This was a change; not new but strange, that the once rogue of a female had to pause and consider time and again. As she had lied in her sick bed away from the collective’s heart, she had not considered that her presence indeed resided on pack lands and that in time she would need to acquaint with them all. Her focus had solely been on healing until she had mustered enough strength to move, but beyond that, her mind drew a perpetual blank until the day came that she could move without the crippling pain of her injury.
And even then, celebration of her recovery was not within the pack as a whole, but with a proposition for the Alpha male and his mate turned mother. Perhaps for them, a celebration was in order. A joining of voices to congratulate the birth of the new into the fold; a moment better shared by those that knew and trusted each other well. But for the wanderer- no, newly inducted wolf, the birth of new was an opportunity to show her worthwhile place within the pack. Even if it would indeed be a slow and arduous process.
But she had time to ponder further on this much later down the line when the novelty of the birth had settled. There would be time to see the pups and demonstrate her skills to the mother, and prove her worth to the pack she had chosen to stay within. For now, what she needed was to mark a place within the haven to call her own, a soft bed in which to lie on each night beneath the stars. There was of course the common den to make herself a home, but she was too used to sleeping in the open to assimilate to those conditions. So for the time being with a mawful of soft moss, she began searching the sparse trees for a place beneath their roots.