haven't told anyone. How could I deal with the rampant jealousy
among my staff? I'm pretty sure Foreman's been hoping for my job for a
while. Anyway, it's good we're doing this now. I could still be virile for
a good twenty years, but you're running out of time."

"I had a physical," she said. "I'm perfectly healthy."

"I know. You work out, you eat right, you have no bad habits, and hey,
it's not like you have a high-stress job."

"That being mostly your fault," she snapped, but he chuckled and her anger
melted away.

"I've been playing nice, haven't I?" He pulled his most innocent face and
she smiled at him involuntarily. "I'm sure anyone as lush as you isn't
going to have a problem conceiving, Cuddy. Your hormone levels are fine,
you've been good to your body, and you've definitely got the equipment.
Plus the fertility meds. You've played it safe. It'll be fine."

She liked how the lechery hadn't gone out of him, but it was modulated
into the conversation these days. They finished their meals. He lingered
over a cup of dark bitter coffee and she nibbled a fruit tart, and when
they got into the car, he tipped her face up with one finger and kissed
her. His chin was scratchy but his lips were gentle and she was so
hormonal from the treatments and her confusion over him that she almost
started crying. He tasted like coffee. She hadn't been kissed in so long.
And House, god, he kissed like he meant it. His hand had worked its way
into her hair when she was distracted and she couldn't help whimpering
just a bit about how good his fingers felt near her skin, how good it felt
to be touched by him even in these small ways.

"Are you sure about this, Cuddy?" he whispered, his fingers still tangled
in her hair.

She looked into his blue eyes that were so close. "Yes. No. I want to do
it anyway." She bit her lip to keep herself from dismissing the
conversation with more kisses. "You were right. You're someone I trust.
You're someone I...like. Your medical history isn't the best, but that's
partly my fault. Are you sure?"

"Hey," he said, "I wouldn't have volunteered to be your baby daddy if I
didn't think it would be a pretty great baby. I'm just glad you seem to
have decided we can do this the old-fashioned way. Lots more fun, I
promise." She let out a quick breath that was almost a laugh and his eyes
lit up. "You gave me another chance at life, Lisa. I owe you. And even if
I didn't owe you, I'd still want to be your baby daddy." He detangled his
hand from her curls and ran one finger down her cheek. "You're smart.
You're beautiful. You don't let me get away with everything but you still
let me work. Any man in his right mind would want to be your baby daddy."

"Please stop using that phrase," she whispered.

"How are you going to stop me?"

She kissed him and they were both laughing through it. Cuddy backed off
reluctantly after a moment and put the car into drive. He held her hand
part of the way home, spreading her fingers and tracing patterns on her
palm. Here was the romance that he'd stifled, that had poisoned him. She
said a quick silent thanks to Stacy's husband Mark for existing and
unlocked her door with shaky hands. Inside the house, she wasn't sure what
to do, but House kissed her again and led her to the bathroom and turned
on the shower. He undressed her slowly as the water heated up, kissing her
on the bare skin that his nimble fingers exposed so that she was too
distracted to be embarassed. The bathroom began to fill with steam as he
let her peel his shirt over his head and unbutton his jeans. Naked, he was
long and lean and unequivocally the right choice, and he looked at her
like a man having an epiphany.

Under the spray of the water he soaped her skin gently, twisting her hair
up out of the water with one hand. She tied her hair in a quick knot to
free his hands and leaned against his chest as he washed her back, sliding
his palm over her shoulders, her spine, her ass until she was so turned on
she could hardly breathe. She ran her soapy hands over any part of him
that she could reach, and let him wash her face, just his fingertips
delicate over her cheekbones as she closed her eyes. She had to reach up
to touch his face, the rough stubble softened a little by the hot water,
and as she raised her arms, he cupped her breasts.

"Greg," she breathed, her hands slipping to his shoulders, and she held
onto him as he washed her breasts, her belly, her thighs, sliding a warm
hand between her legs as his mouth moved to her breasts. She could feel
the muscles of his arms working, the play of groups against each other as
he touched her. Her world narrowed to the chill of the tile against her
back, the heat between her legs, and the tension of his muscles. He leaned
forward to kiss her and her arms slid around his neck. From somewhere in
her throat came a high keening noise she hadn't known she could make and
his fingers played over her and the world was narrowing still and he was
hot and rough and hard and real against her and his hands and she was
trying to say his name but the whole world had convulsed and she was weak
and panting against him and he was still kissing her, more tender than she
had ever imagined. He reached behind himself to twist the water off and
lifted her carefully out of the shower, carrying her to the bed.

He had been doing his reading. He propped her hips at a slant with a
pillow and kissed a line down her front. She watched him, limp with desire
and a sort of half-afterglow. He was beautiful in the dim light of her
bedroom, looming over her, impossibly male, impossibly House. He rubbed
his stubbled cheeks gently over her collarbones and her stomach and she
whimpered. His mouth closed over her nipple and she moaned, and he paused
and lifted his head and stretched out beside her.

She looked at him, mouth quivering a little, afraid of what he'd say. His
eyes were dark, but there wasn't enough light to show the exact details of
his expression, and she turned her head away. "Changed your mind, House?"
Tears pricked at her eyes.

"This is going to change things, Lisa," he said seriously. "I'm going to
be possessive about you. I'm going to want to be around, if this works
out. The downside to having your kid's genetic material come from someone
you know is that it's more of an investment, and they get to have some say
in the kid's life. I'm not going to be casual about this. You've meant
more to me than that. A kid would mean more to me than that. I'm not sure
how this will go, but we'll have to work it out."

Then she was crying, softly, overwhelmed with happiness and some kind of
relief. He turned her face toward him with one hand and kissed her
forehead. "Okay?" he murmured.

"Better than I hoped," she said, and kissed him for all the loneliness
they'd both suffered over the years. She pushed her mouth hard against
his, hungry for the kiss, and he responded with lips and tongue until
their teeth clicked together. He put his hand on her hip and then moved it
down, his fingers pushing into her, and then he rolled over and moved over
her. Her toes tingled. She had never had unprotected sex. She had a vague
idea that it was better than anything else, despite all her medical
training.

"Cuddy...I've never done this with this kind of purpose before. You know
you may not get pregnant the first time," he said, his head bumping
against her in a way that made her want to wrap her legs around his ass
and force him inside.

"Then we'll just have to persevere," she said, and he grinned and pushed
slowly into her. She shifted a little, adjusting to him. It had been too
long since she'd had sex. It had been too long since there'd be anyone
she'd really wanted to have sex with and she was suddenly passionately
glad that it was House here in her bed. Here in her body, even, and
watching her all the time with those eyes. She wasn't sure if absence made
the heart grow fonder, but years of involuntary abstinence had made the
sex better. Just the bulk of him against her was unbearably exciting. She
moved her hips against him, goading him, but he just kissed her neck and
continued to move slowly. She could feel the puckering of his scars
against the inside of her thigh, half a guilty memory and half welcome
extra friction.

"House," she moaned. His weight pushed her thighs apart and she hooked one
leg over him. He was startlingly adept at this. He reached for the pillow
under her and pushed it so that her hips were better angled.

"You can call me Greg if you want," he said against the hollow of her
throat, his words humming through her clavicles. He was breathing harder.
"God, Cuddy. Is this good?"

"Mmmm," was all she could manage, on a rising scale. He bent one arm under
her neck and touched her with his other hand, circling her clit, and he
had found her G-spot somehow and he had finally sped up, his breath
sounding more and more ragged as he kissed her. His flanks trembled
against her and he groaned softly. Her toes curled and tingled and she
pushed her mouth against his collarbones.

"Lisa," he hissed, and then groaned louder and his hips jerked against
her. She reached down, frantic fingers joining his as he moved roughly in
her, and she saw stars against the dim ceiling of her bedroom, and stars
in his eyes. He bent to kiss her again, deeply, slowing the rock of his
hips against hers. When he pulled out, she felt hollow, incomplete. She
was shivering a little with the aftershock of the pleasure.

"You should stay there," he said, with one hand on her hip. "For a few
minutes, at least. Give the little guys a chance to find the mothership."
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and vanished into the bathroom.
She heard the water running. After a moment he came out with a cup of
water and a damp washcloth, and she sipped from the cup as he ran the
washcloth over her.

"Greg," she said softly, watching his body outlined by the faint glow of
her bathroom nightlight.

"If you're planning to thank me, don't bother," he said, but not
brusquely, and set the cup on a magazine on her nightstand. "I can't
handle the incessant adulation."

She smiled. "That was pretty incredible, but I wasn't going to thank you."
She hesitated. "Do you want to stay?"

The corners of his lips quirked. "Might as well protect my investment," he
said. "Make sure you aren't shooting up someone else's stuff in the wee
hours. Think of the potential embarassment if my kid grew up to be
interested in oncology or neurology."

"House!" He chuckled and lay down next to her, and his laugh was fast
becoming her favourite sound in the world. He kissed her shoulder and she
turned her face against him, pushing her nose into his hair. He smelled
good, like her bodywash and clean sweat. They lay that way for several
minutes and she breathed him in.

"I think," he mumbled after a while, "that you could put those pillows to
other purposes now, like under our heads." She roused and moved slowly off
the pillows, a little sore here and there, and found a clean pair of
underwear, a little self-conscious, but sleepy. He scrabbled to find the
edge of the comforter and dragged it over them as she punched the pillow
drowsily back into shape and tossed it under his head. He stretched out
and she lined her body up against his, her head and her arm on his chest
and her leg draped over his, so that she could feel his scars again and
the firmness of the thigh muscle around it. He was a miracle.

"I'm happy," she said, as he settled his arm around her, fingers curled so
that the tips were against her lower back and the knuckles grazed the lacy
hem of her panties, and she would have wanted him again if she hadn't been
so drowsy, just the feel of his fingers on her skin.

He kissed her hair. "Cuddy," he said, and it sounded like an endearment.

+ high as my heart +

Cuddy in the early months of her pregnancy blossomed like a rose. House
tried to find a new simile, something less clichd and more suited to
Cuddy's strength, but he saw the light flush on her cheeks and the glow of
her skin and kept coming back to roses. Lovely, thorny, complicated Cuddy,
delicately formed but enduring, like the brambly wild roses that twined
into fences with their tiny flowers and the perfume that could fill a
meadow. Cuddy's happiness was like that, perfuming the hospital so that
House was sure that the coma patient would comment on it soon. 

He had been well for five months. Cuddy had been pregnant for two of them,
since not long after the evening she'd told him he'd passed his audition
and they had gone out for dinner and then back to her house. House, when
he thought about it, was almost regretful that she had gotten pregnant so
quickly, after only a couple of weeks, but she was healthy and on
fertility medication, and they had made the most of those weeks in bed.
She teased him that it was a testament to his motor skills, that his sperm
were so fresh and vigorous, and he said that there had never been anything
wrong with that particular leg, and kissed her forehead.

Things were different between them. They had been since he had found out
that she wanted a baby. She had intrigued him in a different way, with
this new and somewhat unexpected desire, and she had treated him
differently too. They fought less, partly, he thought, because he'd been
shot and that had jolted all of them, but partly because she had made a
confidant of him, more like a friend than an employee. Now more like a
lover, he thought, but who knew how long that would go on? She let him
kiss her because she had grown used to it, or was there more between them?
He wasn't sure any night whether he'd end up at her place or his, though
he spent an increasing amount of time learning the rooms of her house in
the dark. He lived in a glad uncertainty. 

"Cuddy seems happy these days," said Wilson as they played catch with
House's ball on their adjoining balconies. The air was crisp, but not too
cold. Fall was going easy on them.

"Mmm," House agreed, noncommital. He jogged to the other end of the
balcony, eyed the distance, and bounced the ball over his wall into
Wilson's hands.

"Did you ever find out why she was taking those supplements?" Wilson
asked, tossing the ball back. House caught it easily.

"No," he lied cheerfully. "Must have been a date. Maybe she just wanted to
see if she could understand why all those women sleep with you." He winged
the ball at Wilson, who put his hands in front of his face and caught it
and looked at House with his best exasperated expression.

"You are incorrigible."

"On the contrary, I'm quite corrigible. Throw it." 

Wilson tossed the ball to him with a thoughtful expression. "You seem
happy these days too."

"I'm a whole new man. Maybe I've been taking Cuddy's red clover. Something
to all those wacky New Agers after all." He threw the ball from hand to
hand. "I can walk again, Wilson. Of course I'm happy."

"Mobility didn't help before the infarction," said Wilson drily. He looked
at his watch. "I've got a appointment. I'll see you for lunch."

House stayed out on the balcony, looking over the grounds and rolling his
ball along the little balustrade. The pregnancy was a secret from everyone
but the two of them and Cuddy's OB/GYN, but sometimes he wished he could
tell Wilson. Fatherhood was something he had never really considered
before; Stacy had been happy enough with the responsibilities of her
career and putting up with him. He found he was enjoying the prospect more
than he'd expected, or maybe it was the residual high of well-kept secrets
and the gentle light in Cuddy's eyes. She wasn't rounding out yet, but
there was a new gravity about her and she laughed more often. He found
himself smiling, thinking of it. 

Cuddy was strong. She'd go it alone if he decided he wanted nothing to do
with the child, but now that he'd started this thing, he had an impulse to
see it through. Maybe every son wanted to redeem the sins of his father.
House liked kids well enough. They had their own brand of candor before
they grew up and filled themselves with the bullshit of the world and
their parents. He owed Cuddy. That was twice she'd brought him back to
life now. He wondered if she felt possessive of him because of it, the way
he felt possessive of her now. Wilson was going to get suspicious soon,
the way House kept touching Cuddy, just little things like his fingers
under her elbow, his hand at the small of her back as he opened a door.

He heard the door open and Cuddy appeared as if he'd conjured her.

"Hey," she said, with that secret gleam in her eyes and the flush high on
her cheekbone.

"Hey," he said back, lounging with one elbow on the wall, trying to keep a
smile off his lips. "Are you here to scold me?"

"Why, have you been worse than usual?" She came and leaned on the wall
next to him. "Where's your team?"

"Sent them off to seminars. Ethics, I think. They're supposed to keep me
in line, remember? Figured after all this corruption, they could use some
brushing up."

"You don't have to take these kinds of chances," she said. "With the
patients. We know you're brilliant. I don't know if it's anxiety over this
thing or some kind of arrogance from being reborn, but there's only so far
you can push the envelope before I'll have to fire you." But she was
smiling as she said it.

"If you fire me, I'm moving in. I'll sit around all day and watch tv."

"You'll paint the nursery," she countered. He laughed softly.

"When did this become something more than a business arrangement?" he
asked of no one in particular. 

"College," she said. "Why do you think I hired you? You were every
starry-eyed undergrad's dream. Why wouldn't I want to fulfill that?" He
looked at her, startled, and she looked back with a quick flash of humor
in her face. "Or am I lying?"

"That would be some delayed gratification."

"I get mine in the end," she said, and he laughed again.

"Don't I know it." He ducked his head briefly, looking her up and down.
"How are you feeling?"

"A little sick this morning, as well you know. Otherwise, I'm fine. I'm
starving."

"Nobody yaks like you, Cuddy," he said absently, staring over the grounds.

"House, that might be the nicest thing you've ever said to me."

"I'm quite the romantic," he said, and straightened up, enjoying the way
she had to tip her face to look at him, as if she were waiting to be
kissed. In her bare feet, her head only came up to his collarbones, but in
her daytime heels, she was taller. "What are we doing, Cuddy?"

"I'm not sure," she said, "but I like it." She smiled at him and he felt
the prickle of tiny thorns wound around his heart. He remembered her
suddenly in college, with this same driven brightness. Among all the
undergrads, she had stood out as something special. He wished he had paid
her more attention then, instead of the brief acquaintance that consisted
mostly of shared cups of mediocre coffee and a couple of sessions in the
library. 

"Come back, Greg," she was saying, and he shook his head to dissipate the
memory. "Can I have some extra clinic hours from you this week, since you
don't have a case yet?"

"I thought knocking up the boss exempted me from clinic duty," he said,
pulling a pout.

"Just gets you dinner," she said. 

"In that case, let's see," he said. There was a flutter of movement in the
office. "I'll give you two extra hours unless that's one of the kids with
some stunning new case."

Cameron burst through the door, a little breathless, and stumbled to a
halt. She glanced at Cuddy, looking confused, and held out a manila
folder. "Just got in at the ER. Weirdest rash I've ever seen. No
preexisting allergies. Brought in with anaphylactic shock and severe
chills."

He smirked at Cuddy. "Looks like I've got work to do. See you later,
boss." He took the file from Cameron and flipped through it, walking into
the office. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cameron still staring at
Cuddy, and behind him he could sense the elaborate nonchalance as Cuddy
arranged herself in her professional mode and followed along. 

"You still owe me your regular clinic hours, Dr. House," she reminded him
as she breezed out, and he waved her off. Cameron was staring after Cuddy
with slightly narrowed eyes, looking speculative instead of wicked. 

"What did she want?"

"Hmm? Cuddy? Trying to con me into extra clinic hours." He sat down,
absorbed in the file. "Why did you bring me this? It should have gone to
immunology. It's possible that an allergy developed recently and they just
haven't found it yet, and that's not my job. It's not impressive if anyone
can solve it. Cycle it through them." He closed the file and pushed it
toward Cameron. She raised her hands, palms toward him in a gesture of
helplessness.

"Immunology wants you on it." 

His mouth quirked to one side with annoyance and he scratched his cheek
thoughtfully. "Well, round up the boys and get Foreman on some scratch
testing and the detailed history. You and Chase go search the house and
the workplace." He looked up at her expectantly. "Get going, Cameron." 

"I was just..." she began, and then paused and closed her mouth. She
gathered up the copies of the file from the edge of his desk and hugged
them to her chest as she went out. House watched her go. Cameron was
emotional, but she wasn't dumb. She would figure out something was going
on, the way she'd watched him and Cuddy since that kid had fallen off
Cuddy's roof. But then, it was only a matter of time anyway. Cuddy's frame
was too lean to hide any sort of bulge.

He flipped through his copy of the file again. Middle-aged female, address
somewhere out in the country. Found outside by her husband, who had been
an EMT and kept an epi pen around just in case. Probably a gardener,
inhaling pesticides, or getting bug bites, or weeding with bare hands and
pulling up poison sumac or nightshade or horsenettle and burning them, or
some combination of the above. On a whim, he Googled "gardening" and
clicked through a number of links. Organic gardening to starting your kids
on growing vegetables to wildflowers to roses. At least while he was
waiting for the team to find something this woman was allergic to, he
could do something useful with his time, like learning the language of
roses, in case he ever had to buy someone flowers. Roses were for secrets,
he found; he and Cuddy were living sub rosa with this pregnancy thing,
under the symbol of the rose, keeping the secret. And sub rosa to her, at
least as far as voicing it went, was the thought that she was the best
thing to happen to him in a long time, maybe the best thing to happen to
him ever, aside from Stacy and his M.D. 

He thought about his malarial journalist, how he'd tried to have surgery
to make himself the man the woman who loved him thought he was. House
wondered if the wife had ever come back. Surgery had made him the man that
Stacy hadn't known he was, or at least emphasized the parts that she could
deal with less. He didn't blame her for leaving. He wondered if she would
have stayed if he had gotten the amputuation, but that kind of speculation
was pointless. Cuddy hadn't left him or fired him after the infarction,
and she'd never married someone else. She was gorgeous and she was brainy
and she did her job well and gave his shit right back to him, and he
thought she was falling in love with him, a little. He wasn't sure what
was going on with himself. He had been in love with only Stacy for so long
that any feelings he might have had for anyone else had been sublimated
into his brooding, but now he was free. Or maybe free was the wrong word,
but he was revenged, or exonerated, or martyred, or heaven help him,
moving on, and what he knew was that he liked seeing Cuddy at the end of
the day and knowing that he'd put the smile on her face.

Cuddy kept the faith, he thought, and grinned to himself.

"You're looking happy again." Wilson leaned in through the door. "I would
ask if it's your case, but I ran into Cameron in the hallway looking
disgusted, so I can only imagine you had a good conversation with Cuddy on
the balcony there."

"Jimmy!" said House, and got up. "Have I told you lately how much I value
our friendship?"

"You've never told me how much you value our friendship," said Wilson, and
put his hands on his hips. "What's going on?"

"What, I need a reason to appreciate you now? I'm going down to the gym.
Want to come? You can be my towel boy."

"And watch you sweat? No thanks." But he followed House anyway.
"Seriously, what's up with you and Cuddy? It seems like every time I turn
around, you guys are having secret conversations or giving each other
significant looks across decreasing amounts of space. Do you know
something I don't know?"

"The number of things I know that you don't know is too vast to be
calculated on the run," said House cheerfully. "Oh, fine, you caught us.
We were planning your surprise party. Now it's ruined. We were going to
get you a piata and everything."

"Are you back on Vicodin?" said Wilson, with a touch of incredulity.

"Runner's high," said House, and jogged backwards a few steps. "See? If
you need me, or just want to throw out some more weird theories about me
and Cuddy, I'll be pounding the rubber." He paused and tilted his head.
"That doesn't sound quite right, does it?"

He had logged several miles before his team showed up, gathering around
the treadmill as if it were story hour. House shook the headphones from
his ears and dropped them on the console.

"Immunology says..." began Cameron.

"Yeah, yeah. Ask her about her gardening habits. See if she's picked any
weird weeds lately, or if she's been burning, or if she composts."

"You think she's into pesticides?" asked Foreman. 

"See how you don't bother asking me the stupid questions about how I knew
about the gardening? I like that. Saves time. Is she presenting with any
kind of GI distress?"

"She said she was vomiting before," said Chase. "That could lead to the
chills, I guess, sort of a side reaction."

"Go forth!" House puffed, panting a little, and waved a hand at them. "Do
my bidding. Check for the pesticides and dose her up with steroids for the
poison ivy or poison sumac she's probably got, which gave her the allergic
reaction. She'll be out of here by dinnertime."

For once it was true. They were all out by dinnertime, or at least done.
House rubbed a towel over his damp hair and went up to the office. His
team was there, sitting around the table looking a little dazed, like they
weren't sure they could leave. Cuddy wasn't there, but she'd emailed,
craving Mexican food. House walked out to the balcony and hurled his ball
at Wilson's door. 

"Want to get some dinner?" he asked, when Wilson stuck his head out. 

"Can't. I've got a consult."

"We should order in. Play some poker. Do you guys carry a lot of cash?" he
yelled in to the kids.

"What?" They came out on the balcony, crowding through the door.

"We should have a poker night. Maybe not tonight, though. I want to give
you plenty of time to get to the ATM."

"Don't you usually play with people off the streets?" said Cameron. "Why
would you suddenly want to play poker with us?"

"More fun to take money from you. I can lord it over you for the rest of
your career." She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. 

"As if we're all going to be working under you forever," said Foreman.
"But I'm game. Not tonight, though. I've got plans with my girlfriend."

"Excellent!" said House. "We're all agreed. Wilson's blowing off his
consult and we're going out for Mexican. You guys are dismissed for the
evening. Go home. Have fun, or whatever it is you do. Chase, maybe you
should take Cameron out for a drink."

Chase made his startled face and shoved his hands in his pockets. "You
dictating our social lives now, Boss?"

"Well, Foreman's clearly getting laid tonight. Wilson's probably getting
laid tonight, given that he has that irresistably boyish charm. I have an
escort service preprogrammed into my phone. That leaves you and Cameron
all by your lonesomes, and there's only so much sexual frustration I can
take in my department." He reached for his wallet. "Here's a twenty. That
ought to get her pretty smashed."

Cameron protested but House was already ignoring her. "Come on, Wilson.
You know you want to."

Wilson sighed. "Can you give me half an hour?"

"Excellent." He turned back to his team, who were standing in various
poses of embarassment, outrage, and amusement. "Well, Chase, you have to
ask the girl."

Chase looked off sideways. "I liked you better before you got cured."

"That's the spirit." House walked back into the office. "Go away now. Live
your lives."

He called Cuddy after the kids had left, Foreman smirking and Cameron with
her nose in the air but Chase at her shoulder. "I invited Wilson to
dinner," he said without prologue.

"Subtle," she said. 

"He was asking all sorts of nosy questions. I figured if he actually saw
us together, he'd either figure out something's going on and be satisfied
or decide nothing's going on and continue leading his blissful life.
Remember, this is the man who stole your spoon to test you for cancer.
He's just devious enough to riddle out why we've been sighted together so
often lately."

She sighed. "I was just hoping to put it off for a while."

"Why, because he failed his audition?" House leaned back in his chair. "He
won't be bitter. It's not like he knew it was an audition at the time."

"I suppose," she said dubiously. 

"Cuddy," he said, just enjoying the sound of her name. 

"Are you coming over tonight?"

"Do you want me to?"

There was a long pause. He could almost see the way she was raising her
eyes and biting her lip. "Yes."

"No problem," he said. "Saves on the heating bill."

She snorted. "You sentimental fool."

"I'm liking this us thing," he said, surprising himself. "I always knew
you'd put out eventually."

"House," she said, and he couldn't place her tone. 

"One day at a time," he said. 

"Definitely," she said. "When's dinner?"

"We'll be down in twenty minutes."

Dinner was quietly awkward, but the food was good and the salsa was fiery,
and that made up for it. Wilson worked his way through a plate of fajitas
and almost choked on his beer when House and Cuddy exchanged a look and
Cuddy took a deep breath and said, "I'm pregnant." 

Once he had stopped sputtering, Wilson wiped his mouth. "And House is...?"

"Yes," said House, with a measured look. "Don't spread it around."

Wilson opened his mouth as if he were going to speak and then closed it
again. "Well. I guess that explains the last few weeks. How far along are
you?"

"A couple of months," said Cuddy. "I was waiting until past the twelve
week mark to let anyone know, but House said you were going to figure it
out."

"I'm not sure if I would have quite gotten there on my own," said Wilson.
"Huh. Congratulations. Are you two...an item now?"

"We're taking it a day at a time," House cut in. "Wouldn't want to the
sprog to think he's going to be born into a stable family situation."
Cuddy glared at him.

"A single parent home can be a perfectly stable family situation," she
started to argue, and House put his arm around her.

"Isn't the little woman just so cute when she's all riled up?" He batted
his eyes at Wilson, who rolled his own eyes in tandem with Cuddy. 

"I think I'll have another beer," said Wilson, shaking his head. "You
weren't kidding about the surprises, apparently."

They went home together openly after that, leaving Wilson in the parking
lot. "I was thinking," House said on the drive back to Cuddy's house,
"that maybe if I hadn't spent the last five years wallowing in missing
Stacy, I might have been a better doctor and a better employee. So I'm
sorry about that." It was easier to say when she couldn't spend a lot of
time looking at him, and he could watch the road ahead instead of looking
at her. "I haven't been a good friend or a good colleague," he went on,
"and I wanted to say thanks for putting up with me. I wish I'd gotten over
it sooner."

She put her hand on his knee and squeezed gently. "I knew you'd get there.
Your case solution rate helped. Even when you were a jerk, you were a good
doctor, and it's not like you didn't have a decent excuse for wallowing in
misery. Lucky for you, I know that there's some kind of decency hidden
under all the arrogance."

"You do know me, Cuddy. You and Stacy and Wilson know me better than
anyone, and you've known me longest." He paused. "I was also thinking that
if I hadn't been thinking about Stacy for the last five years, I might
have started thinking of you." He looked sideways at her. She said nothing
for a while. He watched the road unspool in the autumn dark.

"Are you asking me to go steady?" she asked after a bit. 

"I'm just trying to say that I'm glad this is happening," he said. 

"I'm glad you're glad." She put on the turn signal and pulled the car into
the driveway.

"We are too wise to woo peaceably," he said to no one in particular,
undoing his seatbelt.

"Is that your philosopher Jagger again?"

"Shakespeare," he said. "Much Ado. You should see it, if you haven't.
Watch the Kenneth Branaugh version. You get to watch Keanu Reeves make an
ass of himself, plus Emma Thompson gets naked. What a babe."

"Aren't you supposed to be thinking about me getting naked instead?" she
teased instead, getting out of the car. 

"Time enough for that." He looked around the neighborhood as she unlocked
the door, and then went in behind her, avoiding the shoes that she kicked
off in the entry way. She went into the kitchen for a bottle of water, and
he came up and put his arms around her as she drank. She set the bottle
down and turned in his arms, pressing her cheek to his chest. He felt a
sudden rush of possessive joy. He wanted to show her off. He wanted to
protect her. No wonder people wrote books about parenthood, if this was
how it began. In seven months, the rush would be unbelievable. 

"Will you play the piano for me sometime?" she asked, muffled a little
against his shirt.

"If you want. You'll have to come over, though. I'm not schlepping that
thing all the way to your house for just one set." He stroked her hair.
"Have you got a thing for musicians, Cuddy?"

"Why don't you find out?"

He made love to her very gently, and they lay in bed together afterwards
with his hands flattened over her stomach. He thought about his
expectations for his life and the way it had turned out instead. Here he
was curled around Cuddy's now familiar body, his arms arranged just right
around her small frame, instead of having Stacy's long bones draped over
his. It was good. It was different. He could live with different. He could
even love different. They were resourceful. They'd figure things out.

He kissed the back of her neck and she murmured in her sleep. "I love
you," he said against her shoulder, just his lips moving without any
sound, but it was a start. 

+ when the sunlight beckons +

Cuddy began to round out noticeably and Wilson watched in envious
fascination. She was even lovelier than before somehow, walking around the
hospital with an aura of calm and her hand on the gentle swell of her
belly. She and House were still together according to their particular
idiom of intimacy, and Wilson wasn't sure what to make of it all.

"What are you going to tell people?" he asked House as they went through
the line in the caf.

"It's none of people's business," said House, raking salad neatly over a
steak, a trick he seemed to like.

"People will ask anyway," Wilson reminded him.

"People will ask Cuddy," House said. "Probably she'll tell them it was an
anonymous donor. We're not all gossips like you."

"You haven't discussed this? What if she tells the truth?"

They found a table and sat down. House forked his salad aside and started
cutting his steak. "Not like it would make me look bad," he said. "I
scored the biggest babe in the hospital. It can only enhance my reputation
as a stud. And she was just succumbing to my inevitable charms." He stole
a fry from Wilson's plate and popped it into his mouth. "Anyway, as far as
you know, it was an anonymous donation. Maybe I wear a mask to bed." He
waggled his eyebrows suggestively.

Wilson shook his head in disbelief. "You're impossible."

"Jealous?

"Confused. How does she put up with an ass like you?"

"Did you ever get an answer to that question out of Stacy?"

Wilson ignored that. "Don't you fight?"

House rolled his eyes. "Of course we fight. She's pregnant, she didn't
become some non-Cuddy pod person. But then we have makeup sex, and because
she knows she's a stressed out woman with crazy hormones and she's
overreacting to everything, I can get away with just about anything." He
chewed with an air of smug thoughtfulness. "Besides, if we didn't fight,
it wouldn't be any fun. I hope you don't need to see her this afternoon.
I'm sensing we're going to have a little squabble before her board
meeting."

"In her office?" Wilson's voice rose a little. "What made you think that
was on the list of things I should know?"

"Oh, Jimmy, it's just one of the benefits of being my best friend. Now
you'll never be able to pay attention in meetings. Are you eating those?"
He reached out for another fry, but Wilson snatched the plate away.

"Cameron is so going to be pissy about this," he muttered.

"Distract her with your boyish charms," House suggested.

"I thought you were trying to fix her up with Chase."

"Yeah. For a guy with hair that good, he moves really slowly." House
shuffled the trash onto his tray. "Well, I'm off to provoke the boss. I
hear she had to spend the morning in NICU. Best to get all the crying out
of her system before she's in a room with people who control our futures."
He left, snatching one last fry, and Wilson sighed and ate the rest of his
meal, shaking his head slowly. That explained why they both looked so
relaxed, anyway. Cuddy's composure wasn't beatific, it was afterglow. He
smiled despite himself. The situation was bizarre, but he couldn't deny
that it had improved the quality of his life considerably, the two of them
being happy. The timing was good too: they had gotten together around the
time House's newfound-health-and-mobility endorphins should have been
wearing off. House had been a lot more open and pleasant since he'd been
able to walk without constant pain, and now with this Cuddy thing, he was
almost affectionate. Cameron was going to be pissy, but that was for
another day.

House was as reckless in his joy as he had been in his misery, which was
either fortunate or unfortunate for the hospital, depending on the day and
the patient. He was still entirely lacking in bedside manner, still with
that genius for taking the right risk on a patient with no hope left. He
still blew off his paperwork and made Cameron do it though it should have
gone to Foreman, who had the least seniority. He was still an irritating
jerk the greatest part of the time, trying to blow off his clinic duty,
but he was enjoying himself, and that kept himself from destroying himself
the way he had before. Wilson at least was glad for that. He ran into
House on the way to his office. House gave him the thumbs up and ducked
into the office without waiting to see Wilson's response.

"Good morning!" House said to his team, who looked less than enthusiastic.
He reflected that he'd have to come up with a better nickname for them one
of these days. They weren't responding well to being called the kids.

"It's afternoon," Chase pointed out.

"Time flies when you're having fun," said House. "What have you got for
me?"

"Nothing," said Foreman. "Nothing out of the ordinary this week so far."

"Cuddy's pregnant," said Cameron.

"Have we gone from diagnostics to gossip? Excellent. Get me all the dirt
you can find on the nursing staff."

"We just thought you might know something more about it," said Cameron
meaningfully, as Chase and Foreman looked away to forcibly demonstrate
that "we" in this case did not mean them.

"God, am I pregnant too? Wilson promised me he'd stop in time."

"She talks to you," Cameron insisted.

"Yeah, Cameron, she confides in me. Like, totally. And then we paint each
other's toenails. She's my boss, not my stylist." He looked at the blank
whiteboard. "Go hunt down something fun, or I'll send you all to the
clinic for extra hours."

When they were gone, and only their frustrated disapproval lingered in the
office, he sat down and watched soaps, rubbing his thigh absently. The
pain was gone, except for a lingering ache now and again, but he still had
a good supply of Vicodin now that he barely touched them. The detox had
been a bitch, but he'd spent most of it doubling up on recovery from being
shot anyway. Now he kept mints in an empty bottle, just because he was
used to having something to toy with and something to put in his mouth. He
squeezed his thigh experimentally. He was fascinated by the new strength
of the muscle underneath the old puckering of the scars and the places
where they'd removed the tissue entirely.

The phone rang and he debated not answering it, but it was a commercial
break anyway.

"House."

"I hear my secret's out," said Cuddy.

"Hey, maybe if you hadn't gotten fat, it would still be a secret." He
swiveled in his chair.

"I don't have anywhere else to put it," said Cuddy, fortunately sounding
amused more than angry. "How's Cameron?"

"Pissy."

"Too bad," she said and she really didn't sound repentant at all.

"I think she suspects. She all but accused me of fatherhood. I blamed
Wilson."

"Very smooth," she said. "You really are one of the least subtle people I
know."

"How was the board meeting?"

"It went well. For once, they have no immediate reasons to fire you."

The soap was back on. He half-watched it, listening to Cuddy. "Someone's
been keeping me up nights. I'm too tired to make trouble."

"Yes, it's all my fault that you're behaving like a normal person instead
of a psychopath."

"Seriously," he said, "you're like a little heating unit these days.
That's not a baby. It's a tiny furnace. And yet your feet are still cold.
Women are a mystery."

"Go do your clinic hours," she said.

"Yes, mistress." He hung up but waited for the credits to roll over the
melodramatic doctors before he turned the television off and loped down to
the clinic to face down the usual setlist of minor complaints and idiotic
self-cures. He dosed a couple of kids with sniffly noses and found himself
wondering what his kid would look like when it finally arrived, but it was
a minor distraction in the lineup of minor illnesses.

He popped his head into Cuddy's office after. "Lisa," he said, and she
looked up with the starry eyes he saw more and more of lately.

"Hey," she said softly.

"I was thinking of going back to my place tonight," he said.

"Okay," she said without hesitation. "I have that appointment in the
morning anyway." She smiled at him.

House had been looking forward to a night alone with his piano, but seeing
her looking pleased just to see him changed his mind. "Want to come over?"
he offered. "I'll play you all the low down dirty jazz you can handle."

"I thought I was a furnace." But she said the words lightly, with a little
smile playing about her lips.

"I'll deal with it somehow. It is pretty wintery these days."

She started to say something and then winced and gripped the edge of the
desk. He strode across the room to her and knelt by her chair. "What's
wrong?" He tipped up her chin, checked her pupils with a practiced eye,
touched his fingers to her throat for the pulse.

"Nothing's wrong," she said, and moved his hand from her throat to her
belly, pushing aside her shirttail. "I'm pretty sure the baby's moving."
He pressed his palm against her skin.

"I can't feel it," he said. "You're sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine. Actually, this is great. Would you mind if I came over? It
would help if you could drive me tomorrow morning, since it's going to be
distracting to have this thing wiggling around in there."

"That's my kid you're talking about," he said softly. "I wasn't sure you
wanted me at these appointments."

"Greg," she said, as if it were a foregone conclusion, "if I didn't think
I wanted you to be involved in this whole process, I would have kicked you
out of bed when you started saying you'd probably get possessive. Or,
given that I know you're territorial, I would have never asked you in the
first place. I'm not saying you should marry me and turn into some kind of
homemaker. I just thought you might like to see the medical side of this
and not just the biological side."

"When you put it that way, who could resist?" he said, and got up a little
awkwardly. He kissed the top of her head. "Call me when you're done here."
She tipped her face up and he kissed her again and left her with her
paperwork.

In his office, he brooded with his ball, rubbing his chin over it. Cuddy
was a better addiction than anything he'd tried before, he decided. She
was safer than Stacy because she had better reasons for putting up with
him. This half-relationship of theirs was bewildering all around: they
took it for granted that three or four nights a week, one of them would be
spending the night with the other, usually at her house. There weren't any
hard feelings if someone went home alone. They made love, they kept house
together and made food at all hours, they laughed together, they were
having a kid together, but they still had ideas of separate lives or some
kind of independence. She rolled her eyes when he watched The L Word and
she didn't try to put air fresheners in his bathroom. He rubbed her feet
while he watched his trash tv and he tried to remember to put the toilet
seat down, but he didn't tell her loved her unless she was asleep, and she
never said it to him either, except to comment on how perverse she had to
be to love putting up with him.

It was a dangerous game by nature, sleeping with the boss, but when he was
the main reason Cuddy might get fired and he was playing nice, they could
both be safe. They were more discreet since they'd told Wilson about the
pregnancy: they spent less time together in public areas, talked only in
empty offices, kept businesslike manners generally in the office, and
tried not to be seen goign home together. She was good at her job and he
was good at his job and neither one of them wanted to leave
Princeton-Plainsboro, but he would be fired if she was, and he wasn't sure
he wanted to work under any other Dean if he was forced out on his own.
This issue, of course, was something he'd considered long and hard up
until the moment they had gone to bed together, and then not again for
several weeks of startled distracted happiness.

He had mentioned it to her once and she had told him that whether they
were sleeping together was none of anyone else's goddamned business, and
she'd been fighting for him for years with no rewards, so why would the
board find her abnormally biased now? He wasn't sure whether to hope that
the kid looked like him or fear it. Three more months - Cuddy was in her
fourth. He had expected to carry on with his blithe solitude, despite his
interest in Cuddy's welfare and his time in her bed, but these days he was
worrying for three. It troubled him and it brought him more satisfaction
than anything had in a long time, outside of medicine. That troubled him
too.

He put down the ball and rustled through his back logs of paperwork. That
always frustrated him enough to forget whatever was on his mind, and by
the time Cuddy called, he was swearing at his recalcitrant pen and his own
bad habits. She let the phone ring only once and hung up before he could
pick up, but he knew it was her. He stood up, stiff and cranky. It was
going to rain, one of those awful winter storms full of sleet. His thigh
ached. When he got home, he'd have a Vicodin and a drink and he'd play for
Cuddy and reassure himself that nothing had changed that much, except that
he wouldn't have to limp when he took her to bed, and he'd have someone to
soap his back in the morning.

House rode his bike home, Cuddy coming along somewhere behind him, and got
in before the storm had really hit. He threw a cover over his bike and
rattled the key in the door, a little off balance against the ache of his
leg. It was supposed to be bones that did that, not muscles, but he
supposed the changing barometric pressure did something to the feeble
veins threading through the injured tissue. There was still Vicodin in the
pocket of his winter coat, and he threw one back with the familiar motion.
Probably at this point he could have gotten by with 800 milligrams of
ibuprofen, but he was used to the bitter dry shape of the Vicodin working
down his throat and the gentle floating sensation that would follow as the
whiskey moved through his system. He went to the kitchen and sloshed a
couple of fingers into a tumbler.

When she knocked on the door, breathless and windblown with her coat
buttoned awkwardly over her belly, he was playing the piano. She didn't
have a key to his place, and he pretended not to be able to find the keys
to hers. He unlocked the door and pulled her inside, against him, kissing
her deeply as he unbuttoned her coat. He pushed it and her purse over her
shoulders and hung it on the coat rack without letting her break the kiss.

"You've been drinking," she said when he let her go, her voice husky and
breathless still.

"Not done yet. Come here. I want to play for you."

She followed him after toeing her shoes off. "When I said just now...I
didn't mean you shouldn't or that I'm judging you." She sat down on the
bench next to him and he looked down at her.

"I know."

"I mean, it's not really my call. You're a grown man and I'm not your
keeper."

"My leg hurts. I had a Vicodin and some whiskey. If I thought you were
trying to be my keeper, I wouldn't tell you these things. And now I'm
going to play the piano for you." He put his fingers over the keys without
any real plan, just started to play whatever came into his head, low and
jangly and a little mournful, with some grace notes to even out the mood.
The important thing was letting the music out of his body; all the words
and the notes were starting to make his bones vibrate. Cuddy leaned
against him. The sleet in her hair melted against his shoulder. He let all
his worries out in the music, all his hopes. He played Stacy. He played
the infarction. He took one hand off the keyboard and reached for the
whiskey, but didn't stop playing, his eyes almost closed. He played Wilson
and Cuddy and the baby, happier themes threading through it, and he played
the discovery of the fertility drugs, and the shots, and he played the
shooting and the pain, all the familiar jazz themes. He could hear
Gershwin, "Someone to Watch Over Me", and Ellington playing "Summertime"
for Lady Ella, and Miles Davis, but it was his own music built around
theirs, and it took a long time for him to realize that the warmth against
his shoulder was the damp of Cuddy's tears as he played falling in love
with her, his head rolling lightly with the rhythm of his fingers.

"Greg," she said throatily, and his own eyes prickled with tears, for the
first time in longer than he could remember. The Vicodin and the alcohol
were working, stronger than he remembered, and the storm outside rattled
the windows, and he had not expected this to be such a catharsis. "I had
no idea," she said, and licked her lips, and he kissed her, almost
incidentally, his forehead against hers for comfort and his fingers still
moving over the piano.

"Have you had anything to eat?" she murmured, breathing against him,
sniffling a little against her tears.

"No," he said. "Not since lunch."

"I'm going to go find some food for you, okay?" She put her hands against
his cheeks, supporting his head as she moved hers away. His face felt
cold. "Keep playing. I'll be back soon."

So he played The Grand Theme of Steve McQueen Rat About Town, and he
played Cuddy finding her way around his kitchen and she provided the
pot-clanking accompaniment, and he played figuring out a really tough
case, and he played losing a patient, and he played unexpected
intoxication, and he played his team with little squeaky notes for Cameron
objecting and some smooth bass runs for Foreman and a perky theme for
Chase with an unexpected note here and there, and then he played the
warmth of bed after a long night, and then Cuddy was waving a bowl of stew
under his nose. He stood reluctantly and hobbled over to the couch, stiff
all over. She had found some bread and put it through the toaster, and he
spooned down the stew hungrily, remembering his appetite.

"Don't expect this kind of service to be a routine thing," she said,
easing down beside him. He looked at her gratefully.

"Thanks. Maybe you should be my keeper."

Her eyes softened and she smiled a little. "There's a thankless job."

"True enough," he said, and soaked an edge of the bread in the stew.

"The baby liked the music," she said. "It moved a lot." He reached over
with the hand that didn't hold the spoon and put his palm against her
stomach, and she lifted her sweater and repositioned his hand.

"Great," he said when nothing happened. "Kid hates me already." And then
he felt it, the shifting movement under her skin and he turned to her with
surprise in his eyes. "I'll be damned. We did this?"

"We did," she said. "Finish your food and we'll go to bed." He ate
obediently as she moved around the apartment, pulling a toothbrush out of
her purse and disappearing into his bathroom. When he finished, he left
the bowl on the coffee table and found Cuddy already in bed, wearing one
of his t-shirts. He brushed his teeth, leaning heavily against the
counter, and pissed the whiskey away, feeling a deeper contentment than
alcohol usually brought. He had seen pregnant women before, fetuses
twitching on ultrasounds, but this was personal, and he was intrigued by
it. He slid into bed against Cuddy, and she murmured sleepily.

In the morning it was still sleeting. He made them coffee, used his to
wash down a Vicodin under her eyes. She shrugged.

"My professional opinion is that you should take it easy with those, but
you know best."

"Habit," he said. "I should really start putting ibuprofen in these
bottles."

"Maybe so," she said, looking at her coffee with longing. He had forgotten
she was trying to stay off caffeine. She got a glass of water instead to
wash down her vitamins, and he poured her coffee into his cup when she
wasn't looking, and put bread in the toaster. She smeared hers with peanut
butter and he offered her some ancient jam.

"You should take that to the lab," she said with distaste. "It's probably
sentient."

He drove very carefully on the way to the clinic, unaccountably nervous
about being held responsible for Cuddy's situation for the first time.
They'd probably slap him on the back, all that new-dad crap, offer to let
him hear the heartbeat as if he hadn't heard a hundred thousand heartbeats
over his years in medicine. Or he could pace in the waiting room, again
the echo of the countless fathers before him. No, he decided, he'd go into
the room like the medical professional he was. He could take it. Cuddy
looked at him with a smile twisted into the corners of her mouth, as if
she knew what he was thinking.

The OB looked pleased to see Cuddy, ran her through the normal barrage of
questions and tests, and praised her health and vigor as House sat on a
stool in the corner of the room. "And you're House?" she asked, and he
nodded, and she smiled, and that was that. He watched the ultrasound
quietly, looking at the arms and legs and round alien head of the thing
that would be his kid. He understood why people got astonished. Fetuses
were more interesting than livers.

He was quiet all day at work, after dropping Cuddy discreetly by the
entrance and then parking and coming in separately, or as discreetly as
could be done considering he was driving her car. Wilson came in as he was
watching the lunchtime soaps, frowning a little at the television.

"How was the thing this morning?" Wilson asked, perching on the edge of
House's desk.

"Fine. Weird."

"Everybody healthy?"

"The as yet unnamed, unsexed House/Cuddy sprog is healthy as a tadpole,"
said House. "Cuddy/House sprog. Couse. Huddy. Whatever."

"Is it as amazing as they say?" Wilson asked in a low voice, and House
looked at him in surprise.

"Jimmy, are you suffering from sprog envy?"

Wilson shrugged helplessly. "It just doesn't seem likely to be something
I'll ever experience. I thought I'd ask you."

"It's pretty cool," admitted House. "But don't tell anyone. I'll lose my
macho image."

"Who would I tell? Cuddy would eviscerate me."

"True." House stood and stretched. "Let's go get some lunch and talk about
something manly. Did you catch those reruns of The L Word? I was right,
wasn't I? It's better on mute."

+ this head and these arms +

Cuddy had thought that by now she would be tired of being pregnant, but
instead she was still fascinated by the way her belly had grown. Probably,
she thought, the endorphins flooding her system helped: nature knew how to
keep women happy even as their bodies grew unwieldy. She did miss running.
Now she did water aerobics with a bunch of old women and other expectant
mothers, but it wasn't the same. She missed her tailored suits, too, but
House was so enamoured of her increasingly ample breasts that somehow that
part of it evened out. She just found maternity clothing that was fairly
well cut and went on showcasing her cleavage. Cuddy had switched to ballet
flats because her feet were too swollen and achy for heels, and she had to
pee all the time, but she was generally untroubled by these developments.
It was only on evenings after stressful days that she went home and looked
longingly into her closet at her slinky dresses and the stockings that
went with the lingerie she couldn't wear before padding off to the kitchen
for a pint of ice cream.

She and House were still taking things one day at a time, though now he
generally came to her OB appointments, and once in a while would hold her
hand during the ultrasound. They had decided not to find out the sex of
the child, or Cuddy had, and House had shrugged and watched their child's
internal gymnastics on the fuzzy little screen. He had one of the computer
generated models of the fetus tacked onto his refrigerator; she had seen
him stand in front of it for minutes at a time before reaching into the
fridge for whatever he'd come for in the first place. They didn't talk
about baby names, but he painted the nursery for her one weekend, the sage
green that she liked.

They were spending fewer nights together. She found it difficult to get
comfortable even with the entire bed to herself, but he would call before
he went to sleep, just leaving the phone live on top of the piano as he
played lullabies and sonatas for her. She missed the way he breathed when
he was asleep, and the weight of his arm over her hip, but the baby
fidgeted and she itched and her legs cramped and she kept House up, and it
was better if only one of them was sleepless. On the weekends he would
come over and put her in the bath, douse her in lotion, and cook some
Gregory House version of a healthy dinner, which involved a lot of whole
wheat pasta because there wasn't much else he could make. She suspected he
stopped by McDonald's before he came over, because he'd never been a whole
grains type of guy, but she appreciated the gesture. After dinner, he
would rub her back and legs as she arched into his hands with those long
fingers so limber from playing the piano. Sometimes they made love,
finding ways to work around her new bulkiness, and it was so gentle and
joyous that she cried and laughed at the same time, and he brushed her
hair gently away from her face.

At the hospital, it was a busy time, and Cuddy alternated between periods
of almost manic energy where she waddled around the halls making sure
things happened, and periods of exhaustion where she hid in her office and
did paperwork.

"Shouldn't you be thinking about taking some time off?" asked Wilson,
looking worried. "Not to be rude, Cuddy, but you're about as big as a
house, so to speak, and you spend half the day napping on your couch. Farm
some things out. The hospital will be okay without you for a few weeks."

"Let her work," said House, sprawled on her couch as if he had nothing
better to do. "If you kick her out, she'll just be miserable and nag
everyone she can call."

"Can we stop talking as if I'm not here?" she snapped, feet propped on her
desk as she read through the day's files, and House snorted.

"Then again," he said, "there are the mood swings."

"House," she said warningly.

"I'm on your side!" he protested, and Wilson laughed under his breath, and
then Cuddy was laughing too.

"See?" said House. "Mood swings!" But she couldn't seem to hold it against
him.

"It isn't as if we don't have an obstetrics department," she pointed out.
"I mean, if it came down to that."

"We have other departments?" House pulled a face of great amazement.
"You've been seeing other doctors besides me and the Boy Wonder Oncologist
here?"

"Don't you have any work to do?" she asked.

"Cameron keeps my schedule," he said automatically. "Check with her."

"Yeah, she's thrilled with me."

"You did steal her man," Wilson said, hands on his hips. "Isn't that
against the code of the sisterhood?"

"If the two of you don't get out of my office, I swear to God, I'll fire
both of you," Cuddy said, and buried her face in the file. Her stomach
made a convenient resting place for the manila folders these days. House
swung his legs off her couch.

"Too bad Chase won't make up his damn mind about going after Cameron. Get
her off all our backs and onto hers." A sudden gleam came into his eyes.
"This will take some delicate plotting. Wilson, to the batcave!"

Wilson rolled his eyes and followed House out of Cuddy's office, hearing
her sigh as the door swung shut behind them.

"I will never understand how she puts up with you," he said to House as
they walked toward the elevators.

"Ah, but you see, Jimmy, I'm extraordinarily good in bed."

Wilson winced. "Do we need to have another conversation about
inappropriate conversation topics? Which category would most certainly
include any mention of you and my immediate boss doing anything involving
nudity?"

"Who said anything about nudity? That would be entirely indiscreet in a
work setting."

"House!"

"I will never understand why you insist on trying to keep me from being on
time to the clinic," House said loudly as they reached the nurses'
station. She smiled skeptically.

"Exam room three," she said, and there was a wicked glint in her eyes.
"It's an oozer."

House shot her a glance of somewhat diluted hatred and moved toward the
exam room, wishing under his breath for something exotic to show up soon,
cholera or Ebola or hell, some rare strain of the flu would do. Anything
that required a lot of brain power. He was tired of clinic patients, who
all suffered from the same underlying disease of idiocy, except the ones
who were unintentionally terminal by the time they came in. All he spent
his time thinking about these days was Cuddy and the baby and that was a
dangerous path. They'd never talked over the terms of the parenthood,
whether he'd be changing diapers and splitting the cost of college. He had
been curious to see how the pregnancy would go, what the kid would look
like. He was prepared to shoulder his share of the hospital's attention
when the paternity of the sprog was revealed. And yes, he owed it to Cuddy
to be there for her through at least some of the kid's development, give
her some sort of monetary support, if nothing else. But the longer he was
with her, the more he wanted to stay with her. The first couple of weeks,
when they'd been trying to conceive, had set a precedent of intimacy that
he didn't want to surrender, and the months after it had only deepened it.
He loved Cuddy, and he loved seeing this transformation she was going
through, this joint project of theirs that waved at them from a blurry
screen and kicked him in the middle of the night. It was moving in a way
he didn't want to admit. 

But what about when the kid arrived? There would be squalling. There would
be cuddling to be done. The kid needed a good chance at growing up not
quite as twisted as its parents, and that meant he needed to figure out
how one went about caring for an utterly helpless individual. As Cuddy
would cheerfully point out, he had never been the most rational or
responsible of people. Moving in the abstract was well and good, but it
didn't make up for the reality of parenting a newborn: the crying, the
feeding, the utter inability of the thing to communicate its basic needs
aside from screaming and filling its diapers. House could barely
communicate with fully functional adults most of the time. 

Somehow he wanted it to work out anyway, wanted put his diagnostic skills
toward something that would last longer than a few weeks. Maybe figuring
out the particular tone of a scream that meant a certain thing would be
more rewarding than matching symptoms to nuanced diseases. 

He realized the patient was looking at him expectantly and that he had no
idea what she'd been saying for the last few minutes.

"When did you say this all started?" he asked, pretending to make notes in
her file.

His oozer turned out to have a bad allergy to mangos that made her lips
crack and leak and scab. He wrote her a prescription for antihistimines
and sent her away, then ran through a cold, a couple of minor STDs, a case
of adult onset chicken pox, and an infected puncture wound that required a
tetanus shot and some antibiotics. He brooded through the rest of the day,
untangled a college student's bad reaction to mixing and matching acne
medications with his team, and thought some more about how temporary it
all was. He solved the cases and the patients disappeared from his life
forever, except in the rare case where their significant other turned up
and shot him. The pain in his leg had shortened his attention span, but
that wasn't a constant concern anymore. He wanted a long project. He
wanted to stay with Cuddy. He was tired of living somewhere outside the
human race, looking in, even if it had been his choice in the first place.

"Maybe we should go to Lamaze classes," he said that night in the bath,
over at Cuddy's on a rare week night. She leaned back against his chest,
suds lapping at the sides of her belly, which rose above the water like an
island.

"Why?"

"It's a thing people do," he said. "I don't know."

"I was thinking about a C-section. No Lamaze, no epidurals, faster
turnaround, no danger of vaginal tearing."

He winced. "Can we never use that phrase again?"

"Wimp." 

They drifted in the warm water, her fingers drawing idle circles in his
knee. 

"I just don't know how much you want me involved here," he said.

"Greg," she said gently, "you don't exactly fit the stereotype of the
pacing father in the waiting room."

"You've never seen me at the top of my pacing form. I can pace with the
champions."

"Look, I know you love your life the way it is. I know you love your
independence. I'm not going to make you give that up."

"I love you," he said after a pause. 

"That doesn't mean you can give up the things you've always valued."

He let out a long breath. It was strange to talk to the top of her head
and feel the sweet rumble of her voice through the bones of her ribs.
"Lisa, I just made my biggest emotional declaration of the last six
years."

"Greg," she said, and her voice was tender, "I'm not quite as heavy a
sleeper as you think I am."

"Oh."

She tipped her head back onto his shoulder, talking to his chin and the
slope of his cheek. "You were right when you said we're too set in our
ways to woo peaceably, or whatever it was. This is a good thing we have
and God knows I love you more than I should, but I can't take the risk of
trying to set up house with you and then you getting restless. I want this
baby to have a stable environment to grow up in. It's fine if we split our
lives between two houses, because we know to respect each other's space,
but a child doesn't have a sense of that."

"What makes you think I'd cut and run?"

"I saw you push Stacy away twice," she said. "I don't want that to happen
to me and my child."

"So you're pushing first?" He sat up a little and her shoulders shifted
against his chest. 

"I can't ask you to change."

"I have changed," he said, low and fierce. "Look at me. Whether I wanted
to or not, I've changed. Since Stacy left, since my leg healed, since this
thing with you...nothing is the same. I'm trying to figure out how I can
be a father. It's not just your kid, Cuddy, it's OUR kid. If you didn't
want that to be true, you shouldn't have let me stay. You shouldn't have
let me come to the OB appointments. You shouldn't have let me wash your
hair and you shouldn't have let me feel the kid kicking. Yeah, the
followthrough on this particular case is a little bit more difficult to
work out, but I'm trying. Talk to me."

"You want to be around? To stay around?" she asked in a thin little voice,
and he wished there were enough space in the tub to turn her face to face
with him.

"I do, but," he paused. For some reason this was harder to say than
telling her he loved her. "I need help. I need you to talk me through it.
I need me to tell you when I'm being an idiot, and maybe sometimes I need
to go into a dark room with a piano and not come out for a couple of
hours."

"Say it again." 

"This is hard enough."

"Say it."

He fought her order briefly, biting the inside of his lip. "I need help. I
need you to help me."

"Greg." She struggled, slippery in his arms, and wound up on her knees
facing him. Her eyes were bright. He admired the gleaming curves of her
breasts and stomach in the low light of the bathroom, the candles
flickering on the counter. "I was never going to ask you for this kind of
committment."

"I know," he said. "You're too goddamned stubborn for your own good.
Little Miss Does Everything, Queen of the Workaday World. Mothering the
whole hospital in addition to producing the perfect child."

"And you are the most intense, narcissistic, irritating, ridiculously
complicated person I've ever known." He thought she had tears in her eyes.
"It's kind of intimidating to live under your microscope. All that
patented House focus just boring holes through me, some days." He shifted
uncomfortably, knocking his shoulderblades on the tile behind him. She put
one wet hand in the center of his chest. "And yet I don't remember ever
being this happy."

"That's the hormones," he said. She snorted. "This could make problems at
work, if we make this real. Officially," he amended.

"If anyone gives me shit, I'll just put Foreman in charge of the
department again," she said and he smiled. Some things would never change.
His chest ached with deep sense of relief and comfort and he was suddenly
inexpressibly tired. 

"We should buy a new house," she said. "Somewhere to start over on
learning to live with each other. Neutral territory, with a room for your
piano. Spare bedroom in case we feel like sleeping apart."

"Stubborn and overly practical," he said. "I already painted the nursery."

"It was good practice," she said. "Greg, if we're going to make this work,
let's make it work. We're adults; these are reasonable allowances. You and
I have extremely stressful jobs and we value our personal space. We don't
have to have a traditional relationship. It probably won't be easy no
matter how many conditions we set."

"You trusted me," he said, reaching an arm out around her waist. "You
trusted me with maybe the most important secret of your life. I trust you.
One roof. No waiting. I'll even talk to City Hall, if that's what you
decide. As long as the piano can live with us, and my couch. Also, my bed
is nicer than yours."

'If that's what you need."

"I need you," he said and slid awkwardly against the porcelain, bracing
himself so he could kiss her.

"It took you long enough to say it," she murmured against his lips, and he
kissed his way across her cheek and down her neck, letting his stubble
scrape against the soft place where her pulse was, the ridge of her
collarbone still so prominent despite the weight she'd gained. He ran a
hand over her breasts, feeling the ache in his hamstrings from the strange
way he was sitting, and followed fingers with lips, his other hand tracing
patterns on her thighs under the slosh of the sudsy water.

"House," she moaned, and he let his fingers wander closer to the cleft of
her legs. She rose a little higher on her knees, the bathmat crackling
under her.

"Just looking for a little mutuality," he whispered against the underside
of her breast. "Admit it. You need me too."

"I would have admitted it any time you'd asked," she panted, rocking
against his hand. "Professionally. I needed you. The hospital needed you."

"Personally," he demanded, and dropped his head further to kiss the hard
swell of her stomach. 

"I need you," she moaned, as his hand slid against her under the
waterline. "God, I wanted to kill Stacy when she was playing those games
with you."

"It's a dizzy world in which you're the sanest thing to ever happen to me,
little witch." He nuzzled her cleavage to make her whimper. "But thank you
for loving me that much."

"I saved you," she said. "You're mine." He felt oddly touched by the
arrogance of her declaration, her absolute certainty of her claim over
him. She eased backwards, settling into the water until she could kiss
him, holding his face between her hands. She could feel the pulse in his
lips. She slid one hand around the back of his head, letting the other
trail down his back until it reached his hip and she traced the line of
the muscle down into his groin, reaching for his erection, warmer than the
water around it.

"Let's go to bed," he said against her throat. "Give the sprog a few good
chances to kick me in the face."

It was awkward trying to get out of the tub, especially as they tried to
keep as much skin contact as possible, and they didn't bother with
toweling off or draining the tub. She licked droplets of water off the
inside of his knee and he kissed the base of her spine and neither of them
minded that the covers were damp. They shifted at a half word here and a
muffled plea there, finding mutually acceptable configurations, making
space for each other and taking pleasure in the other's delight. The
confessions had loosened a lot of knots too accustomed to be noticed, and
the kisses and moans were tinged with an extra sweetness. The prickle of
desire through their bodies reached their eyes and both of them cried a
little, pretending it was leftover bathwater but no real secrets between
them. Cuddy shifted heavily onto her left side and pulled his arm over
her; House curled around her and kissed the nape of her neck with
exhausted solicitude, her hair catching in his stubble. 

As he fell asleep, he thought that nothing had ever been worth so much
effort as this. 

+ three out of two +

It was definitely spring. The trees were blossoming on the Princeton
campus and the clinic had seen a huge increase in allergy sufferers. The
air was warm enough that Cuddy had insisted that House leave some of the
windows open so that their new place could air out, but now it was evening
and cooling off, and he went around closing them all again.

"Shift," he said, coming up behind the couch and sliding over the arm so
that she had to scoot down or risk being sat upon. She had her feet up on
the other armrest, and now her head was wedged against his thigh. "That's
about enough slavery for one day. I've schlepped about half of Jersey from
one room to the other while you were lying here doing nothing. I'd
forgotten how much I hate moving."

"You just don't like other people touching your things, which is why you
haven't finished unpacking even though technically we moved in two weeks
ago," she said, putting her head in his lap. "And I'm not doing nothing.
Gestation is hard work. I don't get to put down what I'm schlepping for
another couple of weeks."

"True enough."

"It is a good house, though."

"As long as I've got the couch and the piano," he said, patting the
leather of the armrest. "And the bed. And you, I guess."

"God, what a romantic," she said, and he let his fingers slide over her
cheekbone. "Ow." She winced and pressed a hand to her stomach.

"Do I have to give the sprog a lecture on how it's not nice to kick people
again?"

"Distract me," she said. "How many languages do you speak?"

"Bits and pieces of this and that." He twisted his fingers gently through
her hair.

"You know Spanish," she prompted. "I heard from Wilson that you know a
little Mandarin, which, by the way, is a funny story about you actually
doing your work, and why do I always have to hear about your antics from
someone else?"

"Makes me look better if my glory comes through the grapevine," he said.
"If I tell you, it's narcissicism. If Wilson tells you, it's sheer
admiration. Trade secrets of the egomaniac."

"You are basically the world authority." She yawned. "Is it true you
learned Hindi so you could get your revenge on that migraine idiot?"

"Maybe. Learned to read it more than speak it."

"Humor me. Say something."

He paused. "Zaroor, mem sahib. Tum deewani ho, aur bahut khubsurati."

"What did you say?"

"I have no idea."

"Oh." She put one hand on her stomach. The baby was still hiccupping.
"Sounded pretty hot. All throaty. I bet your pronounciation's terrible."

"Yeah, but I make up for it in other ways." He picked up the hand that
wasn't on her belly and kissed her palm, brushing his lips over the
creases of her skin until her breath got ragged. "Is that enough of a
distraction?"

"Where did you learn all of this?"

"Hindi or kissing?"

"All of it." His grin was crooked as she watched him upside down.

"That's a long story."

"I've got time," she said.

"It all started one chilly December morning in the late 1950s," he began,
and she listened to him spin wild and probably untrue stories about his
childhood mischiefs until she fell asleep, their child still shifting in
her belly.

She was restless for the next few weeks, and so was he, as the due date
eased closer. She'd talked through it with her OB and decided a C-section
was the way to go, given her narrow hips and the hefty size of the child,
and House went along with it without much griping after she used the
phrase "vaginal tearing" a few more times and asked if he really wanted to
see her screaming in the delivery room.

"Not like that," he said in that low sexy voice, sitting on the corner of
her desk, and she rolled her eyes and feigned disinterest. "Cuddy." He
caught at her hand. "This is a major surgery. You're sure a little ripping
is worth the risk?"

"House, I oversaw the hiring of our entire obstetrics department. My OB
trusts them. I trust them. They're good surgeons. It's a routine procedure
for them, and we're doing the lower uterine instead of the classical
section, which means there's much less risk involved. The women in my
family have a history of extraordinarily difficult births and we think
that this is safer for me. It may take me a couple of weeks to recover
fully, but that just means that you get to let your inner control freak
run rampant and bring me all kinds of soup from the deli." She squeezed
his fingers comfortingly. "Our surgeons saw you through your major
surgeries."

"Exactly why I'm concerned," he grumbled. "Have you seen my scars?"

"We'll match," she said and he looked down at her desk with that smile
that showed his dimples. "Go away," she said. "Go do your work. In a
couple of days, we're going to have a baby. A very big baby."

"That's pretty much going to blow our cover as far as this whole
relationship thing goes," he said, "because I'm definitely going to be in
that OR."

"You're going to make my surgeons nervous."

"They're going to do the best damn job of their lives," he said grimly.

"I watched your surgeries," she said suddenly. "All of them. The
infarction, the muscle removal, the bullets. Scariest hours of my life."
She pushed her cheek into the heel of the hand he wasn't holding, elbow
braced on the desk and her fingers against her hairline.

"I thought you held Stacy's hand through the first one," he murmured,
flexing the muscle of his thigh a little, remembering the agony. The
bullet had been better; he'd gone into shock, at least.

Cuddy shook her head. "I left her in the waiting room. I had to be there
with you. It was my fault you were there."

"It was nobody's fault," he said. "Except that idiot who wouldn't listen
to me in the first place. You listened." He paused. "I can't help wishing
I could make you go home and rest."

"Greg, we're in a hospital. Nothing's going to happen. If I were at home,
how would you check up on me every half hour?"

He looked thoughtful. "What kind of paternity leave policy do we have?"

"Why don't you go to your office and look it up? Remember? We gave you an
office, name on the door and everything?" She looked pointedly at the
door. "Go. I've got work to do and so do you."

"Taskmaster," he grumbled, and paused at the door. "The other thing - when
we declare this to the world, the lawyers are going to be mad. Just
guessing. I don't have a lot of experience with lawyers being mad."

"They'll deal with it," she said. "This hospital doesn't have a
fraternization clause, and I'm still going to fight you just as hard when
I think you're wrong. When it comes to the question of your dubious genius
or this hospital, the hospital has to come first. Just be glad it isn't
Stacy anymore."

"You have no idea how glad I am of that," he said.

"She's going to find out."

"I know," he said. "I was going to make Wilson call her later. But she
can't stand over my shoulder all professionally anymore. I'm one up in the
game of moving on - she got married, but I knocked somebody up."

"You're not married, though," she pointed out. "I think that puts you
equal in the ranks."

"I could be," he said softly, and she looked up from her file.

"Go to work," she told him, but her eyes were shining. "We'll talk about
that later. Maybe."

House whistled all the way back to Wilson's office and sprawled in the
chair in front of Wilson's desk. "Tell me everything you know about
getting married."

Wilson looked skyward and put his pen down on top of the file he'd been
going through. "What now? Is Cuddy asking for a ring?"

"Nope. All my idea." He kicked at Wilson's desk. "Though I appreciate that
you think I'd only get married if I had to and not because I wanted to."

"You've never seemed the marrying type," Wilson said. "You didn't even
propose to Stacy, and the two of you were together for five years. Until
Cuddy, she was the love of your life."

"I find that as I age, I get more and more into exclusive rights over my
women," House said. "Also, I don't want anyone calling my kid a bastard
unless they've got a good reason. You have to earn this kind of notariety
on your own." He leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. "Just
tell me if it's going to be a total disaster."

"What, because I'm the expert on disastrous marriages? Thanks." Wilson got
up and paced a little. "By the way, I didn't mean that I thought Cuddy
would be the only one to want to make it permanent. She's just more into
propriety than you are."

"She doesn't give a damn about propriety except as it could harm the
hospital for her to look more partial to me than normal," House said. "All
I have to do is continue being brilliant."

"Or she could make Foreman head of your department again," Wilson said
thoughtful.

"See, why does everyone think that's funny?" House frowned.

Wilson stopped pacing and spread his hands on his desk. "You're serious
about this marriage thing?"

House shrugged. "I'm game if she's game. We bought a house a couple of
weeks ago. By the way, guess who gets to call Stacy?"

"Oh, no," Wilson said. "No, no, no. This is your baby, Greg. She's your
ex. You call her."

"I don't have her number," House pointed out.

"Fortunately, due to the miracle of modern technology and organization, I
have a phone and my Rolodex right here." Wilson gestured broadly, and
flipped through the little address cards until he found Stacy's. He
dialed, picked up the receiver, and held it out to House.

House jerked his chin at the phone. "Put it on speaker." Wilson looked
worried but pressed the button and set the receiver down.

"Stacy Warner," came the cool voice from the phone.

"Stacy!" said House, standing and leaning over the desk. "My leg's healed,
so everything's square between us. By the way, I'm going to be a dad in
the next couple of days and I'm thinking seriously about getting married."

"Greg? What's going on?"

"Can Mark walk yet? You've got an impressive track record of crippling the
significant men in your life. Two for two. Good thing I had an insane cure
and a doctor who knows me well enough to implement it. I think I ran ten
miles yesterday."

"Why did you call me?" Her voice vibrated with anger. Wilson looked up at
House, who sighed.

"I thought you should know," he said quietly. "In case things didn't work
out with Mark. I'm finally over you."

"All hostility aside, of course."

"Stacy," he said, remembering how she had always stilled at that tone in
his voice.

"You're having a baby?" Now her voice was trembling.

"With Lisa. Cuddy."

"Well," she said. "This is a surprise." There was a long pause. "Is James
there?"

"Hey, Stacy."

"You're not going to let him go too crazy?" she asked. House knew she was
touching the crucifix at her throat, pushing her hand underneath the hair
at the back of her neck. But it wasn't painful anymore so think of her
doing these things, just a kind of vague regret that at one point, he had
loved her and it hadn't worked.

He leaned in as Wilson failed to formulate a response. "Steve McQueen
sends his regards. Uh oh. Gotta go. A patient just ran by on fire." He
pressed the disconnect button and let his head hang heavy for a brief
moment.

"Got that off your chest?" Wilson murmured.

"Close enough." House slapped his palms on the desk and stood up. "Well,
time to go torture my team. Day after tomorrow is Labor Day. I'm hosting
poker in my office. The kids will never know what they walked into."

"Don't we have to work?"

"Call in sick. They'll never trace you to the third floor. Anyway, it
should be over pretty fast. I just need something to distract me while
Cuddy's in pre-op. I'm forbidden to piss off the obstetrics team until
they're actually in surgery. After that, we'll just be celebrating." He
started to walk away. "Bring chips."

"It's weird that you still call each other by your last names," Wilson
shouted after him.

"Hot, though, right?" House shouted back, and slipped into his office next
door.

His team was sitting around the table looking cranky. Foreman was
glowering at Chase and Cameron, who were sitting on the same side of the
table not looking at each other.

"Uh oh," said House. "Foreman, Chase been playing with your toys again?"

"Just because they're sleeping together doesn't mean they should drop all
professionalism," burst out Foreman. "This case we've got could be any
number of things, but they're insisting that it's vasculitis."

"It is vasculitis!" said Cameron. "And whether or not Chase and I are
sleeping together has no effect on our medical opinions. We just happen to
agree in this case!"

"It could be Addison's!" Foreman said. "The discolouration of the skin is
more consistent with Addison's than with vasculitis."

"Here's a thought," said House, going to pour himself some coffee. Somehow
when you were off most other drugs, caffeine seemed like a godsend. "I
know we don't usually do this, but have you tried running any tests on the
guy?"

Foreman pointed at his fellow Fellows. "They refused to do anything until
you got here. Said it was all unnecessary."

"Chase, Cameron, Foreman: grow up. The differential is just an excuse for
doing as many tests as you can. If you haven't learned that by now, you'll
never be diagnosticians." He stirred his coffee, leaning against the
counter. "Well? Knock yourselves out. Test for both. If you can't tell,
it's clearly in the early stages. Bloodwork, MRI, get a chest x-ray, and
do an ACTH stimulation. And when all those come back negative, we'll
figure out what's really wrong with him. Scoot." He waved them off with
his coffee stirrer, and Cameron gave him a look of deep disdain. Foreman
stomped out.

"Chase," said House, and Chase stopped in the doorway. "The whole point of
you going out with Cameron was so that you would keep her satisfied and
get her off our backs. Can't you give her a little pick me up in the
parking garage or something?"

Chase looked back with the expression of a man who hasn't gotten a lot of
sleep for a few weeks. "You have no idea," he said, and House's eyebrows
went up. Chase pushed off the doorframe with his hand and went off to find
his disgruntled colleagues.

After an afternoon of bickering and a couple of manila envelopes of lab
results, vaculitis or Addison's turned out to be hepatitis.

"I'm really thinking they're just giving us whatever they don't feel like
dealing with these days," House griped. "Anyway. Don't forget to go to the
ATM tomorrow night. We're playing poker on Thursday."

"What? Why?" asked Cameron, shooting puzzled looks at Chase and Foreman.

"Labor Day!" said House, erasing the board.

"It's May," said Chase. "Labor Day isn't until September."

"See how it's the British guy who knows that? You two dropped the ball,"
House said to Foreman and Cameron. "Regardless, we're playing poker on
Thursday."

"Because of Cuddy?" asked Foreman, ducking his head and putting his hands
in his pockets. "Cuddy's labor, right?"

"What could we wish to celebrate more than the return of our Dean's svelte
figure?" asked House. "Bring money. And pretzels. Don't worry, I'll remind
you again tomorrow."

"You and Cuddy? I knew it!" said Cameron, but Chase put his arm around her
and guided her to the door. Foreman just nodded. "Good work, boss," he
said, and left his lab coat over the back of his chair.

"I told my team today," he said to Cuddy later as he puzzled out how to
lay lasagna noodles in the pan. It turned out he had been right: cooking
was for chumps and people with weird allergies who couldn't eat in
restaurants. Unfortunately, Cuddy had a craving and it had to be homemade.
He thought she just wanted to see him in the kitchen from her vantage
point on the couch. "I told Stacy too," he called out.

"Good," she said. "All by yourself, or did you make Wilson do it?"

"He pushed the buttons. I did the talking."

"I'm proud of you," she said, sounding as if she weren't really listening.

"She asked me to run away with her," he adlibbed, dumping sauce and meat
in the pan. "Said she'd wear the really small bikini."

"I hope she remembers to bring sunscreen, wherever you're going that's got
bikini weather in April. She's pretty fair. She'd probably burn."

"Isn't there anything I can do to make you jealous?" He dropped some more
noodles in, carelessly, and shook cheese over the pan.

"Unfortunately for you," she said, "I'm well aware that no one else would
want you."

"Wilson would take me back," he said, and maneuvered the pan into the
oven.

"Wilson knows better," she said, and he went and kissed her on the
forehead. In the corner of the living room, Steve McQueen ran on his
wheel.

"He wouldn't tell me if he thought we'd be able to make a decent effort of
being married," House said, and Cuddy hummed.

"He's a cautious man," she said.

"He did say you were all hung up on propriety."

"Symptom of being an administrator in a hospital where the best doctor is
basically a mad scientist." She moved her hands over her belly.

"Meanwhile, I'm all hung up on you." He wrapped one of her curls around
his finger.

"I won't change my name," she said.

"You don't have any weird objections to making it legal?"

"We bought a house together, Greg. We're having a kid together. It's not
as if I'm not taking this seriously. The conveniences of legality would
probably outweigh the conveniences of not making it legal, given that this
house is big enough for us to get away from each other for a while if we
have to."

"God, Lisa, you're such a romantic," he murmured, a little hurt, and she
tipped her head and gave him one of those brilliant smiles that he saw so
rarely.

"My mother will be thrilled," she said, "and so will yours. But I'm saying
I'm willing to spend the rest of my life with you even if I don't have a
piece of paper reminding me."

He swallowed hard against the warmth swelling in his chest. "That's the
hormones talking, right?"

She rubbed the crown of her head against his thigh. "Where's my lasagna?"

"Has to stay in the oven for another hour, Miss Impatience. Sit up. I'll
rub your back." He let his fingers play over her shoulders, seeking out
the tense muscles. Her shoulders were firm under his hands and he thought
again how much he liked her body, more than any body he'd ever seen.
"Nervous about the kid?"

"Less than I thought I would be." She sighed. "I'm tired. I think I've
read everything ever written about pregnancy and delivering and
c-sections. I have to pee basically every half hour. You have to sleep on
the couch for either of us to get any rest. I'm just ready to be done, but
all I can do now is wait. Been waiting too long to meet this kid. Oooh,
there."

He rolled his thumbs over the knot and she made a happy sound that was
almost a purr. "I spent a couple of hours reading up too," he said.
"Sounds like childbirth is painful and sticky, whatever route you go. And
after that, it's all downhill until they graduate from college and you can
kick them out of the house."

She laughed, and braced herself against the child kicking. "We should
think of names. I kind of like Caleb for a boy. Caleb Cuddy has a nice
ring to it. Even Caleb Cuddy-House."

"It's kind of strange trying to name someone you've never even seen
outside of a womb," he said.

"True, but the birth certificate has to say something."

"How about 'Apoplexy' for a girl? Lexy for short." She elbowed him in the
leg. "Just kidding. Whatever you want is fine. Give her a good Irish name
for your Irish heritage. Colleen or Eileen or Bridget. Moira. Dana. Stop
me when you like something."

"Dana." She rolled it around in her mouth. "Dana's good."

"Glad I could help. Now I need your help on a differential."

"Mmm," she said absently. "Symptoms?"

"Turn around and see."

"Greg!" She moved awkwardly, shifting until she faced him. "Are you sick
and you didn't tell me? What if you're contagious?"

"I'm definitely contagious," he said, "but it's nothing that could hurt
you or the baby."

She looked at him suspiciously. "What are you doing?"

"I have a little problem, just around here." He circled his lips with one
finger. "It necessitates a rapid and prolonged application of heat and
pressure. Delicate area, though. Requires an expert touch."

"Doctor House, are you writing your own prescriptions again?" she asked,
but she was smiling.

"How long has it been since we made out like crazed adolescents?" he
whispered, leaning toward her, letting his mouth brush against the corner
of hers.

"Too long," she said, and moved against him as much as her belly would
allow. The lasagna came out a little burned on top, but neither of them
cared.

Wednesday was a blur. House barely concentrated on his clinic duty, to no
one's surprise. He checked Cuddy's hospital bag five different times to
make sure she had the clothes she wanted and the toothpaste she liked.
Before he knew it, it was Wednesday night, and Cuddy coaxed him into bed
because neither of them were going to sleep much anyway. They lay awake
together, her on her left side and him curled around her back. He kissed
behind her ear, their hands laced over her stomach.

"We're going to be parents tomorrow," she said.

"Blows my mind," he said. "As brain-warping goes, this fatherhood thing is
better than drugs."

"You're going to be a good father," she said.

"All evidence to the contrary. I forgot to go get the application for a
marriage license again. And I don't like fluffy bunnies."

"No hurry," she said, "we know what we want. And look at you. You care so
much about things, and you've fixed your life up so much. I haven't seen
you take a really stupid risk on yourself since before you got shot.
You're going to put all that passion into being a dad and the kid is going
to grow up just fine. I'll take loyalty, intelligence, and true love over
fluffy bunnies any day."

"I just figured you were going to be a hell of a mom," he said against the
rim of her ear, "and if I was screwing up, you'd let me know."

"Oooh," she moaned softly, tensing.

"Usually it takes more than that to get you to make that sound," he said,
raising up on one elbow and pressing his palm to her abdomen.
"Contraction?"

"I'm not sure," she said, eyes wide. "Oof."

"I'll start timing," he said.

"Greg, relax." She pulled him back down. "It's going to be a long time
before anything really happens, even if it was a contraction, but I think
the baby just kicked the wrong thing. We'll go in at the usual time." He
lay down behind her again and stroked her belly, grazing her breasts with
the edge of his thumb.

"How long do you get to keep these for?"

"Unbelievable," she said, but he knew she was smiling.

They managed to sleep a little. When they went into the hospital, the
contractions still weren't regular, or at least weren't strong enough to
matter, but the OB looked her up and down and admitted her. "Out," she
said to House. "I'll page you when you need to scrub up. I know you want
to be around, but frankly, you make everyone crazy. Go do whatever it is
you do."

"She wants the curtain down," said House. "Don't fold once they give you
the spinal," he reminded Cuddy.

"That's why I want you there," she said. "Guide me through the wonderful
world of drug-induced stupors." She grinned at him and squeezed his hand.
"I just wish I could get in on this poker action."

"Another time. We'll play a private little game. Strip poker."

The OB almost pushed him out into the hall, but he could hear Cuddy
laughing, and that was a relief. He sauntered up to his office and found
Wilson pouring chips into a big bowl.

"Getting fancy there, Jimmy. Good idea, though. Best to have the comfort
food easily reachable when I start kicking your ass."

"Need I remind you that I won the poker tournament at the charity dinner?
I've got moves you don't know about."

"I doubt that." House looked around the office. "Any idea where my team
is?"

"For some reason, they didn't believe you about the poker," Wilson said.
"I sent them to the ATM and for pretzels. You've lost all control over
them since you stopped carrying that cane."

"I could just start administering spankings," House said. "Think that's a
good idea? Don't consider it too long, though. Chase finally made his
move. He'll probably sic a croc on you if you start tempting his
girlfriend with a little erotic punishment."

Wilson flushed a little. "You really do think you're God, don't you?"

"God is everywhere," House intoned, rooting through his desk drawer. "And
verily, I shall minister to ye of little faith with a good cigar." He held
out the box he'd pulled from his desk. "Voila. Cuba's finest."

"We can't smoke these," said Wilson, looking at the cigars longingly.
"We're in a hospital."

"I don't see patients in here and none of my team have allergies to smoke,
as far as I can tell. How many times do you think we're going to get to
celebrate the birth of my kid?"

Wilson tilted his head. "Well, once a year for the rest of our lives, I'd
hope."

House frowned. "Don't be a pedant. Take the cigar. I brought some Febreze,
too."

"Good enough for me," Wilson said, and took the cigar as Cameron pushed
the door open.

"We got your damn pretzels," she said. "What are you doing?"

"House rules!" said House. "You have to have a cigar and it has to be
touching your skin at all times. I don't care if you keep it in your mouth
or hold it, there will be no pocketing my fine smokeables. Lighting up is
optional. Oh, and Cameron - it has to be visible skin." She blushed and
glared at him but took a cigar. Chase and Foreman looked much more pleased
about the situation, and Foreman drew the cigar under his nose.

"Smells good. Are we playing poker?"

"Indeed we are," said House. "You are all going to give me a lot of money
today, but that's okay. My kid only gets born once and I'm sure you're in
the mood to make a joyful noise about it or find another job." He produced
a deck of cards from his pocket. "No limits Texas Hold 'Em. Sit down and
ante up."

They had played for a couple of hours before House's pager started
rattling on the desk in the other room, where Wilson had put it after
House checked it obsessively for half an hour. Cameron had her cigar
wedged in the neck of her shirt, which had caused both Chase and Wilson to
misplace more than one bet. Foreman was smoking the end of his with
evident satisfaction and holding his own in the betting. House dropped his
cards and bolted for the other room, grabbing for his pager.

"They're not going to start without you!" Wilson called after him, but
House was out the door, and Wilson shrugged. "Whose bet?"

House ran down the stairs, half because he could and half because he
didn't want to wait for the elevator. He scrubbed up quickly and almost
bounded into the OR, where Cuddy was lying on the table surrounded by her
surgeon and the anesthetist.

"You didn't have to run," she said. "We were waiting."

"Just making sure," he said, a little out of breath. "How are you doing?"

"I'm fine," she said. "A little chilly, but that comes of not really
wearing clothes."

He prowled around her. "Hey, totally shaved. Interesting." He looked up at
the surgeon. "Well?"

"We were waiting to make sure that the spinal took, since we used the
minimum dosage to decrease the risk to her and the baby," said the surgeon
patiently. "Can you feel this, Doctor Cuddy?" He pressed against her
abdomen.

"Nope," she said. "Let's do this."

"Will I be in the way if I hold her hand?" asked House. "Bear in mind that
I don't care if you say yes."

"That should be fine," said the surgeon, clearly warned about House.
"Doctor, if at any time you want the curtain up, just tell us. We don't
usually take it down, but Doctor Graham told us that Doctor House
insisted."

"She knows what guts look like. She went to med school too," said House.

"It's a little different when they're your own," she said, squeezing his
fingers, "but yes, please leave it down."

"I'm making the initial incision," the surgeon announced, and the nurses
took their positions.

"Narrate for me," Cuddy whispered, so House peered around the curve of her
stomach.

"Just making incisions," he said. "Incisions. More incisions. Good news.
You're all pink inside just like everyone else."

"I wish I could see," she said.

"You can't be elevated or your uterus will be at a bad angle," said the
surgeon. "Are you experiencing any pain?"

"Just in my hand," she said, and House loosened his grip a little.

"Sorry. It's just weird. I've seen you naked, but never skinless. More
incisions."

The surgeon leaned back and let the nurse dab at the blood in the wound.
"We're down to the uterus," he said. "From here, it should be easy."

Afterwards, House wasn't quite sure what had happened. There was some
movement of the knife, some gesture of the hands, and then they put a baby
in his arms and the nurse came around with a bulb to suction the fluid
from its nose and mouth. The baby started to cry, loud hearty squalling,
but it sounded like a fanfare to House. Cuddy started crying, and then he
thought they were fiddling with the placenta and dosing her with something
and sewing her up, but he was watching the tiny mouth and fingers of his
child.

"Wipe him with this," said the nurse and handed him a warm damp cloth. His
son was red and wrinkled, with a lot of silky dark hair plastered to his
head. House gently washed away as much of the blood as he could, and the
stickiness of the birth fluids, and held him close to Cuddy.

"Look what we did," he murmured. "Look what we did."

"Caleb," she said, and touched his foot with one finger. The nurse bustled
here and there, tying off the umbilical and cutting it. "Ten toes," Cuddy
said in her throaty voice full of tears.

"Ten fingers," said House. "Two eyes. Your nose, poor kid." She laughed.

"We're going to take you to the recovery room now, Doctor," said the
nurse, shouldering House gently out of the way. "Doctor House can come
too, but first we need to weigh your baby and make sure everything's
fine."

"I'll see you in a moment, sweetheart," House promised, and kissed her
forehead before they wheeled her out, and he didn't think until later that
he'd never used an endearment for Cuddy before, not a standard issue one,
but he liked the feel of it. The nurse weighed the baby and did the Apgar,
stuck him with Vitamin K and did a few other things House wasn't sure of.

"So?" he demanded.

The nurse smiled. "Your son is fine," she said. "Eight on the Apgar. You
can put that on his preschool resume. Seems perfectly healthy, though of
course we'll be doing more checkups later."

House's arms ached for the weight of his son. "Can you wrap him up? I
think he needs to eat."

"Doctor House, we have done this before," said the nurse, but she swaddled
Caleb in a diaper and a soft blue blanket and handed him back. "Don't
forget to support his neck."

House was still wearing scrubs and the stupid paper hat, but he didn't
care. He sat on the edge of Cuddy's bed and handed her the baby, who had
stopped crying and was making smacking noises. "Here. Give him a chance at
the funbags. Little guy's had nothing to play with for the last nine
months except his own thumb," he said, and Cuddy pretended to scowl at
him. She looked a little tired, but she was beaming and she had never
looked more beautiful to him. Little tendrils of hair fell around her face
and her lips were very red. "God, I love you," he said.

"I love you too," she said, and lifted Caleb to her breast. "We did good."

"We certainly did." He leaned forward and kissed her, careful of the new
sutures on her stomach and the child between them. Caleb nursed
enthusiastically, his tiny hands clutching at Cuddy's breast. Cuddy bent
her head over to watch him, the curve of her neck very sweet, and she sang
tuneless nothings to the baby. House watched the two of them until Caleb
started to fall asleep and the nurse came back.

"Ah. Right on time," she said. "Doctor Cuddy, you should get some rest.
Doctor House, you should go for a while. Your baby's just going to be
asleep, and we have a few more tests to do. Doctor Graham told me I wasn't
allowed to let you get in the way and that you had a poker game to win
anyway."

"Got to support the family," he said, not wanting to leave, but the nurse
had gathered Caleb up to take him to the nursery, and Cuddy did look very
tired. "Lisa," he said.

"Go play," she told him, reaching for his hand, "but I'm warning you, none
of those cigars are coming into the house."

He smiled. "Same old dictator Cuddy. Sleep, sweetheart. You definitely
earned it." He kissed her, lightly, and she was asleep almost before he'd
left the room. He changed out of the scrubs and walked back up to his
office slowly by way of the nursery, but his son wasn't on display yet. He
was still caught in the shock of the moment, the knowledge that he was
really a father now. It was terrifying. He couldn't stop smiling. He
wanted to dance. He wanted to stretch out next to Cuddy and watch her
breathing. He wanted to count his son's eyelashes.

Instead, he pushed open the door to his office. Wilson looked up.

"Well?"

"Caleb Cuddy-House, middle name undetermined. Eight pounds, eleven ounces.
Ten fingers, ten toes, an absurd amount of hair, and Cuddy's nose."

"Mazel tov," said Wilson earnestly, and raised his cup of coffee. The team
toasted him too, and in the rush of his joy, House wanted to tell them all
how much they meant to him. He took a deep breath and opened his mouth.
They all look at him curiously, and then he just grinned instead of
whooping his delight, and sat down in his chair. He picked up his cigar
and put it between his teeth, missing Cuddy and Caleb, loving this place
life had brought him to.

"Who's dealing?"

+ + + +

A/N: The section headers come respectively from Joshua Radin's "The Fear
You Won't Fall", Shakespeare's As You Like It, Oasis' "She Is Love",
Malcom Middleton's "Destruction", and Colin Meloy's "Baby Song".  
   Please post a comment on this story.  


Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the
ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House
(and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property
of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I
am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive
no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement
nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the
show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.