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Claude is interrupted from his studies by a knock on his door. No one immediately shouts for him to open up, which is a bit strange. His fellow Golden Deer know to announce themselves in case he’s too absorbed in brewing some devious concoction that he doesn’t hear something as subtle as two raps on the thick wooden door. He closes his book and waits in case he imagined it. It is quite late in the evening, after all. Definitely way past curfew.
The knocking comes again, more urgently this time. Three louder knocks, a pause, the sound of something squeaking – an animal? – and a man’s low voice shushing it. How very curious… He can’t resist a mystery, so he opens the door just a crack.
Their eyes meet. A gauntleted hand shoots out to catch the door, pushing it open and allowing none other than Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd to slip into Claude’s messy room. He immediately shuts the door behind him. The prim and proper prince is being so uncharacteristically rude tonight!
“I need your help,” Dimitri says. Begs, really. The Blue Lions were on a mission last anyone heard, and it looks like he hasn’t had time to wash up since getting back. His hair is an absolute disaster, there’s a look of panic in his eyes, and something is squirming underneath his cape, which he’s clutching bundled up by his chest.
The squirming thing is about the size of a cat, and Claude briefly entertains the idea of Dimitri stealing the monastery’s strays because Sylvain tricked him into going on a quest to “get some pussy” or something equally absurd. But it’s not a cat. The squirmy thing’s chirruping calls sound very familiar to Claude.
“Is that…?”
Before he can finish his sentence, a tiny baby wyvern scrambles out of Dimitri’s too-loose grip on the cape. It’s an unusual mottled gray and white in color, marking it as not a standard domestic wyvern. It scampers up Dimitri’s arm to his shoulder, then claws its way up the prince’s face while Dimitri yelps and flails, leaving little red pinprick trails all the way up to his hair.
There it settles, draped across his head. “Umph, umph!” the little wyvern calls happily as it snuggles into its blond nest.
Claude is chomping down on his lower lip and holding his breath until his lungs burn with how badly he wants to laugh.
“So, uh, how did that happen?”
“We went to stop poachers near the Sacred Gwenhwyvar, where the white wyverns roost, but were too late to save this little one’s mother and siblings. The Knights said to leave it, let nature take its course, but I… It wouldn’t survive a winter in the northern mountains on its own.”
“It imprinted on you, and now you’re attached too. Why come to me, though? Surely there’s room for it in the aerie?”
“I asked… surreptitiously, of course!” Dimitri sighs. “I asked if, hypothetically, they could take in a wild wyvern, but the answer was no. Garreg Mach breeds its own wyverns to strict standards, and the wyvern keepers were adamant that introducing a wild one would ruin their breeding stock.”
Claude thinks on it for a moment and then nods. “Okay, so we’re doing this. I’m helping you keep a secret illegal pet.”
“W-wha it’s not illegal.”
“It’s absolutely against the rules to be keeping live animals in our rooms, but that’s what our esteemed prince is going to do. When did you become such a bad boy, Dimitri?”
“Claude.”
Dimitri’s reprimand doesn’t sound the least bit scary when there’s a teensy lizard on his head, its eyes starting to droop closed. “Umph,” it says as if in agreement.