A / N : Thanks Lady Bender, Already There, and ThatFlyingEagle for the reviews. (50? You guys, I die inside. I can't believe 50 people have even read this.)

Now on to Leela, and that plus one she's in total denial about. Not for long!

Leela's landing was sloppy, but she was in too black a mood to care. She left the ship - pausing only briefly to scowl at the scratches she'd left in the paintwork - and headed straight to the canteen.

"Hey, Leela," Amy said nervously.

"Hey," Leela said shortly, rummaging in the refrigerator. "Ugh. Don't we have anything worth eating in here?"

"There's coffee," her co-worker suggested.

Leela grimaced. "No. I mean food. It was a rough trip," she explained. "We ran into an asteroid belt and I must've hurled my entire body weight in vomit. I feel like I haven't eaten in days."

Amy laughed, but stopped when she caught Leela's expression.

"Sorry. I thought that was a joke."

"It wasn't."

"Oh. Well, I have some ice-cream in the freezer, and Fry probably left some Slurm somewhere, but if you want real food . . . oh." She trailed off, watching Leela combine the two. Her expression was somewhere between grossed-out and wistful. "You're going to eat that. Together."

Leela sat down opposite her and prodded her ice-cream island with her spoon. It melted a little as the sea of Slurm in the bowl fizzed at the edges. The concoction was a little gross, but food was food, and right now it was helping to settle her stomach.

"Actually it's not so bad," she admitted. "You want some?"

Amy shook her head and reluctantly looked away.

"No thanks. I can't afford to pork out. I'm presenting my thesis at the end of the week" - she gestured sadly at her computer screen - "and if they mark me on merit, I'm never gonna pass. My only hope is to look super cute when I turn it in. And maybe cry a little. I'll see how I feel." She closed her laptop. "So how was the delivery? Aside from the asteroid belt, globviously."

Leela's scowl returned.

"Awful. We had to deliver two thousand pizzas to a research station in the Tempus Nebula, and when we got there, those jackasses wouldn't pay."

"Jeepers. Why not?"

"According to them, they never ordered any pizza. And being humorless hyper-nerds, they would never pull fratboy pranks on a delivery crew." Leela crushed her ice-cream forcefully with the back of her spoon. "They denied it even when we played them back the tape. So now the ship is full of cold pizza and my bank account is empty, which is just great. And the one person who's supposed to deliver pizza didn't bother to show up for work today." She pushed her bowl away. "So far my day's been peachy, Amy. Thanks for asking."

"You're welcome." Amy smiled. Either Leela's bitter sarcasm had bounced right off her, or she was choosing to ignore it. "Um, just . . two things." She edged out of hitting distance. "Why didn't you just eat the pizza, if you were hungry?"

Leela glared at her.

"Because I can't even look at those pizza boxes without wanting to kill someone," she snapped. "What was the other thing?"

Amy took a deep breath.

"Fry didn't show up for work because he quit. Days ago. I'm sorry, Leela. I thought Bender would have told you."

Leela's stomach dropped.

"He . . . what?"

"Yeah. He skipped out on Bender too. I'm not sure where he is." Amy frowned. "Are you okay?" she asked gently.

Leela nodded.

"I'm fine," she said. Her voice sounded like it was coming from far away. "I'm going to go watch TV," she mumbled.

Amy let her go without argument.

Leela's anger had drained away. It didn't seem important anymore. She felt dizzy instead, like someone had cut away one of her legs and she hadn't noticed until she started to fall over.

It was all her fault. She had told him to move on from her. What had she expected? The truth was that she should have seen this coming. But somehow she hadn't, and now she was left feeling unbalanced, like she was missing a part of herself. She didn't know where Fry was, she wasn't much more sure where Lars was, and she felt empty.

Channel Six was showing some dated legal drama. Leela stared at it blankly. It was ten minutes before she realized not one iota of the plot had entered her head. Her eye was burning and there was a lump in her throat like she might cry.

Cry? Oh lord, not again.

She gave up pretending to watch a hot young lawyer fellate a judge, and lay down on the couch instead, staring up at the ceiling tiles.

She felt . . . alone.

She shut her eye.

She missed Lars. She missed the way he talked her to sleep at night, mumbling about tv commercials and famous peoples' heads until she gave up trying to shut him up and just drifted off. She missed waking up annoyed because he'd got a hold on her in the night and was sleepily refusing to let go. She missed giving up and letting his heartbeat lull her back to sleep, listening out for the little skips and glitches she knew like the back of her hand.

She missed Fry too. She missed what he did to her heart when he kissed her - that terrified, exciting, exhilarated feeling that was part her feelings and part Fry's feelings mixed up with her own. She missed the sweet stupid things he said sometimes. The way he looked at stars. The way he looked at her. She missed sitting on the couch with him doing absolutely nothing, and feeling happy for reasons she couldn't explain.

It was hard enough to miss one person that badly, never mind two.

The Professor was drilling something on the next floor, and the sound of college radio floated in from the next room, where Amy was supposed to be working on her thesis. Leela knew she should get up and do something about all that pizza before Zoidberg found it, but she didn't have the energy.

I'll get up in a minute, she told herself.

She'd fallen asleep again.

Leela knew this because she was on the brink of waking but her eyelid was as heavy as lead and her body seemed to have sunk six inches into the couch.

On the edge of her hearing, Hermes and Amy were having a whispered argument.

"I can't ask her that!" Amy was protesting. "She'll rip my head off and eat it, Hermes!"

Hermes chuckled. "I know. Oh Jah, do I know. But you are a woman. It might sound better coming from you. You know. More . . . tactful, as it were."

"Are you crazy? I'm not tactful!" Amy moaned. "Oh man, she'll kill me. There's no way I'm asking her."

"If only we could get Fry to do it," Hermes lamented.

Leela decided she'd had enough. She rubbed her eye and sat up, still feeling sluggish. Maybe she needed a workout – it wasn't like her to feel so drained.

She wiped the drool off her chin and glared at her co-workers.

"What are you arguing about?" she demanded. "And why did you let me sleep all afternoon? What's wrong with you?"

Her friends stared at her. Eventually Hermes held up one pudgy finger.

"One moment," he said brightly.

He put his other hand in his pocket and came up holding two straws.

"Fair is fair," he said to Amy.

"I guess so . . . oh, man!" The Martian girl pouted as she drew the short straw. "I can't believe this!"

"No do-overs," Hermes reminded her smugly. "Now if you'll excuse me, ladies, LaBarbara's curried goat is waiting for me."

He smiled smugly and ducked out, leaving Amy to moan in despair.

Leela stood up and stretched.

Ugh. I definitely need a workout, she thought, as she rubbed away the crick in her neck. She could use an energy boost, and she didn't like the way Amy was eying her figure.

"If there's a problem," she snapped, "spit it out."

Zoidberg probably got into the pizza. Well, it's not like we had plans for it anyway.

"Oh," Amy said nervously. "It's nothing, really . . . it's just . . ." She closed her eyes and crossed her fingers on both hands. "Are you pregnant?"

"What?"

The intern cringed away in terror.

"Hermes and I were thinking maybe you were pregnant," she stammered. "Because, um, your mood swings are giving us whiplash, and-"

"Amy," Leela interrupted. "I am not pregnant. And that's a low blow, even for you. If you think I'm putting on weight, you could just say."

The accusation made her angry and defensive for reasons she didn't really want to think about, but found herself thinking about now. She could hear Fry's voice in her head again, panting "Wait, wait!" when all she wanted was to stop talking, stop thinking, stop caring. And later she'd looked at that condom wrapper and wondered what was wrong with it, why it bothered her so much . . .

Maybe it was because she'd let her feelings for Fry boil over like that once before, and as hard as she tried, she couldn't remember a condom on that occasion.

But there must have been. There must have been. She couldn't be pregnant.

Amy chewed her lip.

"Are you sure? Because you did say you and Lars were going to try for a baby that time, and your scary-face is so not contradicting my point about the mood swings. You didn't do anything crazy like stop your birth control, right?"

Leela froze. Panic flooded her stomach, making her feel physically sick. She had to fight to overcome it.

"I'd know it if I was pregnant," she argued. "That was ages ago. If I was pregnant, I'd be -" She pulled up short but the sentence finished itself in her head anyway. "Late," she realized, horrified. "Oh, god. I'm late."

"It could be stress," Amy said doubtfully.

"Of course it's stress!"

"Okay . . . but just in case it's not . . . maybe we should do a test."

Leela glared at her. "Why would we do a test? I don't need a test. I'm not pregnant. I can't be pregnant. I don't know why we're even talking about this."

She began to twist the end of her ponytail between her fingers, which had started to shake almost imperceptibly. She sat on them to make it stop.

Amy muttered something under her breath in strained-sounding Cantonese.

"Okay," she said brightly. She pulled out her laptop and typed in a few words. "I'll list a bunch of symptoms and you just say yes or no if you have them. Like a pop quiz! How's that?"

Leela wanted to drop the subject and never mention it again, but Amy clearly wasn't going to help with that. So she rolled her eye, feigning calm.

"Fine. Waste your time."

She picked up the TV remote and began to skip through the channels. The rapid motion was a good cover for her nervous hands.

"Fatigue," Amy started. "Oh come on, you definitely have that!"

"I fell asleep at work one time," Leela fumed.

The cyclops curled up on the couch, pretending not to notice Amy's skeptical expression. She tried to focus on All My Circuits, but even Calculon's hammy acting couldn't distract her from her heart, which was going haywire in her chest.

"Nausea or vomiting in the morning," Amy continued, "or at any other time of day."

She broke off reading and looked at Leela, who was struggling to keep her cool. A panicked inner voice had started up in her head. It wasn't saying much, but still – the inner chorus of 'no, no, no' was pretty distracting.

"My parents live in the sewer," she managed at last, in a passably nonchalant tone. "And have you gotten a whiff of Zoidberg lately? He reeks."

Amy had enough sense not to push it.

"He is disgusting," she allowed. "How about this one : a strong sense of aversion to everyday smells, or a craving for certain foods?"

Leela hesitated. She didn't know why she was even admitting to this, but - "I have been a little disgusted by coffee lately," she confessed. "But it's probably that barista across the street. Her coffee tastes like crapswill."

"Yeah . . . she's cute though," Amy chirped. "Hey, are we not gonna mention the Slurm thing? You're drinking more of that stuff than Fry lately, and that's saying something."

"I . . . that's not . . ."

"Mood swings!" Amy continued, gleefully pushing ahead with the list. "Come on, there's no way you don't have those."

"I do not -" Leela began hotly, but she couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence.

It was true. Her moods had been all over the place lately.

How many times had she over-reacted to something, and struggled to understand why she was feeling so emotional? How many times had she found herself crying or yelling, and not really understood why she was doing it? She could flip from being furious at Fry to loving him more than she could stand in sixty seconds flat. One minute she was sure she'd never forgive Lars for lying to her, the next she was overwhelmed with guilt and wished he'd yell back at her. She was still doing it - blaming her bizarre moods on her emotions without ever stopping to think that maybe it wasn't her emotions turning her into a crazy person, maybe it was her hormones.

"Heehee." Amy giggled, her attention already back on the list. "This one's weird. Tender boobs. I wonder if Kiffy ever had that . . ."

Leela ignored her.

"Amy?" she said faintly.

"Yeah?"

"Shut up and get me a test."

Leela put the test on the coffee table and sat down beside Amy, chewing her nails.

"How long do we have to wait?" she asked tersely.

Amy checked the packet.

"Says three minutes."

"Right. Okay. I can do that. Three minutes. No problem."

The silence spiraled. Leela worked her teeth around a hangnail on her thumb.

"It was one time," she said to fill the silence. "One time I'm not sure about. I might not even be right. I mean, Fry may be an idiot, but I'm not. We must have been careful. I wouldn't be that stupid. I couldn't be."

Amy looked at her askance.

"I thought you only slept with him once?"

Leela reddened.

"I don't know how it happened," she protested. "I was mad at him, we were alone . . . one thing just led to another somehow." Please, please, she thought, don't let it have led somewhere else.

Amy stretched out cat-like on the couch.

"Angry sex is hot," she yawned.

Leela ignored her. "I can't be pregnant," she insisted. "Even if we did have unprotected sex, what are the odds? One in a couple of million? One in a billion? How unlucky would you have to be?"

Amy raised an eyebrow.

"As unlucky as Fry?" When this didn't raise a laugh she winced. "Sorry. Bad time to joke?"

Leela swallowed. Her stomach was tying itself in knots. She couldn't look at the test. What would she do if she was pregnant? She tried to think rationally about this possibility, but her brain kept backing away from it. The only feeling she could muster was abject terror.

"I can't have a baby," she mumbled. Something else struck her. "Fry can't have a baby."

If Leela couldn't picture herself as a parent there was no way she could imagine Fry as one. There were probably worse candidates for fatherhood, but right now the only one she could think of was Bender.

She was dimly aware of a commotion downstairs, the sound of running footsteps.

Amy tugged gently at her elbow.

"Leela," she said softly.

"I figured it out!" a distant voice was yelling. "I know what Nibbler meant . . . I need to find Leela!"

Lars burst through the door, waving a dictionary in one hand.

"I found the word," he panted. "Progeny, it means -"

He stopped.

"Baby," he murmured.

The three of them stared at the test, and Leela felt her world come crashing down.