9.

There was a noise, a jostling, a disturbance - something - and he was awake.

House opened his eyes and watched blurrily from his horizontal position as Cuddy stood up on the other side of the bed and staggered toward the bathroom. There was a brief flash of skin, the fleeting impression of a narrow waist and round ass and then she pulled on a robe and disappeared from sight.

It took him a minute or so to get himself together after that - finding pants, cane, equilibrium - but eventually he managed to follow after her.

Propped up in the doorway he said, "So is this deja vu, or were the last six weeks just an extremely vivid hallucination?"

"I wish," she muttered.

She looked pale as she stood there, one hand braced on the vanity, staring at the toilet like it was her worst enemy.

"Gonna puke or what?" he asked, amused at the ways in which this morning was paralleling that other morning they'd woken up together. Although that day she hadn't been the only one feeling sick.

"I hate throwing up." She was thinking about it, though, and he could tell she was close from the tightness around her eyes and the way her lips pressed together. Finally, though, she shook her head. "I'm definitely not throwing up with you standing there watching me." She said it half to herself, as if her stomach might hear her and obey if she just spoke firmly enough.

She went to move past him out the door but he stopped her.

"Twice in two months," he said. "This is becoming a habit."

She gave him a wan smile. "Twice is hardly a habit. Twice is more like a... coincidence." She moved away and he watched her leave through the other door, heading off down the hall.

He went into the bathroom himself then, taking care of a few matters of his own - peeing, ridding himself of morning breath with Cuddy's mouthwash. He stopped short of using her toothbrush because that, he thought with an inward smirk, would be gross.

He realised as he went back out into the bedroom and found his shirt that he was actually feeling... not bad at all. Well-rested and relaxed and not at all how he tended to feel first thing in the morning.

Sex, the great cure-all, he thought as he ambled down the corridor. That is, unless you had morning sickness. Then you were on your own.

She was seated at the kitchen table when he found her. There was an open box of crackers by her elbow and the smell of ginger and lemon emanating from the steaming mug in her hand.

"If you want coffee, you'll have to make it yourself," she said.

"Some hostess you are."

"I'm surprised you haven't made a run for it yet. You didn't stick around for coffee and chit-chat last time."

"I'm afraid you'll just track me down at work later and force me to 'talk about it' anyway," he said, making quotation marks in the air.

"Don't you think we should talk about it?" she said, her tone and expression carefully neutral. "I didn't ask if you wanted to," she added when he made a face. "I asked if you think we should."

He propped himself up against the counter and rubbed his forehead. No hangover, and yet his head was starting to hurt after all. He reached in his pocket for his vicodin.

"I know, I know," she went on. "It's too early for a deep and meaningful conversation."

"It's never a good time for one of those."

She smiled faintly. "I don't disagree. But last night -"

"Or," he cut her off abruptly, "we could try not spoiling a good thing by dissecting it to death. Or even until it's just really, really sick."

"You think it was a good thing?"

"You're right. It was a bad, bad thing. Naughty, even."

"I'm not saying it wasn't..." When he grinned she rolled her eyes. "Could you stop being you for a minute? It's just that things are complicated enough right now - that's all I'm saying. We really don't need any more..."

"Complications?"

"Right."

"Well 'talking about it'," he repeated the quotation mark gesture, "always makes things more complicated. So I say we don't do that. From now on, fight club rules apply."

She stared at him. "What?"

"What's the first rule of fight club?" She didn't reply so he answered for her. "Don't talk about fight club!"

"I never saw that movie."

"Well, the book was better, anyway. But you've only got to remember one thing."

She raised an eyebrow, her demeanour unimpressed. "Don't talk about some movie I never saw?"

"Exactly. Now, what was that about coffee?"

She gave him an exasperated look over the rim of her cup of tea, but as she put it down again he could see she was fighting off amusement. Then she sighed. "In the freezer. I've mostly given up but I haven't gotten around to tossing it yet."

As he found the coffee and brought it over to the machine he proceeded to inform her of the complete lack of any data to support caffeine having detrimental effects on foetal development - not at levels found in an average cup of joe, at any rate. Which she should really know, he pointed out, being a doctor herself. Supposedly.

She listened to it all, watching his futile attempts to work her coffee machine, and when he finished talking simply said, "I'm not getting my baby hopped up on caffeine."

"How about helping me get hopped up, then?"

"You know, a man your age who doesn't know how to make his own coffee probably doesn't deserve any. And stop hitting it! You break it, you're buying me a new one."

He narrowed his eyes at her, reaching back into his pocket. It had started out so well, but was quickly turning into a two-pill morning. "Not much of a morning person, are you?"

"Hey, I used to be a morning person. I used to get up and go for a run, eat a healthy breakfast and go to work feeling great. Now I get up, spend some time in the bathroom depending on how much I'm going to vomit that morning, then I sit here drinking ginger tea, which by the way I can't stand, because it's the only thing that seems to help the nausea, and then I drag myself in to work feeling like crap. So no, at the moment, I'm not much of a morning person."

Finished with her speech, she got up and crossed the space between them. "Filters are up there," she pointed to a shelf over his head, "and they go in here. Then the coffee. Three scoops. The water goes in there. Push that button. And I can't believe I had to tell you that. Idiot. I'm going to take a shower. I'll be leaving for work in twenty minutes - I can drop you at home on my way in. Don't break it," were her parting words as she left the room.

He watched her go, then turned back to the coffee machine and began following her directions.

If he wanted coffee, he bought it. Or got Cameron to make it for him. Still, he thought somewhat defensively, he would have figured it out on his own. Eventually. She was just cranky. Cranky and sick.

Her symptoms were textbook - there was no mystery here for him to solve. Not medically, anyway. He wondered about her, though, he couldn't help it. He wondered about what was going through her head, especially after what had happened last night. He didn't have an answer, though, not yet.

And then there was the question of what had been going through his own mind. One minute, he remembered, all he had wanted to do was escape, the next he found himself drawn to her, irresistibly so. He found himself kissing her, and propositioning her, and sitting in her car on the way to spend the night with her.

He decided to fall back on his old standby - it seemed like a good idea at the time. A really good idea. She'd seemed to think so too in the moment, though this morning was another story. Now she seemed happy to let him brush off the discussion entirely, to pass it off as a one time thing. The problem there being that it had now happened twice.

Twice wasn't a habit; she was right about that. But twice could mean more than a coincidence, too - twice could be a pattern emerging. He liked patterns. Patterns made sense, they could be defined and quantified.

Patterns, he thought as he stood in her kitchen sipping freshly brewed coffee, had no choice but to repeat themselves.