Chapter 2

"When a man and a woman love each other very very much," Cuddy was explaining when Rachel asked her where babies come from, "They can share this very very special hug that helps them make a baby." House snorted as he poured his cereal and listened with glee as Cuddy further embarrassed herself. He dug into her as soon as Rachel left the room.

"A special hug?" he asked, smirking despite a mouthful of Froot Loops.

"What did you want me to say?" Cuddy hissed. "That it happens when a guy is pulling your hair and humping you from behind?"

"You forgot about the moaning of 'More, House. Harder,'" he teased. Cuddy smacked his chest as she got up to put her dish in the sink. He watched her walk across the room. He noted the way her belly was still a flat plane, but there was even more of a glow about her, even this early.

"Are you scared?" Cuddy asked him, looking out the window while she soaped a dish. He recognized it immediately. Often she asked him questions that she really wanted him to ask her.

"Are you?" he asked obediently.

Cuddy turned and leaned against the counter, considering. "A little," she confessed.

"Of what?" he probed.

Cuddy chuckled. "All of it. How to balance a baby on top of all the rest of our life. How Rachel will feel. What kind of mother I will be. You know me, everything. Sometimes I even worry about my age and my body and whether I might die during childbirth." She laughed a little, embarrassed, but he knew she wasn't kidding.

"I wouldn't let that happen," he assured her.

"You're God now?"

"I'm better," he replied. "A. I exist. And B. I'm singularly focused on you. Screw all the other scared, sad, and dying people."

Cuddy grinned at him. She turned back to the sink to wash dishes before lobbing the question back at him. "Are you scared?"

He shrugged. "Sure. We'd be idiots not to be," he answered. "But honestly, the only good things that ever happen to me are usually preceded by intense fear."

"You sound like a fortune cookie," she teased.

"Well, the fortune cookie doesn't tell you that the worst things that happen are also usually preceded by intense fear."

She laughed softly. House got up and limped over to her, his leg especially achy in the morning. He put his arms around her waist and sunk his head against her neck. "We can do anything, Cuddy. We might take the painful, roundabout, dysfunctional path to it, but we get it done." She nodded, and something about her stoicism made it click. "Wait, you're worried about me, aren't you?" He cut to the chase.

"No," she replied unconvincingly.

"What? That I'll leave or that I'll suck at it?" he asked, ignoring her answer. He felt mad… Well, hurt, which led to mad, and he was trying not to let it run free. He kept his arms around her, thinking that if they just stayed connected, they could traverse this treacherous ground.

Cuddy sighed heavily. "This is never what you wanted. It wasn't part of your life plan," she explained. "But it happened, and I don't want you to think you should do it. I want you to want to do it. And I can't make you want something you don't, and you can't either, no matter how much you love me…" She was rambling, getting worked up.

"Will you shut up for a minute?" he barked. He stepped back from her a little, propping his hands on the counter on either side of her. Cuddy turned and faced him with a defiant expression. If this was going to go bad, she preferred it to happen sooner than later. "What part of 'I want to have a baby with you,' did you not understand?" he asked.

"You never said that. You asked if I wanted to have a baby with you."

He gave her a disgusted look. "Yeah, that was pretty cryptic. All part of my plan to impregnate you and split. Or to raise my devil spawn. We haven't nailed down which you're afraid of yet," he sniped. He stood up straight. He was still retreating, just more slowly, trying to fight the urge he had to find a hole and set up camp.

"House, I just… I don't want to trap you in a life you didn't want," she said, trying to make him understand.

"Everyone is in a life they didn't want, Cuddy!" he yelled. "Everyone wants more great, less bad, but we have very little control of what we get. You wanted a baby years ago and didn't get it. I want a functioning leg. C'est la vie. I'm under no delusion that I can plan any of it."

"So what, this baby is like your infarction? Some random tragedy that beset you?" she accused.

"Christ, Cuddy. No." He ran a hand through his hair, limped back to a chair to sit down. "I'm saying that unlike you, I don't have a fucking blueprint for everything. You might try it sometime. It keeps you from obsessively analyzing everything until it isn't fun anymore."

Cuddy bit her lip. "It's fun for you?"

House looked at her softened face. He wanted it to be over, but he also wanted to punish her for never trusting him, never feeling secure about him. "It's fun because I'm doing it with you," he told her. "But it's probably not fun for you cuz you're doing it with me."

Cuddy sucked in her lips. He couldn't tell if she was pissed, going to cry, or just thoughtful. "What was the scariest moment of your life?" she asked.

He lobbed the question back at her reflexively. "What was yours?"

"You first."

He thought for a few seconds. "Flying back from Singapore. I thought for a while you really might have had Menningococcus and that I'd killed you out of laziness." She stared at him. "Yours?"

"Your leg surgery," she answered. He stared back.

Rachel padded in to get her sippy cup off the table, singing a gibberish song quietly. She drank with gusto and looked from one to the other while she audibly gulped.

"We've always been terrified of destroying each other," Cuddy said quietly.

"What's destroying?" Rachel asked, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

They didn't answer for a moment. Then House answered her without looking at her. "Ruining. Wrecking,"

"Aww, don't wreck House, Mama," Rachel laughed. "That's so silly."

Small smiles started and they all eventually laughed, Rachel most heartily of all. She padded back out of the room saying, "Silly family."

[H] [H] [H]

"Heard Cuddy's pregnant," Chase said as House entered the DDX room, tossing his stuff into a chair. Chase had lost the breaking-the-ice bet with the rest of the team and was forced to address the issue.

House stopped in his tracks and leaned in conspiratorially. "Really? Where'd you hear that? Is she keeping it? Did they say whose it was?"

Chase gave him an eyeroll and a glare. "Congratulations, House."

House grabbed a file from the table and dropped into a chair as the others murmured their congratulations too. "Thanks, thanks. I was pretty sure my guys could get the job done, but it's validating nonetheless."

"Are you excited?" Thirteen asked. "This is huge."

"I'll say it's huge. The tumor in his liver has gotta be four centimeters." He held a scan up to the ceiling light.

"Are you going to find out if it's a boy or a girl?" Taub asked, ignoring his deflection.

"Eventually," House answered with a sigh, closing the file. "Otherwise adolescence will be pretty awkward."

"House," Thirteen chided. "We're just happy for you. We assume that you're happy for you. We wanted to… celebrate it."

"You know what you do when you assume," House replied, getting up and moving toward his office. "You annoy me." He let the door swing shut behind him, but promptly reopened it and stuck his head back in. "Oh, and I assume you all are going to biopsy the tumor, get the patient on the transplant list, and prep him for chemo. Which probably annoys you all." House said with a sigh. "But I assume we're all assuming it's cancer." He paused, putting a finger to his lip. "Now do you suppose that annoys the cancer?"

The team got up and began leaving the room. Taub offered a small smile to House, which he sneered at. "Hey, I've gotta register for tiny pastel outfits online… You want me to order something for you? Got any color preferences? I know puppies are a classic but I think you could pull off ducks."

[H] [H] [H]

"It's open," House bellowed when he heard Wilson's polite knock on the door. He heard Wilson come inside and shouted that he was in the back bedroom. Wilson entered to see House surrounded by pieces of wood, screws, and basically a paper blanket of instructions.

"We have to do this before we can have fun," House proclaimed.

"We do?" Wilson asked.

"I'd make my team come do it, but they'd just start fighting over whether it was a crib, a dresser, a table, or lupus."

Wilson nodded and picked up the instructions, sitting on a rocking chair. "Happy to help."

"Uh, I thought I'd be the one to sit on my ass and tell you what to do." House explained.

"Well, you're already down there," Wilson replied dryly.

He stared reading off steps in the assembly process and helping House locate "slot C" and "tab 5." Slowly, the crib began taking shape. They were both standing now, taking turns holding pieces in place while the other tightened screws. House was working on one screw when he said "So I asked you to hang out because I figured we needed to check in."

"Oh yeah?" Wilson replied, trying to sound casual.

"I figure by now, you're starting to seriously grapple with your future role as Uncle Jimmy. Just wanted to make sure you felt prepared." Wilson chuckled.

"Been giving it a lot of thought, yeah."

"Yeah," House continued. "That's a lot of responsibility there, Wilson."

"It is," he agreed.

"I mean, you're gonna be Uncle Jimmy for the rest of this kid's life. His only Uncle Jimmy."

"That's true," Wilson admitted. House sighed and stood up and faced him across the length of the crib. Then Wilson offered, "I think I'm just worried about it because I hated my uncle." He held his breath to see how this would play. "So I really don't have a good firsthand uncle image to go on."

"Wait a minute," House smiled a big fake smile and did a switcheroo gesture. "You're talking about… I mean… Oh, you!" He shook his finger at Wilson. They continued working in silence for a few minutes.

"I don't think there's anything like it, House," Wilson told him, after some thought. "I don't think you can be ready. You just have to be… open to what it does to you." House nodded after they fit the last pieces together. They both looked down at the crib which seemed huge to hold a tiny baby. "Then again, parts of it suck. In a few months, this person is going to be in here who just eats, sleeps, poops, and cries," Wilson summarized.

"Oh I'm ready for that," House replied. "It'll be like living with you." Wilson saw him grab a teddy bear off the dresser and set it in the corner of the crib.

"There are people out there becoming uncles left and right who have absolutely no business becoming uncles," Wilson reminded him.

House nodded again. "I know. You'll do fine."

[H] [H] [H]

"You're a real shit, you know that?" Cuddy yelled when he came home one evening. He'd worked late and Cuddy was feeling tired and had fed and put Rachel to bed solo, giving her time to build up a furious froth before his arrival.

"I had a case," he protested defensively. "I told you I'd do my best to be there."

"Don't gimme that crap," she scolded. "You have a patient and you manage to prank Wilson and take naps and buy motorcycles. But you can't make it to an ultrasound in the very hospital in which you work?"

"The case had problems. The baby doesn't have any problems."

"Not that you would know. You weren't there."

"Cuddy, relax. Show me the print outs. I'll look at them now. Or better yet, I'll do an ultrasound on you myself tomorrow. It's no big deal."

"No big deal to you, maybe! It was to me," she told him. There was a pause. "It was a big deal to me. Why wasn't it to you?"

He thought about it. At least for once they were arguing about the right thing. It was a big deal to her and he had resisted going when he probably could have managed. "It's a blurry picture of a cluster of cells, Cuddy. It's not like I was seeing our baby in person or something. I just… I was preoccupied."

Cuddy glared. She wasn't buying it. "So we've covered not doing this, being scared of doing this, you resenting me not trusting you to do this… What are we missing here, House?"

"You're making too much of this."

"You're not making enough of it," she countered. "Doesn't the idea of seeing our baby move you at all?"

House sighed. "Yes. Of course. I just didn't want to sit there with an ultrasound tech watching our intimate moments just to go report them to a bunch of nurses in the cafeteria and gossip about what a terrible father I'm going to be. How I wasn't moved enough. I was busy and the idea of being evaluated for something I'm already evaluating myself about wasn't… appealing."

"Oh, boo-hoo, House. People judge us. Since when do you give a crap what anyone else thinks of you?"

"Since it's not just me anymore!" he yelled back. "Jesus, Cuddy, you can't relate to this because you're seemingly perfect and no one expects anything but more perfection. But I'm fully aware that bets are probably being made on how long this lasts, and aside from that bullshit, I'm fully aware that I have no idea how to do this well. I have no… idea," he repeated, running out of steam. "I can't think this out with a whiteboard list and a shitload of background knowledge. I can't even anticipate all that is going to come up over these years. So all I have to go on is not wanting to do it like my dad did it, which only leaves four million and seventy-two other options. And on top of it, I have to be 'moved' at these very particular moments and people are just waiting to see if I might just be unmovable."

"House." She took his hand. "You're trying to plan how to love. To prepare for it. It's not like that."

He looked at her and evenly replied, "What if I'm so fucked up I feel nothing?" He'd never shared this fear with her, or even really with himself. Yet it had nagged at him.

Cuddy surprised him with a wide smile. "I am absolutely positive that will not happen."

House ran a hand roughly over his face. "How are you that sure?"

Cuddy shrugged like he was worried about the weather, like this was no big deal. "I see in you what you don't see in yourself," she explained. "I see through your pretense to the feelings underneath. The very intense feelings underneath." She pulled him closer and looked up into his face.

He leaned down and kissed her lightly, then pressed his forehead to hers. "That's what those are?" he asked. "I thought it was indigestion."

Cuddy smiled. "See that joke? That's 'House' for 'Thank you for your unending patience and understanding, my most glorious girlfriend. I feel better now.'" She held his face, and kissed him back, deepening it.

"I always did prefer the Cliff's notes," he murmured against her mouth. He ran his hands over her body, still fascinated by the new hills and valleys. They stumbled clumsily to the couch and Cuddy pushed him down onto it. She straddled him, but the big bump of her belly was making it awkward. "This won't work," she groaned.

He kissed her neck and jaw anyway, sliding his hands under her shirt and into her pants. Cuddy gasped a little as she felt his fingers against her. "I think it's working just fine," he said into her neck. Cuddy moaned and braced her hands on his shoulders. She felt his stubble slide up her neck to her chin as she threw her head back. She felt his other hand skim over her side, caressing her breast and then sliding down to her round taut belly. She couldn't help laughing, like every time lately. "It's not a turn off?" she asked quietly.

"Hell no!" House exclaimed, his lips finding hers again. "I just pretend you grew a third very big, very firm breast. It's hot."

"You're so beyond demented," she told him.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you." She felt his hand against her and began rocking against it. He watched her face, eyes closed, lips parted. He loved being able to do this to her, every time. He felt the curves of her body grinding against the flat plane of his as she moved. She was a tangible miracle. When she came it was almost like it surprised her. She gasped and her eyes slid open to meet his. She whispered his name before bending forward and pressing her face to his shoulder as he escorted her to and from a blissful release. He felt her breath on his neck turn into her hot mouth on his skin then, and she stood and took his hand, leading him to the bedroom. They made love, peppering it with jokes, repositioning, and laughter at the goofiness of it all. They rolled around and found new positions until they were both fully satisfied and lay spent, House spooning Cuddy and running his hand sleepily over her skin.

Cuddy felt the familiar flutter. She took his hand and placed it over the spot, low on the left side of her belly. He felt a tiny movement under his hand, then a constant outward pressure that held for a few seconds and released. "Do you wanna know?" Cuddy asked.

"Sure," House answered.

"It's a girl," Cuddy told him. He felt the flutter roll across her belly.

He blinked and pictured a tiny Cuddy. "I'm moved," he whispered. Cuddy smiled sleepily. They lay in the silence, their bodies pressed close. "I promise to make it to the next big pregnancy thing. I'll be early."

"Well, that's good," she replied. "Since the next big thing is the birth."

"I'll pencil it in."