Author's Note: I'm halfway through season 4 now and I thought what if Pete and Addison were together still... here. I definitely thought Addison was pregnant in 4x17! So then I thought, what if she was? obviously AU. I don't particularly like Violet as you may be able to tell. Lmao.

"Babe, you look like shit."

She practically scowled at him. As if she didn't already know that.

For the three seconds before she looked at herself in the bathroom mirror this morning, the sallow of her face, sunken cheeks, and the purplish bruising underneath her eyes, the whites of which were pale and washed out, she might have let herself believe otherwise.

Other than the exhaustion and pressing urge to be sick, she felt relatively normal.

"So do you."

Disheveled hair and scruff hiding the definition of his jaw, one making him look decidedly less sexy, while the other did the opposite, and veiny rivulets of red all markers of this brutal exhaustion that had been plaguing him the last three days.

"We're not talking about me."

Lucas hasn't been sleeping well, if at all, and of course Pete was paying the price. Insisted, even, when Addison argued that she could help, so that he could take a deserved night off.

So, she left it, mostly because she didn't have the energy to fight him on it. And look where it's gotten him. Gotten them both.

"Seriously, babe," he purred softly, his lips against the side of her head, leaving a warm kiss there.

"You should see a doctor."

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. It wasn't enough for him to parent his son, he had to parent her, too? But instead, she smiled at him, because there was a part of her that knew, the bigger part of her, that his suggestion was out of love.

"I'm a doctor. You're a doctor. We're literally in a sea of doctors, here."

"Precisely."

She felt him smile against her lips and he pulled away too soon, so she grabbed the back of his head and kissed him for longer and harder this time, because even though she was sick, she still had a very much fully functioning sex drive; and she could think about how that was, analyze its implications, but there was no time, because she was losing stamina by the second and they both had patients to attend to, so she wanted to enjoy every second left that she could spend tethered to his mouth like a horny teenager.

"Shut up."

There wasn't another word out of him after that, not until they broke apart by only their guilt of crossing the line of professionalism in the office (otherwise known as Naomi alerting them to keep their hands to themselves where other people could see).

"Heh."

He smiled lazily at her. It was sexy, and it made her want to reach for his face again, but she refrained. Instead, she trailed the pad of her thumb along his bottom lip, swollen from their earlier activities, and smiled back, mimicking him.

"Have a good day."

"You too."

He stood up from the couch but she remained sitting for a few seconds longer, a little lightheaded. She was hoping it was from all the kissing and not sickness but she couldn't exactly be sure.

"I love you."

"You too," Pete replied, clearly distracted, his eyes away from her and suddenly glued to a patient in the lobby.

It was as if he could sense the pause in her breathing, a reaction as subtle as she could make it, because he turned to look at her again and when he did she could see that his eyes were soft, apologetic even.

"I love you too." He repeated her words in full this time, then she blinked and there was a flutter that felt like his lips on her skin, and then nothing.

Until he smiled easily at her when she opened her eyes, but it wasn't lazy this time, just comfortable. Her favorite smile of his, her favorite thing of anybody's. Her favorite thing in general.

"Rest up. Don't work too hard."

"We have a patient together. I have to deliver a baby. And probably others."

Again with that smile. "I said don't work too hard. Not don't work at all. There's a difference."

She laughed. "Right. A difference."

"A difference," he said again with a wink.

And then he left her office and was quickly ushering his first patient into an exam room, a transition that was clearly practiced.

The idea had been there in the back of her mind, of course it had. She was just very hesitant, reluctant, really, to entertain even the possibility.

Her hopes had been high and then shot down too many times for any sort of comfort, so it was easier to pretend there was no hope at all rather than the shred of it that was.

It was that little, nagging piece that had her agreeing to buy a pregnancy test at Amelia's badgering, which was consistent and loud, until she was thinking about nothing else. Nothing else but a baby, her and Pete's baby, and it made her heart race and her palms sweat.

Could it finally be happening, and if it was, why was she afraid of the answer? Maybe it wasn't actually fear at all, and the physiology was just a leftover reaction to something else, to her sickness, and not a byproduct of her mental state at all.

Because she and Pete were finally stable, she and Pete and Lucas were in a good place, and finally nothing could shake that, with Violet moving to New York City and relinquishing her parental rights months ago now. So, it wasn't nervousness then. It couldn't be.

When Amelia softly called her name from the other side of the stall door, and she was staring at a positive test in her hand, she knew then and there that it hadn't been nerves, earlier but the rush of anticipation.

The anticipation of this exact moment. Of the truth of it, of what it meant, finally, for her, for Pete, and for almost two year old Lucas, who now proudly called her his mama, every chance he got.

Dada had come later, just recently, and Pete hadn't smiled bigger, not since the day his son had uttered mama, his first word amongst babbled gibberish while staring up at Addison with a sudden and heart-stopping recognition that hadn't been there before, or one she just hadn't noticed.

"Addie?" came Amelia's voice again, softer this time, sad, even. "What's the verdict?"

She opened the stall door, slowly, quietly, for fear of jinxing anything, that if she moved too much, made too much noise, all of it would disappear.

"Positive. I'm pregnant..."

She trailed off, fingering the test in her hands and letting out a sigh. She couldn't fight the thought that this was all still too good to be true.

"Wait, seriously? Oh my god that's amazing!"

Amelia nearly knocked her over with the strength of her hug, and the feeling of being held like this was what assuaged those bad feelings, those persistent thoughts that somehow, someway, this wasn't going to work out, that this pregnancy, now that it's here, wouldn't stick.

"I'm so incredibly happy for you, Addie..."

Amelia whispered into her hair, pursing her lips against her scalp in a friendly kiss. "I can't wait to see you become a mother."

At that, the image of the little blonde haired boy with the gooey grin of a baby and the legs chubby with rolls of a toddler, came to her and she smiled, softly. She was missing him so much, quick and sudden.

"I already am a mother."

Amelia smiled too, but there was a subtle shrug to her shoulders. "Not biologically speaking."

Addison bit her lip, resisting to remind her what everyone else around here has a million times a day. If not more. Filter, baby. Filter.

It was as if Amelia was reading her thoughts because her face changed and she was hasty to correct herself.

"I mean, of course you are. In every other way. But Addie, don't kid yourself. You've wanted this, this way," she made a vague gesture to her stomach, and Addison reflexively placed her hands flat against it, "for as long as I've known you.

"Addison, I watched you and my brother struggle to conceive for years. It might not have been what definitively ended your relationship, but still."

Addison was quiet, remembering those long nights she and Derek laid next to each other afterwards, her sweat turning cool and sticky on her skin, no longer something lasting in the pleasurable sense, instead a reminder of their failure to be together intimately enough, so that something, a baby, would come of it.

Silently, they blamed themselves, and soon enough, and not so silently, they started to blame each other. Infertility took a toll on relationships like not much else, and it drove people to lengths that they vowed they would never go to.

For them, on both sides, that was cheating, because if they couldn't make it work with each other, maybe they could make it work with someone else.

At least, after awhile, that's what she told herself. Not to justify it, just to make it less shameful, maybe.

"I know," she murmured, then again. "I know."

Her face was still ghostly, her eyes still tired, the nausea still present, deeply rooted now, but when she looked in the bathroom mirror for the second time today, she saw something else there, too.

There was a glow to her skin, soft and almost pretty. It was a wonder how she'd mistaken it for clamminess, for sickness, before, when really it was something else entirely.

She gasped when Pete's reflection appeared next to hers, breathed out when his arms twisted around her waist and he kissed her neck, it felt, with every ounce of intimacy he could give.

It wasn't to start something, but to just tell her that he was here, and it brought up a comfort she didn't know she needed, something she now knew she had needed before she could tell him. Before she could tell him her news. She squeezed his hand. Their news.

"Are you feeling any better?" he asked, running his fingers through her hair.

"Yeah...about that..."

She paused, reaching up her hand to intertwine their fingers, meeting his eyes through the glass.

They didn't need theatrics, they never have.
Their relationship wasn't about them; at first, it had just been two lost, jealous souls finding solace from feeling in each other, but slowly, surely, they found more than that, they found more in each other, with each other. Love.

The switch from familial to intimate was easy, because at first denying their chemistry would be a disservice and so they didn't, and once they indulged, it became difficult to stop, and so they didn't.

And as it went, feelings surfaced and soon enough stopping them wasn't an option and they became so strong, so forceful, at least on her end, though he confirmed later that it was on both, that feeling anything like that for another person but Pete became impossible, and so her feelings for Sam, whatever they had been, likely just curiosity about the potential of a chance that had passed her by a long time ago, dissipated.

Pete rubbed her back in slow circles and she knew he was prompting her. Not pushing, just nudging, encouraging.

"What is it, babe?"

Addison took a deep breath. Leveled their gazes. She never really thought much about how sweet his eyes were, because they could darken so quickly with sexual feeling, it wasn't an adjective she would use most of the time, but now, now she saw it.

Suddenly, his eyes reminded her of a child's, of Lucas, and she hoped that this baby had his eyes. His eyes and her wits. A perfect combination.

"I'm pregnant."

Those eyes widened. "What!?"

She tilted her head with a small smile. Cheeky.

"Do you want me to say it again?"

"No," he answered her quickly, too quickly, and he realized. "I mean, yes, of course I - "

She cut him off, her smile widening. A little less impish. "I'm pregnant."

His smile was genuine. His dimples were indenting his cheeks, subtly softening the angular set of his jaw.

"I can't believe it. I thought you couldn't - we're having a baby? Lucas gets a sibling!?"

She laughed. She couldn't help it. There was so much she was feeling and all at once.

"Lucas gets a sibling."

Pete was giving her a full fledged grin now, childlike, to match his eyes.

"I love you. I love you so much, Addison Montgomery."

He hugged her close, breathed in deep, and she had a feeling he was trying to commit every second of this to memory, down to the shea butter in her shampoo.

"I love you too, Pete Wilder. And our little family."

She felt his hands on her belly then, on top of where hers were resting. Through the reflection, she saw his gaze find the baby monitor sitting where she had left it on the bathroom counter. She smiled.

If they were really, really quiet, they could hear the sleepy chatter, most of it gibberish, of Lucas in his crib.

"I love our little family, too."