Chapter 197 - 196: A Piece of him, inside Her.

"He doesn’t know," Eleanore said quietly. "I can’t even tell him. Letters take weeks to reach the front, if they reach him at all with the lines as unstable as they are."

"Then you write it anyway," Stella said gently. "You write it, and you send it, and you trust that it finds him. Because he deserves to know, even if it takes time to reach him. And because you deserve to not carry this alone, even from a distance."

Eleanore nodded slowly, blinking back the sudden sting of tears, relief and fear and hope all tangled together in a knot she didn’t quite know how to unravel. "What if something happens to him before it reaches him? What if he never—"

"Don’t," Stella said firmly, squeezing her hand. "Don’t let your mind go there. Hael and Caelestis are both far too stubborn and strong to die on some battlefield when they have this much waiting for them at home. Hold onto that instead."

Eleanore exhaled shakily, pressing a hand to her still-flat stomach, the reality of it beginning to settle in fully now, a piece of Caelestis growing inside her while he fought a war hundreds of miles away, unaware, and a fierce, protective love already blooming for a child she hadn’t even met yet.

"A few months apart," she echoed softly, a small, watery laugh escaping her despite everything. "Our children are going to grow up as absolute menaces together, just like you said."

"Obviously," Stella said, smiling through her own tears now. "It’s practically destiny at this point."

They sat together a long while after that, the two of them talking quietly through the strange, frightening, wonderful shape of what lay ahead, nursery arrangements neither of them had any right to be planning this early, names floated and dismissed with the same easy humor as before, though something steadier and more determined had settled beneath the laughter now, the shared understanding that whatever came next, they would face it together, the way they always had.

The telegram office was crowded when Eleanore arrived, soldiers’ families lined up in weary rows to send whatever brief words the wartime restrictions allowed, but she waited her turn patiently, the small slip of paper in her hand feeling heavier than its size should have allowed.

She’d drafted the message a dozen times in her head on the carriage ride over, discarding version after version as either too clinical or too overwrought, before finally settling on the simplest possible truth.

"Caelestis — I’m pregnant. Come home safe. All my love, Eleanore."

It was brief, restricted by the same wartime limits placed on every message crossing the front lines, but it carried everything that mattered. She handed it across the counter with hands that weren’t quite steady, watching the clerk fold it without any particular ceremony into the same stack as a dozen other messages destined for the same front, and found herself lingering a moment longer than necessary, as though watching it disappear into that stack might somehow guarantee its safe arrival.

The telegram found him nearly a week later, delivered to the command tent along with a stack of routine dispatches, and Caelestis nearly dismissed it as another supply report before he registered the sender’s name. He read it once, then again, and the low murmur of the tent around him faded into complete irrelevance.

"Careful," Hael said, glancing over from where he was cleaning his blade, "you look like you’ve seen a ghost."

Caelestis didn’t answer immediately, simply staring at the words until they’d fully settled, something cracking open in his chest that had nothing to do with grief for once.

"Eleanore’s pregnant," he said finally, voice unsteady with disbelief.

The tent erupted. Hael was on his feet in an instant, clapping him hard on the shoulder with a delighted laugh, and within minutes the news had spread through the surrounding camp, soldiers offering rough, hearty congratulations, a rare bright moment carved out of the grinding exhaustion of war. Even the crown prince, arriving to find the source of the commotion, broke into a genuine grin for the first time in days.

"Congratulations," Alastor said, gripping his hand firmly. "Truly. If there’s any justice left in this war, it’ll end quickly enough to get you both home before that child arrives."

"I intend to be there regardless of how this war ends," Caelestis said, something fierce and unshakable settling into his voice.

That night, by lamplight in his tent, he wrote back, longer than the restrictions technically allowed, though he didn’t particularly care if it got trimmed down before reaching her.

"Eleanore,

I don’t have the words for what I felt reading your message. I’ve fought through worse than this war today just carrying that feeling with me. Take care of yourself, and take care of them. I’ll be home before you know it, and nothing on this battlefield is going to change that. All my love, always. Caelestis."

He sat with the letter a long while after finishing it, reading it back twice before finally sealing it, some part of him reluctant to let it go, as though holding onto it a little longer might delay the moment he had to return to the grim business of the war waiting outside the tent flap. Hael found him still sitting there when he came to fetch him for the evening’s briefing.

"You’ve got that look," Hael said, dropping down onto the crate beside him.

"What look?"

"The one where you’re trying to memorize something you’re afraid you won’t get to keep." Hael’s own expression sobered, some of the earlier levity fading. "I get it. Believe me. I read Stella’s last letter probably a dozen times before I could make myself put it away."

"Does it get easier?" Caelestis asked. "Being out here, knowing what’s waiting for you at home."

"No," Hael admitted. "But it gets clearer. You stop fighting for the crown, or the war office, or whatever official reason got you sent out here in the first place. You start fighting just to get back to the thing that actually matters. That part, at least, makes the rest of it easier to bear."