Chapter 184 First Trimester Chaos
Jolie POV
Week 8-13
The morning sickness starts on a Wednesday and by Thursday I have vomited twice and Doc has added four new columns to his monitoring spreadsheet.
It isn't painful exactly—more disorienting, like my body has decided it no longer answers to me and is now taking direction from a much smaller authority who has opinions about everything I eat. The moonfire surging at the wrong moments is worse than the nausea. I'll be reaching for a glass of water and my hand will glow suddenly bright, and then Ryder will appear in the doorway in two seconds flat because he felt something through the bond, and I'll have to talk him down from the edge while also trying not to throw up.
"This is fine," I tell him one morning, sitting on the bathroom floor with my back against the cool wall, tired and exhausted. "Completely normal."
He sits down on the floor across from me, back against the opposite wall, forearms on his knees. He doesn't say anything, just watches me with that look he gets when he's cataloguing a situation and deciding how many people to blame for it.
"Stop looking at me like I'm under siege," I say.
"You just glowed through the floor tile."
I look down. There's a faint silver burn mark on the tile between my feet, roughly the shape of my handprint. "...I'll ask Doc about it."
Doc is fascinated in the way that slightly worries me, which is the way where he keeps making small interested sounds and adding things to the spreadsheet without immediately reassuring anyone. He runs daily tests now. Blood work, energy mapping, the divine signature readings he developed for my power. He also wanders into rooms I'm in with a slightly distracted expression that means a new hypothesis just occurred to him.
"The baby," he tells me at week ten, reviewing the latest mapping results with the careful delivery of someone who knows the information is going to require a moment to land, "is channeling moonfire."
I stare at him. "She's the size of a fig."
"A fig with a developing divine energy signature, yes." He turns the monitor toward me so I can see the readings. There's my usual silver-white pattern—and nested inside it, fainter but unmistakable, a second signature. Smaller. Warmer but already distinct. "She appears to be accessing your power through the developmental connection. We don't know if this is intentional on her part or simply a natural function of her biology, but"
"Her," I say.
Doc blinks. "Yes. The divine mapping is clear on that. You're having a girl."
I've known it, somewhere underneath the data. Ash has known it—she's been curling around the idea of her since before the confirmation, gentle and certain. But hearing it out loud does something to my chest, something I don't have an immediate word for.
I tell Ryder that evening, sitting across from him at the kitchen table with my tea going cold between my hands.
His face goes through something extraordinary. Shock first—he wasn't expecting the confirmation yet—then a stillness, then the brightness I've been watching grow in him for weeks. Then something that breaks a little at the edges. His eyes fill.
"A daughter," he says, like he's testing the word for weight.
"A daughter."
He's quiet for a long moment. Then, low and honest: "What if I can't protect her? What if" He stops. Tries again. "I know every threat in the region. I know exactly how dangerous this world is. And she's going to be—she's going to be small, and new, and"
"You'll teach her," I say. "Like you taught me. Except she'll start with everything you spent years learning, and she'll be terrifying by the time she's seven, and you'll spend the rest of her childhood being the thing that other people's children are frightened of."
He laughs, sudden and real, and it breaks something loose in both of us.
Later in the day i find Knox as he removes the decorative axes from the common room walls. I notice this on a Tuesday and don't say anything until I find him also padding the corners of the kitchen island, at which point I lean in the doorway and watch him work for a full minute before he looks up.
"They're sharp corners," he says, without shame.
"I'm thirteen weeks pregnant, Knox."
"Babies don't know that."
"I don't have the baby yet."
He considers this. "Better safe."
Mara pulls me off my motorcycle for the first time in months, physically positioning herself between me and my bike during a morning ride, arms crossed, expression immovable. "You ride with me. On the back."
"I have been riding since I got here"
"That was before." She says it like before is a complete sentence, which somehow it is. "Now you ride with me."
I ride with her. I'm furious about it for approximately ten minutes and then I lean my cheek against her shoulder while the road unspools ahead of us and she drives exactly the way I would drive, and I don't say anything.
Phoenix installs what he calls "pregnancy-safe lighting" throughout the compound. When I ask what makes lighting pregnancy-safe, he begins explaining something about wavelengths and circadian rhythm and the particular sensitivities of developing divine neural tissue, and I stop him at the ninety-second mark and tell him I appreciate him.
"I'm not fragile," I tell the pack at large, in the common room, on a Thursday afternoon. "I'm pregnant. There's a difference."
They look at me with various expressions of complete agreement paired with absolutely no behavior change whatsoever. It's infuriating. It's also, quietly, somewhere underneath the frustration, one of the most genuinely loving things I have ever experienced, and I carry that secretly.
The healing session goes wrong at week twelve, and the aftermath is harder than the incident itself.
A wolf from the Redwood alliance arrives with a shoulder injury—torn muscle, partial ligament damage, the kind of thing I've healed a hundred times. I sit with him in the healing center, Ash steady inside me, and I reach for the familiar thread of moonfire the way I always do.
Except the baby reaches with me.
It happens in an instant—her signature merging with mine, amplifying everything, the two of us together pushing twice the energy the situation requires. The wolf gasps. I feel it immediately, feel the too-much of it, and I try to pull back but the baby doesn't have an off switch yet, she doesn't know she's doing anything at all, and Doc is already across the room with his hands on my shoulders saying something I can't quite process through the roaring in my ears.
He stabilizes the patient first, then me. The wolf is unharmed—shaken, flooded with healing energy that knocked him sideways, but unharmed. I'm sitting on the floor with my back against the examination table before I'm fully certain of what just happened.
"The amplification isn't predictable," Doc says, quiet and careful. "Her developing abilities are interfacing with yours in ways neither of you can control yet. Until she's born, until we understand the parameters."
"I can't do healing work," I say.
The words feel strange in my mouth. Like putting down something I'd forgotten I was carrying.
"Not independently," Doc says. "Not with external patients. The risk is too unpredictable."
I sit with that for a long time after he leaves. The healing center is quiet around me—the scent of the herbs I've been working with for months, the familiar hum of equipment, the particular quality of light in the late afternoon.
Who am I if I'm not the healer? I've been building this network, this framework, this whole identity around what my power can do for others—and now the most fundamental thing about me is making that impossible. I understand why, I accept why, but the understanding doesn't reach all the way down to where the grief lives.
Celeste leads that evening's session in my place. I watch from the doorway—the wolves seated in the circle, Celeste moving among them with the quiet confidence she's built over months, her voice patient and steady. She knows what she's doing. She learned from me and she learned from Elena and she learned from her own long recovery, and she doesn't need me there.
Cass appears beside me in the doorway, reading my expression with the accuracy of someone who's spent time learning how Jolie's face works.
"You created a legacy," he says. "Something that runs without you, that serves people even on the days you can't. That's not failure." He nods toward my stomach, the barely-there curve that is going to be unmistakable very soon. "Now you're creating a life. Both of those things matter. They don't compete."
I lean against the doorframe and watch Celeste help a recovering wolf find words for something they couldn't name last week.
"Yeah," I say, after a moment. "They don't."