Summary: Barkspawn gets sick, and Merrill saves the day.

"... yours not very sincerely, Champion Sabia Hawke. P.S.: Your son looks like a piece of mouldy cheese. Stop trying to marry him off to me, I don't want him either."

The estate is dark as Hawke lowers her pen and rubs her face tiredly, leaving streaks of ink across her eyes. Orana, Bodahn and Sandal are fast asleep as their mistress catches up on the correspondence that has built up into a heaving paper monster over the course of a few months, snarling at her from her dusty desk. It was too raw to see all those black notes of condolence, so she simply left them be. Only Sebastian's gentle prodding made her get started on answering them all as politely and as genuinely as she could, which is difficult; her mother was always better with words, wrapping up simple responses in verbose bows. Hawke's writing is illegible, let alone the actual content, which is mostly incoherent and rude. They called her Champion for murdering things, not for scribing.

A canine sigh catches her attention; Barkspawn is snoozing before the dying fire, powerful chest heaving. "Here, boy." Barkspawn lifts an eyelid and whines. "Oh, come on, you big fat lump. I'm right here!"

The parchment crackles beneath her hands as she shifts, reaching her fingers out to her dog as she leans back in her chair. He snuffles slightly at her, but droops back down again.

"Barkspawn?" Hawke vacates her chair to hunker down beside him, caressing his stubby ears. "Are you alright?"

He looks at her sadly, brown eyes dim. When she listens, his breathing is laboured, and when she catches a glance at his bowl it is half-full.

Hawke runs frantic hands over him, feeling the bulk of his neck, his trunk, his hindlegs; there are no contusions or bumps, no open gashes and weeping sores. Panic builds as she presses an ear to his chest to hear his heartbeat which, to her horror, is slightly more sluggish than usual.

"Oh, no." Hawke cradles Barkspawn's massive head in her lap; he wags his tail slightly, as if telling her not to worry. "What am I…?"

What doe she always do when she's hurt? Go to Anders. She's see him heal Barkspawn before, fixing gashes on his muzzle and sore paws, and he even put up with the hound's slobbery thank-yous after.

"Let's go visit Anders. I know it stinks down there, but you'll have to put up with it." She heaves Barkspawn up into her arms with a little difficulty. "Andraste's tits! You weigh as much as a Qunari, you fatass!" Barkspawn huffs, insulted.

The passage from the cellar into Darktown is dank, torches unlit, but Hawke does not stop to light them. Puddles, whether of water or of something more sinister, splash beneath her heedless feet; Barkspawn's head lolls into her chest, and her panic spikes.

She skids into the clinic a few minutes later, almost bowling over an old man in the process; normally, she would apologise, but worry drives her in a beeline to Anders, who is staring at her in confusion from beside his examination table. She lays Barkspawn on it carefully.

"Hawke, what…?"

"He's sick." Her voice is higher than usual; she sees a woman stir on one of the cots.

Anders places his hands on Barkspawn, and begins to cast. Barkspawn lets out a pained yelp as the glow intensifies, and Anders yanks his hands away from the dog as if burned.

"What? What's wrong?"

"Something's wrong, but… I don't know."

She gapes at him; she's never seen Anders fail to heal someone before. "What do you mean?"

"I was taught to heal humans. Not animals." Anders scratches behind Barkspawn's ear, and the mabari sighs heavily in response. "Cuts, broken bones… they don't differ much from animal to animal, whether it's a cat or a human or a bird, but for something more serious, you need intimate knowledge of that being's anatomy. If I tried to heal Barkspawn as I would a human, I would risk doing serious damage to him, and as far as I can tell, he's pretty sick already." He gives her an apologetic look. "I'm sorry, Hawke. I can't help you."

"What am I going to do?" Hawke presses her hands to her eyes.

Whatever Anders was going to say is interrupted by the door banging open; a man is hauled in, blood staining his shirt, braced by two younger boys. A woman frets behind them. Hawke pulls Barkspawn off the table as Anders goes to his patients.

"Can I-"

"It's fine, Hawke. I've got this under control." He takes the man from the two boys, heedless of the blood spattering his shirt. "You worry about Barkspawn. He's saved my life enough times; he deserves that much."

Hawke nods, picks her dog up again, and leaves; the woman's sobs echo in her ears.

Once outside the clinic, Hawke sinks to her knees. Barkspawn is wheezing now, chest heaving under the effort of breathing. She leans her head against his, and he licks her half-heartedly.

She doesn't know how long she sits there, curled up with her mabari. Some Champion she is, she can't even help her pet…

"Hawke? Are you asleep?"

Large green eyes peer down at her, framed by curling green tendrils. "Merrill?"

"Oh, good! You're awake. Not a great place to take a nap, Darktown, take it from me."

"What are you…?" Night has well and truly fallen. Unless Merrill needs Anders' assistance...

"Deathroot!" Merrill shows her a clump of greens, dirt still hanging off them. Oh, Hawke thinks. Of course. "It likes growing in the corner over behind those stairs. Hello, Barkspawn!" The dog doesn't even respond; the vallaslin on Merrill's forehead crinkles as she frowns in confusion. "Oh, no. Is he sick?"

Hawke nods wordlessly. "Anders couldn't help me. I..."

"I bet they didn't teach him animal healing in the Circle. Very narrow minded. As for me-" Merrill threads her arms under the dog's massive bulk, and heaves; Hawke helps, lacing her fingers with Merrill's and lifting. "Well, we Dalish try to help any animals we see injured in the woods, and wolves are not so different from mabari."

"By the Maker, Merrill, if you can fix Barkspawn I will buy you a golden ball of thread."

"Done!" She smiles. "Just as well. The one Varric gave me ran out."

How they managed to get the dog to Lowtown, Hawke does not recall; Merrill has gotten lost often enough in the city that she knows each and every nook and cranny and alley and surmountable wall in Kirkwall, wending her way through paths that Hawke never even knew existed. Not a soul is awake in the Alienage, and the stars glint through the canopy of the vhenadahl like jewels, casting cold light on the swirls and whorls engraved in its trunk.

Merrill's little house is as clean as it usually is, which is to say, not very. It is not dirty, nor is it squalid, but there is a healthy coating of dirt on most everything, and the books seem to be arranged by colour. Organised chaos, Hawke thinks dumbly, helping Merrill as she spreads a patterned blanket on the floor and lays Barkspawn carefully on it, crooning to him in elvhen, as is her wont.

Merrill proceeds to enact a through external examination of the hound. She lifts his ears and peers inside as if she could see his brain, and opens his jaw to check behind his pointed canines and under his tongue. She examines his eyes and smells his nose and looks in the dips between his pawpads. At one point, she even raises his tail.

"Could you not do that to my dog?" Hawke protests weakly.

"Just taking his temperature!" Merrill responds cheerily, lowering his tail with a pat on his rump. "Hmm."

Hawke redirects her attention to Barkspawn, gazing into his dull, half-lidded eyes, as Merrill bustles around, clanking jars and tins. She trails a finger down the wide scar that bisects his haunches, a remnant of his litter days.

Merrill returns with a bag of salts. "Hold that under his nose," she instructs; Hawke does as she's told, and as she wafts them under his nose, Barkspawn's eyelids droop until he is fully asleep, breath slowing.

Merrill places his hands on him, and concentrates. Hawke watches; the feeling of magic grates against her senses. Merrill's smells like damp earth and freshly fallen rain, whereas Anders' smells like someone set him on fire. Bethany always smelled like baking bread when she was doing magic, and her father... Ozone, like the air after a storm. The scent clung to him, even when she knew it had been weeks since he picked up his staff.

Merrill's fingers flex and contract, and her words are foreign to Hawke- well, more foreign than usual. A sense of unease crawls down the back of her spine. "Is that blood magic?"

"Technically, it's keeper magic, but..." Merrill bites her lip. "All I am doing is manipulating the blood in his body to feel out any problems. Far more accurate than creation magic, and utterly harmless if you know what you're doing... Which I do, luckily for you!"

"So, I won't owe my dog's life to a demon?"

"Nope! Just me. Which is more than Anders can say." Merrill gives her a sunny smile, and Hawke snorts, and feels her lips twitch up. It feels... strange, to say the least. Smiles have been thin on the ground; losing her mother, the death of the Viscount, and the whole Qunari affair... It all took a toll on Hawke. After the duel with the Arishok, she was bed-bound for a month. Merrill visited sometimes, slipping in through the window and bringing the garden inside, presenting her with newly sprouted daffodils.

"Ah! There we go." Merrill's hands glow red, casting a bloody shine on Barkspawn's dappled coat. "A bit of him was growing too fast. We're lucky we caught it this early, because it might have spread. Now, I'm afraid this might hurt..." Merrill draws a glyph on Barkspawn's side with her finger. Barkspawn's breathing grows laboured as it forms, until it disappears with a squelching noise and he awakens with a pained yelp. "There! All done," Merrill declares, patting Barkspawn's head. "Don't you feel better now, my brave boy?" She spends several minutes extolling the hound's virtues, much like Hawke has seen Anders do with small children, sniffling after a scary injection. It must work; his ears perk up, and he wuffs quietly when Hawke scratches under his jaw, tail thumping reassuringly.

"I can't thank you enough, Merrill."

She waves a dismissive hand. "Isn't that what friends are for, lethallan?" The word falls easily from Merrill's tongue; Hawke looks at her in shock. On one stormy night, they got caught on Sundermount; the Dalish grudgingly sheltered them, and Hawke stayed up half the night in conversation with the hahren. He told her about the elven pantheon, the fragments of language they had left, and of their plight; the story stuck in Hawke's mind, and she scribbled what she could remember of it in her journal after. Merrill grins. "I think you've earned that by now."

Hawke feels another smile form on her lips, and resolves to spend more time with Merrill.

In a matter of minutes, Barkspawn's eyes slide shut, and he slips into sleep. Hawke's worries are allayed when he begins to twitch and let out muffled barks in his usual way; doggy daydreams, her mother used to call them, and Bethany would wonder what he was chasing. Carver said rabbits, but Hawke always said birds.

A yawn catches her unawares. Merrill giggles and says; "You can stay here, if you like."

"I think I just might. Your rats are far cuddlier than the ones in the Hanged Man."

Ten minutes later, they have a nest of blankets and pillows arranged around Barkspawn, before the smouldering coals in the hearth. There's slightly stale bread and soft cheese and two steaming cups of nettle tea, warm and stingy.

"How old is he?" Merrill asks, smoothing a hand down his neck.

"Hmm… seven, perhaps?" She pokes his belly. "You're getting old! And fat." Barkspawn huffs sleepily.

"How did you get him, anyways? Varric says mabari are very expensive, and Barkspawn's a beautiful specimen!" Merrill waves a bit of cheese in front of him; he cracks an eye, but closes it again, too tired for even food. Shrugging, Merrill pops it into her mouth.

"Well…" Hawke slumps down into the blankets. "It was about a year after my father died... Arl Bryland was fostering one of Arl Wulff's sons, I think, and said son got a little fresh with Bethany last market day. In the course of my duty as overprotective older sister, I decided to scare the lad off, so I snuck into the Arl's manor to pay a little midnight visit."

"Why didn't Carver do it?" Merrill blinks at her. "I thought that would be more his thing, as her twin."

Hawke snorts. "Carver would have cut his balls off. I only threatened to. It all went well, anyways. He was most courteous to Beth after that. The trouble came when I was sneaking out through the kennels. It was fine on the way in; the litter was fast asleep around their mother, but the second time… one was awake."

"And he imprinted on you!"

"Of course he did. No animal, human or beast, can resist my myriad charms!" Hawke strikes a silly pose, and Merrill titters. "He got out of that pen and stuck to me like glue, and no matter how many times I put him back in he managed to wriggle back out again. I ended up tying the poor thing to a post and running as fast as I could. I even ran through the river so he couldn't track me. Can you imagine that? The height of winter, and me lurching through the fields in the middle of the night, sodden to the skin!"

"It didn't work, did it?" Merrill's gaze is full of admiration for Barkspawn. "He'd never abandon you."

"Loyal to a fault." She pats him. "I woke up the next morning with a faceful of stinky mabari puppy. I almost had a conniption. Bad enough that I broke into the Arl's manor; stealing one of his prize mabari hounds could have gotten me in serious trouble. I could have been blinded, they could have cut off my hand, and if the arl was in a very bad mood, he could have me buried alive. I had to do something, so I went back to Bryland's manor with my tail between my legs and this fella on a lead with his tail wagging away to beat the band, and told him the whole thing."

"What did he do?" Merrill is rapt, green eyes wide.

"He heard me out, and… apologised for his foster's behaviour, and gave me the dog as recompense for the damage done to Bethany's reputation. He owed father, you see; he saved that boil-brained daughter of his when she was a babe."

"So you took him home?"

"He was a bit runty at first, but he grew… and grew, and grew. I've seen horses smaller than him! He was a great help during the night; he watched the farm while I was working in the Refuge." Hawke chucks him under the chin. "And you've seen his hamstring-ripping trick. Very handy against the Qunari."

Merrill begins to say something, but a yawn cuts her off; she looks apologetically at Hawke. "Sorry. I stayed up late... um, reading last night."

Which is to say, she stayed up late gazing into the Eluvian. Hawke decides not to take the bait."I fell asleep early, and I'm wrecked." She stretches. "I think I might turn in." She draws a blanket over herself, and curls up with Barkspawn like she used to during the winter.

"Goodnight, lethallan." Merrill gives Barkspawn a final pat.

"'Night, Merrill." Sleep, already fraying the edges of her consciousness, claims her entirely.

She wakes up during the night to find Merrill fast asleep, tucked into her side, hair loose of braids. Barkspawn is sprawled across the both of them, drooling happily on Hawke's thigh. She sighs, pulls Merrill a little closer, and goes back to sleep.