Dorian rolls onto his side to face him, squinting in the mid-morning light. "You wanted to talk, last night. So talk." "Mm, not like this." Bull cracks his neck, stretches his free arm above his head. Dorian doesn't even pretend he's not watching the muscles shift in Bull's shoulder. "You don't talk about sex in bed."

The temporary fall and subsequent Maker be damned rise of Dorian Pavus.

He keeps the aqun-asala powder in a jar on his dressing table. Every three months he spoons some of it into a mug and mixes it into the water with his finger. It's supposed to be tasteless, but when he swallows it down it lingers on his tongue, affects the taste of anything else he eats for the next couple days, mutes everything. He gets a kick outta eating spicy shit all lackadaisically and offering it to people, and acting surprised when it burns their mouths. (When he explains it to Sera, after she's stopped crying and threatening to stab him with one of his own horns, she thinks it's hilarious — tries to talk him into letting her have enough to prank people, actually. He knows exactly how much is left in the jar though, and he's not sure he's ever gonna get more... so she has to make do with sitting next to him and watching.) "So it keeps you from losing it, huh?" she asks, glaring down into her empty flagon like she doesn't know where the beer got off to. "No squishy pffff—" she puffs up her cheeks and sets the flagon down, curving her hands into a circle and then moving them apart, "—for the qunari pokers?"

And Dorian – who hasn’t maliciously thought of Bull as a beast in years, who hasn’t said the words even jokingly in months – still finds himself struck with what he was taught about the Qunari, what he still thinks when a new Vashoth joins the Inquisition. And now, every time the child opens his wide dark eyes and blinks lazily up at Dorian, every time he seems surprised by his own hands waving in front of his face, every time he laughs and squawks and hiccups after he’s done crying… Dorian thinks he can do better, for this child. He will. He rocks the child in his arms late at night and whispers against the tight curls springing out of the sweet crown of his head, coaxes him to sleep for papa, darling, that’s a good boy.

Detective Bull Hissrad of the Val Royeux Police Department finally gets a break in the spate of bizarre deaths across the city: everybody who’s ended up six feet under bought a pet from the absurdly-named Magister D’s Pet Shop in Vintown, and the vint who runs the place is just strange enough to be worth checking out. (Or, that time Bull was kind of a lonely, grumpy cop trying to figure out if Dorian was an ancient dragon hell-bent on exacting vengeance on humanity by killing people one at a time via the pretty inefficient method of selling them pets... or if he was just lonely and grumpy too.)