POV: Draco and Lucen (Alternating)
They're not Alphas. They're better.
DRACO
I look at what we've built.
The councils in the grove's clearings, the people making decisions together in the specific way that collaborative governance works when it's working — not the ideal version that the principle promises and the theory describes but the actual version, the messy real version where the collaboration requires the sustained effort of people who are learning to do it and who are finding the learning produce the capability.
They're building it.
The packs that were most thoroughly organized around the dominance structure are the slowest to find the collaborative mode — not because the mode is unavailable to them but because the learning requires the unlearning first, the specific work of identifying the assumptions that were running as default settings and finding that the assumptions were default settings and deciding to run a different default.
Some of them are doing that work.
