Chapter 97 Back to Normal
The campus looked the same.
That was the strange part. I had half expected it to feel different. To somehow reflect everything that had changed inside me. But Mooncrest was just Mooncrest. Same stone buildings. Same oak trees. Same students cutting across the quad with coffee cups and backpacks and the particular tired energy of a Thursday morning that had nothing to do with anything except being tired on a Thursday.
Nobody looked at me.
I pulled my jacket tighter and walked toward the biology building. Ten weeks pregnant and not showing yet, but I felt different in my own body. Slower. More deliberate. Like I was carrying something I couldn’t put down and didn’t want to.
Lycian had offered to walk me. I had told him no.
Not because I didn’t want him. Because I needed to know I could do this on my own. Walk across this campus like a regular person. Like a student. Like someone whose biggest problem was a missed lecture and not an ancient bloodline and a war she had barely survived.
The classroom smelled like dry-erase markers and old coffee. Twelve students are already seated. Professor Adler is writing something on the board without turning around.
I slid into a seat near the window. Put my bag down. Pulled out a notebook.
The girl beside me glanced over. “You’re Elowen, right?”
My shoulders tensed. Old reflex. “Yeah.”
“I missed some lectures. Can I borrow your notes?”
Just that. No weight to it. No recognition of anything else. Just a girl who missed class asking the girl beside her for help.
“Sure,” I said. Something loosened in my chest. “I’ll send them to you after.”
“Thanks.” She turned back to her laptop, completely unconcerned. Like I was just another student. Like this was just another morning.
It was. That was the thing. It actually was.
Class started. I wrote things down. Listened. Let myself be ordinary for fifty minutes. Let the scratch of pens and the hum of the projector and the smell of someone’s coffee two rows ahead be the whole world for a little while.
When it ended I gathered my things slowly. Let the room empty around me. Stood at the window for a moment and looked out at the quad below. Students are crossing in every direction. Leaves are skipping across the stone path in the October wind. A boy on a bench was eating a sandwich with the focused energy of someone who had forgotten to eat breakfast and was now making up for it.
Normal. Quietly, beautifully normal.
I felt my phone buzz in my jacket pocket.
Lycian: How’s it feel?
I smiled before I could stop myself. Stood there by the window typing back like a student texting between classes, which was exactly what I was.
Me: Quiet. Good quiet.
The reply came fast.
Lycian: Good. I’m right outside if you need me.
I laughed softly. Just a small sound, but the girl still packing up her bag near the door glanced over and smiled without knowing why, the way people do when laughter is genuine enough to be contagious.
He was actually outside. I knew without checking. Probably leaning against the oak tree near the entrance with his hands in his pockets, looking like he just happened to be there. Looking like he wasn’t counting the minutes.
Some things didn’t change.
I found him exactly where I’d pictured. Collar up against the October cold, breath showing faintly in the air, eyes finding me the second I came through the door. He didn’t move toward me right away. Just watched me walk to him. Let me have the last few steps on my own.
“How was it?” he asked when I reached him.
“Normal.” I tucked myself under his arm and felt the warmth of him close around me immediately. He smelled like cold air and cedar and something underneath both that was just him. “Someone asked to borrow my notes.”
“Huge crisis.”
“Enormous. I handled it very bravely.”
He pressed his lips to the top of my head and I felt him smile against my hair.
We walked. Slow enough to be lazy about it. His hand found mine somewhere between the biology building and the east path without either of us deciding it would. Fingers linked. Easy. The kind of easy that takes a long time to build and then feels like it was always there.
Leaves skipped across the path ahead of us. The sky was pale blue and cloudless, the sharp clean blue that only came in October when the air had finally decided to be honest about the season. Somewhere across the quad someone was playing music from an open window. Something soft. Something with no urgency in it at all.
I thought about the first time I had walked this campus.
Terrified. Debt follows me like a shadow. Hiding everything I was and everything I wasn’t. The weight of it was so constant that I had stopped feeling it as weight and started feeling it as just the way things were.
Now I was walking the same path with my mate’s hand warm around mine and a baby growing quietly inside me and nowhere to be except here. Except this. Except for the plain, unhurried middle of a Thursday.
“You’re thinking loudly,” Lycian said.
“I’m allowed.”
“Always. What about?”
I watched a pair of students hurry past with coffee cups and half-finished conversations. “How different this feels. I used to walk this exact path bracing for something. Always waiting for the next bad thing.” I squeezed his hand. “Now I’m just walking.”
He looked at me the way he did sometimes, measuring something, remembering something. His thumb moved slowly across my knuckles.
“Here is good,” he said.
“It really is.”
We stopped at the bench near the east garden. The one that caught whatever sun existed even in October, sheltered against the old stone wall of the science building. I sat because my lower back had been aching since morning and the walk had not improved it. Lycian sat beside me without being asked. Close. His thigh warms against mine.
The campus spread out in front of us. Students are moving in every direction. A group of girls is laughing loudly about something near the fountain. A professor crossing the quad with a stack of papers threatening to escape the crook of his arm.
Ordinary in every direction.
I pressed my free hand to my stomach. Still flat. Still hiding the small certain life growing there.
The baby shifted. Just once. Low and gentle. Their particular way of reminding me they were paying attention too.
Lycian felt it through my hand before I said anything. His fingers tightened around mine.
We sat on the bench in the thin October sun with the whole campus moving around us like we were something still at the center of it. Like we were the part that didn’t need to rush.
I leaned into his shoulder. Felt him lean back into me without adjusting, without shifting, just accepting my weight the way he always did. Like holding me steady was something he had always been built for.
The music from the dorm window drifted across the quad. Soft and unhurried. It mixed with footsteps and distant laughter and the wind moving through the oak trees overhead and then slowly faded as the song ended.
Neither of us moved.
There was nowhere else to be.