Justice For All Time

It had been a year since her brother had been kidnapped, and Justice had not been able to rouse herself from her apathetic state. She'd been able to do nothing to help her mother, nothing to save her father, nothing to keep Exodus there, and now she was helpless to free Valor from his captivity. The knowledge of her continuous line of failures ate at her. From afar, the sorry state of affairs might not have been obvious. She was eating, she kept herself well groomed, she did her patrols, she kept herself in good physical condition, and when she happened to cross paths with another pack member she spoke to them as though nothing had changed, as though everything was all right.

But it wasn't all right. Nothing was.

She'd moved out of the communal dens that she'd stayed in since she'd returned to the pack, but hadn't bothered to dig one of her own. Why should she stay in the caves when there was no Kavdaya there for her to care for? No Valor to watch over as he healed? If she stayed, Paladin might start to notice something was wrong and confront her about it. So she'd left, and slept curled in an old buffalo wallow instead.

She was there now, sleeping off a late-night patrol among the new-growth grasses of spring, when her ears twitched up of their own accord and woke her. It took a long moment for it to register as a howl calling for her. For her? For a second a spark of interest flared in her, but it was smothered beneath the weight of gloom. She had to go through the motions though, so the young Ancora hauled herself to her paws and loped mechanically along the path to where Regulus' call had originated.

She stopped in front of him and eyed him with a narrow-eyed neutrality. He had lost his last fight in the raid to one of Talis' warriors, leaving him with a permanent limp. She wondered distantly how he felt about that. He seemed to be coping with it anyway. It wasn't exactly a death-knell for his alphaship. On the other hand, she wondered what effect Dragon being completely blinded was having, and managed to scrape up a dark satisfaction that she'd taken away his ability to betray them so easily again. Caught up in these thoughts, Justice didn't say anything aloud.