Just when we were getting to the good part

As they exchanged their apologies, Briar wanted to deny Zee's just as her mother denied hers. There was nothing any of them could have done to foresee this or prepare for this sudden illness, but it didn't make her regret the past any less. She wished she could turn back time, to find a way to change how things had been, to tell herself not to hold such bitterness and resentment for so long. Looking back on things now, she could see the pettiness in it and which she was sure that every pup growing up without their parents felt some sort of anger or void that couldn't be filled, she still wished that things had been different. She gave a small nod of agreement and smiled when Zee mentioned having Artorias to lean on and getting to have her here to meet her children for at least a brief time, swallowing past the lump in her throat as she desperately tried to hold back her tears. Artorias had been there for her the first time she thought that she had lost her mother and now he would be there for her again and again for the rest of their lives. No matter how many decisions she had made that she regretted, he was the one choice that she had no reason to doubt.

Lifting her paw to the edge of the bed, she went to take her mother's similarly tawny paw and squeeze it gently. "I just... I just wish there was more time," she said softly. More time to get to know the mother she had spent so little time with before she moved away, more time to see her children playing with their grandmother, more time to see her parents together. A thought crossed her mind and a laugh bubbled up as a smile tugged at her lips, the most ridiculous of her regrets crossing her mind. "You never got to try the wines!" she exclaimed between tear-laced laughter, remembering how she had attempted to share them with her mother during one of their trips to the Armada before she found out about her youngest siblings, grinning and grateful for the moment of silliness in the heavy darkness that hung around them like a heavy fog.

"Briar Carpathius"