this can still happen anywhere.

[ungovernable]

WHO: Benevenuta Thevenet, Nerva Lecuyer, Alistair Theirin
WHAT: Puppy puppy puppy puppy puppy.
WHEN: Prior to Serpent of Nevarra.
WHERE: Skyhold.
NOTES: If this post ends up needing a warning let's all blame MJ. Also, please feel free to assume that if your character was going to get a puppy, they can have picked them up or made arrangements to do so later - these are just getting logs because Benevenuta is a terrible person.

( NERVA )

They don't make scheduled arrangements, no, nothing so ... organised. Only Benevenuta had suggested that they might play chess, and Nerva had failed to object to it, and so they do, at approximately the same time and in the same place each week. Incidentally, really, only Benevenuta has been known to murmur an apology when it isn't quite the same time, or tap her fingers against the edge of the table and decline offers of an alternate partner when it's Nerva that fails to present herself at the not actually agreed upon hour.

Nerva is not late; Benevenuta is early, her new lapdog making truth out of the designation, a much smaller creature nestled in beside.

( ALISTAIR )

Tracking down Alistair requires a bit more effort. She carries the pup in her arms, Husband trotting obediently along at her heels, skittering this way and that when the rustle of Benevenuta's skirts threatens to entangle her short limbs. When she finds him, he would not be unwise to find the way her smile broadens when her gaze settles on him just a little bit worrying.

"Alistair," she says, almost sweetly, "are you much for dogs?"

He's Fereldan. This is barely a question.

Comments

[keeperofmagi]

She is rarely late. Not out of any sort of intention, exactly, but chess has become part of her routine, and Nerva was nothing if not precise with her schedule. So she arrives at exactly the same time that she usually does when other duties don't hold her up..

"Councillor," she murmurs as she sits. It's how she says hello. Usually then she silently arranges the board, but today she stopped before she had even fully say down, frowning at the... animal in Benevenuta's lap.

"...You have a dog," she states the obvious.

[ungovernable]

"I have named her Husband," Benevenuta says, serenely. And now she has one, so leave off - it isn't a terribly obscure joke to figure out. She strokes one hand aimlessly along Husband's back, prompting some interest that doesn't linger; a sleepy animal, currently, tired from her exertions.

She smiles at Nerva over the board, pieces beside it.

"I had thought to make a gift of the little one."

To her.

[keeperofmagi]

She didn't intend to smile - almost never does - but she can't help the twitch at her lips, quickly smothered, as she begins to take each piece and carefully put it in its place.

She pauses, though, and frowns at the mention of the little one, leaning sideways to be able to see past the table. Oh. That thing. She had dismissed it as some particularly ugly lump of fur. Something someone had discarded, and had yet to be cleaned up. When she looked at it, however, the puppy turned up its face to look at her.

It was... A spectacularly ugly dog.

She raised an eyebrow to look over at her chess partner.

"And who are you bestowing this - gift- on?" She asked, wryly. "I hope they have a decent sense of humour."

[ungovernable]

"I have hoped that all this time," Benevenuta says, lightly, leaning across the table and depositing the little puppy - just old enough to be separated from its mother, likely, though Husband noses inquisitively at her mistress's hands as she lifts the unfortunate beast - in Nerva's lap without ceremony.

It slides onto its back, somewhat pathetically, in the slight dip of her thighs. A paw raises.

Benevenuta smiles again. That seems to be trouble, generally.

[keeperofmagi]

The amusement quickly disappeared into a confused frown, as suddenly there was a dog in her lap. It took her a few seconds to realise what this meant - and there was the tiniest bit of colour rising to her cheeks as she frowned down at the tiny, ugly, pathetic dog.

The silence stretched for a moment before she carefully put her hand down to try to get the dog to sit up properly, only to have it flop uselessly against her hand, and lick at her palm.

She flashed a look up at Benny, half confusion, half suspicion - she couldn't tell if she was being made fun of or not.

"Me?" She asked, as if she needed confirmation of the obvious.

[ungovernable]

"You," she agrees, careful not to let her smile grow too much at the way Nerva colours. Pleased with herself, yes; pleased with Nerva's discomfort will do her no favours with the woman at all, she knows, and so she exhibits nothing more than friendly patience.

"They are affectionate," she says, a moment later, encouraging.

[keeperofmagi]

Nerva narrowed her eyes a little, watching Benevenuta for any sign of mockery, but when she couldn't find it, she just frowned down at the puppy again, who was now completely on its back in her lap, its tiny tail wagging as it wiggled.

"... I've never... had a dog," She said, after a long moment, before frowning up at Benevenuta again. "How am I meant to care for it?"

[ungovernable]

"Feed it, walk it, keep it clean," Benevenuta supplies, brightly, settling Husband back in her lap with a gentle hand. "The stablehands will have plenty of advice, should you care to ask them - I've not had charge of my own, either, before now. But this minx made herself a spot of trouble for one of them, and I thought better I intercede."

A wry shake of her head - "Would that everyone here were so sensible. We have much more pressing affairs than an accidental bit of breeding. Still."

[keeperofmagi]

It was more confusion than anything else that kept Nerva's eyes narrowed and her brows knit, though she carefully removed a leather glove and let herself rub fingers into the dog's fur.

She was quiet for longer than was perhaps polite, as she rolled over everything in her mind, trying to find the trick, the set up, the plot.

But Benevenuta - despite everything - had only ever been straightforward and direct, with her, and it seemed she was in this, too. So, finally, she merely said,

"Thank you."

[ungovernable]

The trick is that there is no trick. The trick is that if there is no trick for long enough, eventually, Nerva will warm to her; trust her. It is the endgame in itself, and Benevenuta is as patient as she is steady and smiling. A clarion laugh and she claps her hands together, pleased--

"You are welcome. They are unfortunate, I know, but terribly affectionate. I think it will grow on you, in time."

She thinks it already is.

[keeperofmagi]

"It is appropriate."

A beautiful dog would be worse, she thinks. An ugly dog - an unfortunate one - fits her just fine. No one will question her about it without a glare.

"I think I will name him Soleil," She murmured, more to herself than to Benevenuta.

[byblow]

"I was raised by dogs," Alistair says.

It's an old joke, and one he puts much less energy into embellishing details for these days, but there is a kernel of truth—it's a more personal and more accurate answer than I love dogs, although he does, in the ways that only someone who grew up sleeping in a pile of them for warmth and having his ears licked until he fell asleep ever could. He loves dogs more than any other Ferelden who has never actually owned one, probably.

But her smile is a little bit worrying, yes. He had been leaning on a makeshift fence and watching a pitiful spar, but he turns to give her his full attention out of instinctive self-defense. He looks at her companions, first the larger, then the smaller.

His eyes narrow.

"Big dogs," he clarifies, to be safe. "Hunting dogs. War dogs."

[ungovernable]

"We are at war," she says, very reasonably, lifting the puppy to eye level as if she addresses her remarks to him. "Are you not all therefore war dogs?"

Woman and animal both turn to look at Alistair, although the latter a moment after and probably only because she did.

"They were supposed to be half-mabari," she says, in the sort of tone that suggests some sort of confidence being shared, as if the two of them are in conspiracy. It probably isn't the tone of voice she uses with Dorian, with whom she actually is a two-person conspiracy. "But you see for yourself, Theraday was quite mistaken as to the culprit...I hate to think of them struggling to find homes, now they are not quite so appealing."

They are not struggling to find homes, and if she hadn't just cornered him with one, he would be able to find that out for himself. As it is, she will be all insouciance if he ever does and exhibits outrage; she only says she hates to think! It is a terrible thought, Alistair!

Take this puppy.

[byblow]

"That's the usual way of things," Alistair says, blasé. Perhaps he should be more sympathetic. He, too, is the disappointing and unfortunate byproduct of someone well-bred and someone less so making poor decisions when no one was there to stop them. But he slept in the stables with the dogs. So can this actual dog. Man up, small puppy.

Except he's looking at it with more interest than his tone suggests, pity in his eyes not quite masked by their narrowness.

"You're not trying to make me take it, are you?" he asks. "You realize I'm a Grey Warden. And aside from all of that—" The travel, the Blight, the fact that a dog may well outlive him. "—I'm not really in the position to take care of anything. Every other morning I put my boots on the wrong feet."

[ungovernable]

"Every man needs a dog," Benevenuta objects, immediately, sweeping closer with the puppy (and its attentive mother in tow behind her), sniffing with interest at all she passed but most especially Alistair as they approached him, "I am certain that is some tenet of your southern laws."

All right, maybe it isn't law. It certainly seems as if they have more than their fair share, she'd daresay.

"Perhaps you might learn a bit more responsibility," airily, in the process of divesting herself of the smallest and most pitiable thing, planting the dog who would be his in the arms of the man who wouldn't be king. "You will be obliged to pay more attention to your boots if there might be something in them, I should think."

[byblow]

The puppy is in her arms, and then the puppy is in his arms, and he couldn't exactly say how it happened. It's probably blood magic. Nevarrans seem like the type. "You should think," he echoes, with an audible lack of faith in his ability to not shove his foot into a boot with a puppy inside it.

But at the same time, he's not trying to hand it back. He holds it up to his face to frown at it.

"You're sure it's a dog?"

[ungovernable]

"I defer, of course, to your greater experience," she says, brightly, scratching what's still probably a dog, Alistair, under her little chin. "But it certainly came from a dog."

Very importantly, leaning in a little, "I saw it happen," conspiratorial.

[byblow]

"Which part?" He looks away from the dog to examine Benevenuta's face instead. What a terrifying human. "I'd put money on the culprit being a nug, personally, if you didn't witness—"

The puppy, still held awkwardly in the air, makes one of those squeaky grunty noises puppies make before they're good at barking. Alistair doesn't look back at it—he isn't that weak—but he does fold it in to his chest.

[ungovernable]

Her smile takes on a sort of victorious quality when he tucks his puppy in his arms that way; it does not in any substantial way make her seem less terrifying. If anything, quite the opposite.

"One of Sister Nightingale's, perhaps? There, a prestigious lineage after all!"

[byblow]

"Sister Nightingale got her first nug from a duster in Orzammar," Alistair says, with no less skepticism. Prestigious lineage his foot. If she technically got it from said duster by way of the Hero-turned-King of Ferelden--that doesn't add any prestige, if you ask Alistair, and there is no one else here to ask. He glances down at the puppy.

His puppy.

Maker's Breath.

"She does look like she should live underground. I'll give you that."