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The first time Cullen sees the mabari is through the window during a meeting with Josephine. It catches his eye; curled up forlornly on the cobbles next to a small group of people otherwise paying it little attention. He supposes it must belong to one of them.
“I thought they didn’t breed mabari in Orlais,” he says, and Josephine looks up from the table to give him a curious look.
“Not that I’ve come across, no.” She offers him a warm smile, but looks back down at her missives as if to give him a gentle reminder of quite how busy they are. He clears his throat.
“It’s just that I saw -” He looks out the window again to see the mabari still with its head on its paws, the group of people nearby talking animatedly but never once glancing in its direction.
“A visiting Fereldan, perhaps?” Josephine suggests, attention evidently still on the papers in front of her, “Is Captain Rylen aware of the security arrangements for the Inquisitor?”
Cullen is still watching the group near the mabari. They don’t look Fereldan, unless it’s customary now for visiting dignitaries to adopt Orlesian fashion, including masks. He frowns.
“Commander?”
He pulls his gaze back from the window with a start. “Sorry, yes, I - where were we?”
Next time he looks, it’s nowhere to be seen. He supposes its owner must have taken it with them.
-
It’s back the next day, lying on the cobblestones in the sun. This time, there’s no one nearby, but the mabari looks just as forlorn.
He’s on a tight schedule. He simply doesn’t have time to check up on every stray dog he happens across, but -
The mabari’s ears prick up as he gets closer, and then as he takes another step closer his tail starts to move in a hopeful shuffle that is almost a wag. Cullen crouches down in front of him.
“Are you lost?” he asks, and feels immediately stupid for doing so. Mabari are intelligent, he knows this, but it’s not as though they’re capable of answering back. Maker knows he wanted one of his own desperately enough when he was little, but he’s never been particularly practiced with animals of any sort. He reaches out a hand instead, and the mabari nudges it with his nose. “Is anyone looking after you?”
The mabari licks happily at his knuckles.
At that, there’s a piercing whistle from behind them, and someone calls something in Orlesian. The mabari leaps to his feet and pads off in the direction of the voice, all hopeful exuberance. Cullen watches him run to a nearby doorway, where a servant throws out a chicken leg which he sees to enthusiastically.
He must belong to one of the nobles, then, and simply left to his own devices for large portions of the day.
Cullen shakes off his misgivings, and heads on his way.
-
The mabari is by a fountain when he sees him later that afternoon, lapping up the water messily. Cullen is fresh out of a series of draining meetings with diplomats, battling a growing headache and ready to snap at the next person he sees, but he sits himself on the edge of the large stone basin nonetheless. The mabari seems to recognise him immediately, padding up to him and placing his damp head on Cullen’s knee pointedly until he scratches the fur behind his ears. The marabi’s eyes close happily. It’s hard not to feel a little peaceful.
“I hope you’re not this trusting with everyone,” Cullen admonishes him, “don’t they give you fresh water?”
The mabari just looks up at him with baleful eyes. He repositions his head so as to accommodate a more thorough scratching, clearly a master of the art.
“Where’s your master?” Cullen says, dredging up some forgotten memories of mabari intelligence and their ability to obey clear commands. “Take me to your master.”
He tilts his head to one side with his ears alert, as if considering Cullen’s words, and then lets his head fall back down onto his lap with a little huff of breath. Cullen sighs.
“You’re very far from home,” he says vaguely aware that he’s talking to a dog about concepts that are probably outside his ability to understand, but finds himself continuing, “I’m from Ferelden, too.”
The mabari licks at his hand as he continues to rub at his neck and ears, the picture of contentment. Strangely, it spills over a little to the prickly agitation Cullen is fighting against, a moment of calm amidst the stress.
They sit there for perhaps half an hour before the mabari’s ears perk up at something Cullen evidently can’t quite hear, and he watches as the dog dashes off across the courtyard towards a merchant who is holding out a piece of meat.
“Assis,” he hears the merchant say firmly, and the mabari rests back on his haunches obediently.
Cullen is oddly reluctant to accept he’s found the mabari’s owner, perhaps even a little disappointed -
Well, it is what it is. As long as someone’s looking after him.
-
He spots the same merchant the next morning, without the mabari. He’s late. He’s due at one of Josephine’s meticulously planned social events, and he had promised her - and later, more sincerely, Linnea - and he has every intention of making good on it.
Still, he finds himself catching the merchant’s attention.
“The dog, yesterday,” he says, waving away the merchant’s proffered goods as he misinterprets Cullen’s interest, “is it yours?”
The merchant replies in rapid Orlesian and Cullen grits his teeth. The language barrier, again. It’s hardly the merchant’s fault, and so he tries not to let his irritation show. Likely without much success.
“The dog,” he repeats, “the mabari?”
The merchant nods, points in the direction of the fountain. There’s nothing there.
“Is it yours? Does it belong to you?”
“Ah! - no, no.”
“Does he have an owner?”
The merchants shakes his head. “No, no. Not mine.”
“Abandoned? A stray?”
The merchant gestures towards the dried meat in his cart.
“You’ve been feeding him,” Cullen guesses, but the merchant has lost interest now it’s evident Cullen is not a customer. He buys some of the meat as a gesture of goodwill, but he’s not getting any more information.
He tucks the wrapped meats inside his jacket, and idly finds himself wondering if Skyhold would be suitable for a dog. Not that he’s - not that he’s thinking about adopting it, that would be absurd. He just feels a faintly ridiculous sense of kinship with the animal, both outsiders in an unfamiliar environment. He can’t just leave him to fend for himself.
He leaves the meat in a bowl outside overnight. It feels like the right thing to do.
-
The mabari is nowhere to be seen for a few days, much to Cullen’s concern. Perhaps he had been wrong; perhaps it indeed had an owner, and the owner has now left, taking the mabari with him. The meat that he’d left out overnight had disappeared, sure enough, but there are plenty of rats and other feral animals that might have taken it instead. He’s glad, really. The pampered life of being a noble’s mabari is much better than whatever Cullen could have offered him.
It’s not until Cullen has sought refuge in a quiet spot in the courtyard, running a slight temperature and having developed an aversion to most light and sound above a certain level, that the mabari reappears. Cullen’s eyes are closed as he sits hunched forwards and focusing on the sound of the breeze through the trees, and he just feels the weight of a head on his knee, and the warmth of breath on his leg. His tail is wagging happily. It feels perfectly natural for Cullen to scratch him behind his ears, already familiar and practised with the mabari’s preferences.
At a quick glance, the mabari looks content but perhaps a little thinner, a little rougher around the edges. That’s all it takes for Cullen to make up his mind.
“You’re staying with me,” he says firmly, and the mabari’s tail wags harder as he pushes his head more insistently in Cullen’s direction, “if you’d like to, that is.”
Perhaps the mabari doesn’t quite understand his exact words, but he seems to understand the sentiment well enough, and he leaps up in his excitement to leave a wet, slobbery trail down Cullen’s cheek.
He doesn’t mind.
-
“You found a dog,” Linnea says, both amused and delightedly incredulous, in the same tone of voice she always uses when she’s accusing him of being particularly Fereldan. It’s the first time she’s met his mystery mabari, though he’d told her he was worried about a potential stray a few days ago and she’d been unable to hold back her smile.
Chester - it’s his name, now, he seemed to take to it better than the others - perks up at the new arrival, considering her for a few seconds before his tail starts wagging again, tongue lolling out happily.
“Actually,” Cullen says dryly, knowing the answer will please her, “he found me.”