remedy

Time was short, and she was feeling the pressure of guilt weighing on her fully as much as the disease that was ravaging her. She'd spent so much of her time caring for Celestial, and so little mothering her children. Did they, perhaps, resent her for that lack? That she'd sacrificed her time with them for a pack that had done little to step up and prepare them for adulthood? She was concerned for how her eldest son seemed to view the world through a lens of cynicism and anger, but it was Geoffrey and Viviane who concerned her most of all. Her gentler children worried her, knowing she had and could do so little to prepare them for life without her to protect them. She'd never been anything of a healer, and that, she knew, was what they both had the most interest in. She had been tolerant of it, even encouraging, but she'd not been as insistent on getting them thoroughly trained as she should have been. With only one fully trained healer in the pack capable of teaching, she'd left it in his paws and given it little thought, until she'd realized that she'd put it off for far too long and trusted too much in the pack to take the initiative, and now it was too late to see them trained before she left them.

Resting beside the den, letting the weak winter sun soak her brittle fur and trying to get fresh air, she waited for night to come, and bring healer son home, so she could catch him away from his siblings and have a quiet word with him.