at least it's a very comfortable couch

Aris wasn't the most well trained healers - what she'd learned had mostly come from what Gossamer had done her best to teach her, mixed with the scrolls she was slowly gathering into a library from the trader-fox whose rounds she now eagerly awaited. She wasn't even particularly interested in helping most people - she was driven to healing out of the puzzle-solving aspect of it, really, and had always been way more interested in using it for less than kindly things. But for the people who were important to her, like really important, she was willing to do anything, delve deep into that admittedly shallow pocket of knowledge and come up with a win for them. She'd wanted so badly to be able to do that during the Long Night when everyone was so sick but she hadn't had the knowledge or the experience to be able to come up with a solution. The fact that no one else had been able to do anything about it either didn't make it easier, because she should have been the one to pull the answer out of the hat.

Now that the disease had run its course and the sun had driven away the last physical vestiges of it, that opportunity had gone. But she didn't need to be a trained healer to worry about how her mother was handling it, after everything else she'd already been through. She'd been both physically and emotionally fragile before she and Sirius and several of her children had gotten sick; that had to have been terrifying to her, for so many lives she cared about to be in danger of being lost and not being able to do anything about it. Her mom always had just cared so much more than Aris, and she had the scars from it too. It wasn't something she really thought about much in connection to healing, the mental and emotional aspect of it, but frankly she was a manipulative little bitch so she was aware of peoples' emotional states and she was pretty sure her mom was at risk of being really hurt by all she'd gone through, and Aris fucking hated the idea of her mom hurting.

So one morning not long after the sun had risen to warm the world and her father had already left to do alpha-y things, Aris had set out to get her mom alone and see how she was doing. The first place she looked was Zee and Sirius' den - not even necessarily because she thought she'd be there, but because it one place she'd be certain to be at some point in the day and it was still early, so it was a good starting point. Poking her head in, she called out softly, "Mom, are you in? Can we talk?"