Now Dally is not an animal person.
Especially not dogs. Never has he once expressed affection to Buck’s dog, not because he is completely heartless just that the dog “Bender” is awfully loud, and typically stays away from dally anyways, it’s a mutual dislike.
At least that’s what dally had thought.
He’s realizing the mistake in that assumptions because the dog is currently laying on top of him and licking his face and he has to resist the urge to throw the dog off because it’s tongue is so scratchy and makes dally want to rip his skin off and the dogs breathing is so loud in his ear he almost can’t bear it.
But at the same time it’s oddly comforting, the dog's fur is nice and fluffy and dally enjoys the weight of the dog on him.
He’s dimly aware of Buck calling his name while he pets and plays with the dog until he hears footsteps go up the stairs
“Dallas Winston! If you don’t get ready for school right… now?”
Buck was staring at dally oddly and dally didn’t quite understand why
“Kid, why are you petting the dog?”
Now Dally was real confused, why was Buck confused?
“Because he jumped on me?”
Dally thought this concept was pretty simple, but buck still stared at him in bewilderment
Never has Buck EVER seen dally take kindly to an animal or anything that isn’t one of his boys or Tim Shepard jumping on him.
“Yea, but I thought you hated Bender?”
Buck whistles for bender to go over to him and bender jumps off of Dally and sits by bucks feet
Buck realizes his mistake when Dally makes a upset noise
“I don’t hate him, he's just loud…”
Dally has these big innocent eyes and looks real upset so Buck shoes bender back over to Dally
God this kid is acting weird today
But Buck just sighs and drops it
“Well come on kid you have school in 30 minutes”
Finally he’s back to his normal self
“Yes because if you miss another day the school is gonna make me sit in a meeting and if I have to do that I’m gonna take away your truck privileges for a month”
And that gets Dally up faster than Buck has ever seen, but first he pet Bender one last time before getting up.
Buck heads back downstairs to make some quick breakfast and when Dally comes back down 20 minutes later with music blasting out his headphones Buck just smiles make sure he has all his homework, a charged computer and his phone he sends him off to the bus with a smile as he watches bender follow dally to the door.
Maybe he’ll finally get the kid a cat like he asked for a couple months ago. They’ll have a talk about it at dinner, Buck needs to be sure the cat won’t be an issue because Dally gets upset with certain textures and noises but he thinks it’ll be good for him actually.
