faderift | (no subject)

WHO: Cullen, Puppy, a ~~four~~ three year old prince, and you
WHAT: commandering
WHEN: whole month
NOTES: So, yeah, Cullen is just basically collecting small cute things. Newest one is a prince from the Anderfels.

It's a little unsettling how much overlap there is between caring for a small child and caring for a dog. Unsettling, but it works for Cullen. He has vague memories of being this age. he knows what he wanted, and while the circumstances were very different from Baldewin's upbringing, he figures at the heart of things, all children are probably the same.

He lets the boy play with Puppy. They two are contented to spend massive amounts of time together. While the boy is less thrilled to be stuck in Cullen's office all day, he understands that this is where he needs to be. Of course, big sad eyes and repeated pictures drawn for the man of the three of them playing in grass and surrounded by trees and rocks and other people does tend to wear him down. Some work is portable. Cullen can be seen in courtyards quite often, a small box of work at his feet, and Baldewin and Puppy playing within his line of vision. You don't have to come spend time with all of them, but if you're around for long enough in any capacity, chances are the tiny prince will draw you a picture.

Young boys also get dirty. Very dirty. Very often. Even exiled princes, it seems. Perhaps especially exiled princes, free from the shackles of the title and able to enjoy their childhood for the first time. There's freedom that comes in shedding the mantle of royalty. If you see Cullen at the hot springs during the day, he will most likely be sitting near the a shallow area in some cloth trousers bathing the day's dirt off of the little boy. Puppy will try to help. Puppy will not actually be much help.

He still goes to the hot springs late at night for himself, though now these trips no longer involve Puppy. Whenever Cullen is not with them, Puppy has been tasked with watching after the prince, and is taking his new role as royal guard dog very seriously. ANyone attempting to approach the sleeping child is going to get a chunk taken out of them by a mabari. Not figuratively.

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The bloody doglord, in this case, is three years old and seated on the back of a six month old mabari puppy who's already built like a boulder and has long since tipped the scales past 100 pounds. "Puppy didn't do anything," Bladewin insists, slipping off his perch to wrap his arms protectively around the animal's thick neck.

The nugs continue to squeak their annoyance until Yngvi can get himself out from under the keg he arrived in, tipping it back the right way with himself in it. All that can be seen of the nugs are their ears, twitching and alert for any hint that the hound might move as their pink bodies wiggle closer to Yngvi inside the keg. Guess what, they have very sharp little nails on the ends of their hand-feets.

"That," he says with all the dignity he can muster which is more than you'd think, but less than you'd hope as he glances over for some adult who was the doglord he'd been addressing because you aren't a doglord proper when Yngvi could still unhinge his jaw and take a good shot at devouring you whole pipsqueak, simmer down, "is not a puppy. Read a book."

Yngvi when did you last read something that wasn't a letter from the Boneflayers, the family or a dirty limerick, really.

Baldewin puffs out his little chest. "He's a puppy because he's six months old and you're a puppy until you're one year and also he-- his name is Puppy so he's always going to be Puppy because it's his name. I read a book this morning it was about a wyrven and I know all the words and it's-- the wyrven's name is Wingard and he's not a puppy because he's not a dog and also he's three years old." That all makes perfect sense inside a tiny mind.

"I watched a wyvern eat a man." Cullen you might want to step in because you should know what some people can be like, and this one sold a lot of lyrium to your less-than-scrupulous colleagues back in Kirkwall okay. "Started with the feet and he kept trying to claw himself out, and he did a bit, because it wasn't one of the big wyverns but it chomped him down. We all sat back, had an ale. Finished the wyvern off when it was done with him."

That's probably the one good thing about being the only Boneflayer here. No one is going to go contradicting the Truth As Dictated by Yngvi. He gets to make however many truths he likes.

"Dared one of my mates to drink the blood too, he'd already drunk dragon's blood and lived so didn't see the harm." The nugs are quiet now, little heads peeping up over the keg with twitching noses, wary just in case the predator decides it might want to take a chunk out of them. It's big enough to take them whole when they're just nugs after all.

The child doesn't appear to be in any danger. Cullen has yet to encounter anyone who might be cruel to the child, or harm him with words in any way. It doesn't occur to him, that this might be a threat worth defending against. The horrors of watching a man being eaten alive? No, it doesn't occur to him that this is something one might share with a three year old boy.

Baldewin's eyes are wide and terrified. "You didn't help him?" he asks, his voice trembling. He loves dragons, and he understands the food chain as well as any child can, but having just lost his entire family he's sensitive to the subject of death. Especially one so violent. "Why didn't you help him?"

Puppy might not know what's going on, but he absolutely can tell that Baldewin is afraid. He doesn't feel particularly threatened by the dirty little thing with his keg full of nugs, but that's not the point. He responds to the child's emotions, front legs planted, head down, menacing growl starting low in that big barrel chest of his. Nobody gets to upset the boy. Nobody.

Snorting, Yngvi swings himself out of the keg so his legs aren't about to seize up with cramp, shaking his head. That just means rescuing it from the mouth of a nug when it wonders if it might be edible, which he does with a sigh. "Rump Roast, enough, for the hundredth time you'll be in the soup pot soon as I get m'self a soup pot."

Still working on the domestic aspects of life here as he picks up where he left off, hoisting the nug into his lap. "Why should I help him? D'you reckon he would've helped me? Wyvern would've seen me, thought 'ah, look, seconds and not often I get dwarf up these parts' and come after me fast as you like. Man like that would never have helped the likes of me either, would've bought and sold me if he thought I'd have been worth the trouble."

That cuts slightly closer to the bone but this is a child so whatever, not like a child knows what Kirkwall life was like when you were small and growing up in the dark, and then when more and more desperate humans started piling into your already squalid city. Rolling his eyes at the dog - Bronson was a meaner sight, all scars and a missing eye, fished out of a fighting pit as Asher told it - he finds the mabari crunch that still seems to line the pockets of all his coats. Doesn't know what he'll do when it runs out so he just sort of fills it when he cuts through the kennels, tossing it at the hound. "Stop upsetting the nugs dog, didn't do a thing to you." Look at poor Rump Roast, wobbling like he's made of jelly.