The nausea arrived on a morning when I had planned to do approximately everything.
Not the dramatic kind — not the crisis version, not the specific misery of illness that announces itself loudly and requires immediate response. The quiet kind. The kind that settled in my stomach at the first awareness of the day and stayed, low and persistent, a background note of wrong that no specific action seemed to address.
I lay still for a moment, cataloguing.
The bond was warm — Darius awake, somewhere in the compound already. The pack bond was at its morning register. The small warmth below my ribs was present and unchanged, patient as always. Everything external was in order.
It was just my body, asserting itself.
I sat up.
That was a mistake.
I sat back down.
The nausea adjusted accordi
