it has to look real by @decarbry (decarbry)

It was not something she thought about often, so set was she in the knowledge that she had done the right thing. The memory was one she recalled in dreams here and there, but she always awoke only more confident in her choices. In her dreams she fled through the Freelands, from north to west, taking every opportunity to bruise and batter herself along the way. Push to exhaustion. Bleed. Break. Make it look real. Tree branches could be claw marks. Dirt rubbed in her fur could be when the bear had dragged her about before she'd gotten free. Everything was a tool to sell her falseness ever further.

Olimpia left her children in the north and returned a liar to Stonehaven. The dreams were familiar despite their infrequency. This time... for the first time... she stopped, paused, in her tireless run. She looked down, wanting to see the face she wore, the one her children saw, the one her packmates would soon see. Her face was hardened with determination. Coldness. That was not the face of a mother whose children were just killed by a bear. Olimpia did not recall stopping to look at herself in the waking world. This was a decision she made here, in the strange and wakeless world in sleep. Odd how once again her dream self listened to any kind of will.

She did remember the way she'd felt, though. When Stonehaven's border would soon come around the next rise. The barest of moments... Olimpia had felt... doubt. Uncertainty. Not in her decision, but in her ability to make them see what she wanted them to see. This version of her now, her old body mixed with her present mind... she saw that moment again, and saw only weakness. Perhaps her weakest moment.

She didn't care to forget what she did to Wander and Yael, nor what she did to Stonehaven's laws.

She only wanted to forget that one singular moment of doubt.