Author Notes: Occurs in season 7, before 'Bombshells'. Or perhaps as an alternative to 'Bombshells'. Title and chapter headings are lyrics from the song 'Get Happy'.

1.

He's in Cuddy's bed, with Cuddy, one of his favourite places to be.

It's late, and they're kissing lazily, lying on their sides. He's not really sure it's going to lead beyond kissing at this point; he knows she's tired and she put on full-length pyjamas to sleep in and that's usually a good indicator of how things will go at this point in the evening. He's not disappointed - they had a brusque bout of wake-up sex this morning and knows there's every chance for a repeat performance once the alarm goes off in seven hours.

Still, he returns her slow, warm kisses with his own and touches her in a half-interested, willing-to-engage-further fashion because he loves touching her, always. Still marvels at times that she lets him. Will always take any and all opportunities to do so. Her body feels divine whether the pyjamas come off or not, one palm full of an ass cheek, the other wrapped under her back and curving over the dip in her waist.

She hums a little in enjoyment, sliding a knee up to hook over his hip. It's really all the encouragement he needs and his hand slides up her torso to cover her breast. The hum takes on a hint of disapproval and she pushes his hand back down. He takes it as his cue to back off so she can roll over, switch off the lamp, and say goodnight.

But she doesn't do that. She redirects the wandering hand back to her ass and presses closer, nuzzling under his jaw. It's a discrepancy in behaviour that might have been insignificant to any other man - especially with sex suddenly back on the table - but to him it's a red flag to the raging bull of his restless intellect. As she nips at his Adam's apple and slides her hands under his t-shirt his mind races.

She wants sex; wants him to touch her. Doesn't want him touching her breast, though, and there are a limited number of reasons for why that would be. So he tries it again, this time with his hand under the soft flannel of her top and a little more gentle, testing her response as he lightly brushes the underside of the warm mound of flesh with just the pad of his thumb.

She sighs. Her hand presses against the middle of his back and her hips shift restlessly against his. He switches to the other breast, this time teasing his fingertips over her nipple, which gets a reaction. It's not altogether a bad one; a tiny hiss between her teeth and then she dislodges his hand by pushing him over onto his back so she can straddle him. Which he does not mind at all.

Still, even as she palms his growing erection it's not enough to forestall his question: "What's wrong with your boobs?"

"What?" she says distractedly, having shoved up his t-shirt to press kisses across his chest.

"They're sore."

"Um, a little I guess. My cycle, it happens." She slides her hand under his waistband to grip him firmly. There was a time that tactic would have worked, but he has been getting it on the regular now for a while and a hand on his junk isn't the automatic kill-switch for his brain it once was.

And he can still count. "It's the wrong time in your cycle for sore boobs."

"Do we have to talk about my cycle right now?"

He remembers seeing the maxi-pads out on the bathroom counter a week ago, but he'd been caught up in an intense and - for the four days it lasted - exciting medical mystery and so hadn't paid much attention to the interruption in their usual sexcapade schedule.

"You had your period last week, right?" he presses, and the hand emerges from his shorts so she can shift off him to sit at his side and start frowning.

"What's the problem, are you not in the mood or...? Because I have to be up early again in the morning."

It's an evasion and it only heightens his interest, and she really should know better than that if she wants to avoid the subject. But the truth is at times like this it doesn't matter how well she knows him - when she's put on the spot she gets defensive. Every time.

Another day, another bull, another red flag.

"No, I'm definitely in the mood. Continue to try distracting me with sex, I think it was working," he says.

"You know what, I'm really tired. Let's just go to sleep."

He shrugs. "Fine."

She eyes him suspiciously before moving to lie back down. She resettles the covers over them both, and is just about to reach for the lamp when he opens his mouth again.

"So you think you might be pregnant?"

He doesn't get the what are you crazy? he was expecting. She just freezes, arm stretched out to the nightstand.

"I don't know." She lies back against the pillow, looking up at the ceiling, her face a blank mask.

He doesn't know what response he was expecting, but this is not it.

His mind scours the past few weeks, everything she has said or done that he can recall, examining every detail with new eyes. Everything slots into place and regardless that she didn't confirm it, now he knows.

She's been tired - more so than usual. She's been slightly evasive at times, not enough to register in the moment but now... Now she is lying beside him with sore breasts and that tight, expressionless expression, and he knows.

"You're pregnant."

She looks guiltily over at him. "I might not be."

"And you're not surprised. How long have you known?"

"I don't know. I had a suspicion. It might be nothing. I just - I missed a pill last month and didn't realise till days later, and that shouldn't even matter, the odds are so slim I could ever get - that I could ever conceive naturally. But then last week... my period was really light, just spotting really, and they are sometimes light but not that light and… oh god, what if I am?"

"You are. Your boobs are tender. You're exhausted. You skipped your withdrawal bleed. You should have started back on the active pills a couple days ago, but I haven't seen you taking them, which you wouldn't if you thought you might be pregnant. You haven't taken a test yet?"

She sighs and rubs a hand over her face. "I didn't want to know."

He is focused laser-sharp on her and her reactions and the words she is saying. Somewhere in the back of his brain there is the fact, like a ticking bomb, that she is almost certainly pregnant. Pregnant. But he's not thinking about that right now; there's just her and the immediate need to figure her out.

"What's wrong with you?" he says. "I know this is... unexpected, about as unexpected as it gets but... you 'didn't want to know'? Seriously?"

She avoids his eyes. He tries to work out what that look on her face means. He knows all of her looks, she has such an expressive face it's rare he can't tell what she's feeling at any given moment. But right now she just looks weary.

It's all wrong.

She's feeling something, but he can't see it, which means she's hiding it from him, which means...

"You are not happy about this," he murmurs as the realisation hits him.

Her face flashes from impassive back to guilty in a second. "Look, I'm sorry I didn't say anything. If I am pregnant it's still really early, only a couple weeks since ovulation, and... I guess I was thinking you wouldn't have to know about it."

The words are a slap to the face. It actually shocks him how much it hurts. The level of pain is as surprising as what she just told him, and he's still reeling from the blow as she keeps right on talking.

"God, who was I kidding? Of course you noticed. You knew last time even though I only had morning sickness in the middle of the night and I wore my most confining bras even when my boobs were hurting like hell just so you wouldn't notice they were a little bigger. You kept making comments anyway, and I still don't know how you could really tell, I wasn't pregnant long enough to put on weight so -"

"You were glowing."

"What?"

"Happy. You must have just found out. I saw you smiling to yourself one day when you thought no one was looking. No reason for you to be smiling, but you were, like you had a secret. But then... I thought I must have been wrong."

"No, you were right."

He nods. Wilson had spilled that particular secret of hers at some point, about the miscarriage she'd had that somehow completely escaped his notice. He can't even remember why it came up.

He should have known about the miscarriage. He should have seen her devastation - because she must have been devastated, just like she had been after the failed adoption attempt.

"I never even got to see the heartbeat," she murmurs, and closes her eyes tight against whatever memory she's reliving.

He knows her journey to motherhood is inextricably bound up with crushing disappointment and pain as counterpoint to the happiness she found in her eventual success with Rachel. For him, it would never have been worth it. He avoids pain, he doesn't seek it out. But she is not him; she pushed through the painful times, and was rewarded with the baby she wanted so badly, and that is why he cannot understand what is happening right now, here in this bed.

They're both sitting up now, her with her head bowed, looking at her hands in her lap. Him leaning against the headboard, staring at her as he tries to work it out. "So, what? After all those years of drama over getting yourself a kid, you already got the perfect one so that's... enough?"

"What are you talking about?" She actually rolls her eyes as she asks, like she thinks he's being ridiculous.

"Were you seriously going to terminate and not even tell me about it?"

"What? House, I don't..."

He sits up and moves away to the side of the bed. He needs to get up and get out of here. When she moves after him and grabs onto his arm, he stays where he is with his feet on the floor but resists her attempts to get him to look at her.

"House I don't know what you're talking about but I'm not intending to abort. Why would you think that?"

"Well you weren't going to tell me - if you weren't going to get rid of it then I'm pretty sure I would notice that you had a baby, you know, eventually. At least by the time it learned to talk. Rachel never shuts up - I'd sometimes like to be unaware of her existence but it's literally impossible."

"House... Come on, you - you don't really think I can carry to term, do you? This isn't - it won't last, and I'm not going to get my hopes up like I did before. You know my history, you know how difficult it was for me to get pregnant - only once after three IUIs, and three full cycles of IVF - and I was 40 then, not 44. That this has even happened at all is the fluke of the century. Just some freak occurrence of nature, like the universe playing some bad joke on me. That's why I didn't tell you, because even if I was pregnant there's just really no chance. It can't possibly be viable."

"You have no way of knowing that - you haven't even taken a stick test to confirm. You need a blood work-up, beta hCG testing and an ultrasound before we know anything. Since when are you such a pessimist?"

She's been holding onto him as she explained but now she lets go to drag her hands over her face. "Okay, no, this is really why I didn't want you to know. You don't know what it's like to lose a baby. I've lost two. It sucks. But I've got Rachel, and she is enough. This..." She lets her hand drift momentarily over the flat plane between her hip bones before dropping her arm to her side, fist clenched. "This isn't going to happen. So there's no point getting invested. Like you even want a kid? You barely manage babysitting mine."

He doesn't even touch on that last pronouncement. He still has no idea what he thinks about this, and the panic is barely being kept at bay by her surprisingly averse reaction.

"That's it?" he demands.

"That's it."

"You won't even consider -"

"No. House, I can't. I can't get my hopes up again."

"Right."

"Hey, not like I want to be infertile. This is a crappy situation, and you know it isn't what I want. You know that."

"I know that you'll fight for the baby of a complete stranger, but you apparently won't fight for mine."

She looks like she's been struck and a dark part of him is glad because he's still feeling the sting of the body blows he's been taking from her throughout this whole conversation.

And maybe it would have been better her way, if he never suspected a thing - maybe she will lose this pregnancy like she lost the other one. Maybe she could have gone through the blood and pain with him none the wiser. But she doesn't know that's how this will end. There is a chance, however slim, that this baby could be born whole and healthy, and who is this woman he's known for half his life if not the reigning queen of lost causes?

He's not used to her giving up - he has seen her rail against insurmountable odds in the most absurd, hopeless situations. She's letting him down right now and it's honestly pissing him off as much as it is confusing him.

But it doesn't matter. His anger abandons him at the first sign of tears in her eyes.

"I'm sorry," he says, the words leaving his mouth now like a Pavlovian response.

She nods and sniffles, but doesn't cry. "Me too. It's just... You don't know what it's like. Last time it happened I was... I was so happy, and then... And this time it won't just be my heart that gets broken, you're going to get hurt, too. I didn't want that. God, I should have been more careful with my birth control. I can't believe this has happened."

She's still talking like it's a done deal, an inevitability. He doesn't know how to counter this staunch denial from her.

He holds out an arm and she comes to him, curling against his side, her damp face on his shoulder. He rests his cheek against her hair.

"It'll be okay," he says, under the assumption that this is what a decent boyfriend would say at such a moment.

"I know. We'll get through this." She sighs. "We should go to sleep, it's late. You're going to stay, right?"

"Yeah."

But this isn't over, and he can't imagine that it will, in fact, be okay. Or how they are supposed to get through this. He can't see it, any more than she can see the stunning, terrifying possibility of their baby in her arms.