AN: This is my inexcusably, reprehensibly, unforgivably late giveaway fic for Dreadwulf. She asked for Fenabela with a focus on Isabela and her backstory, and it took me almost a year to come up with something that I felt did proper justice to her and Dreadwulf both. I am so, so sorry for the delay on this; I can offer nothing but my apologies and this fic for atonement. I hope it serves Isabela well, despite my unfamiliarity with the world's extra books & comics, and I hope you enjoy the read.
I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to w0rdinista for her excellent and thorough beta, without which this fic would be a good deal less than it ought to be. Thank you for taking time out of your already-hectic life to beat this into shape! I couldn't have made it without you.
Anchor's Knot
—
The third time the assassins arrive through her window, Fenris happens to be there.
Frankly, and as much as she hates to admit it, he's the only reason she survives that one. He's lounging by the sill as she folds a new bit of jewelry into her hair, nothing saucy, only a little knot of gold—and then the next thing she knows he's a blur of silver light and brilliant crimson spraying across her perfectly-stained floorboards. She's got her own dagger in hand by the time the second one comes over the sill into Fenris's fist; the third she gets herself, a neat little bite right beneath the second rib that sends him sprawling with a gasp across her floor.
"Isabela," Fenris says, just too low, but she ignores him to circle the man bleeding out at her feet, dropping one knee ungently between his shoulder blades.
The man lets out a long, low groan, and Isabela bends closer, her gold wristcuff flashing in the afternoon sunlight. "You aren't going to make me ask who sent you, are you? That would be terribly predictable."
His spittle lands just to the left of Fenris's bare foot, spotted red. "Thieving snake!" She lets a little more weight shift to his back and he groans again; then he says, "Roscuro wishes his—ugh—investment returned."
Of all the— "It's been returned. Several times over, as a matter of fact."
"You owe us, Isabela!"
"Mm. I don't think so." The blade flashes again and with a short exhale, he slumps and does not move again. She rises, swipes ineffectively at the blood darkening the knee of her boot; Fenris stands in the Hanged Man's narrow hall already, glancing both directions before pulling the door closed. "Empty?"
"So far as I can see. Isabela—"
"Well, then that's that." He's still watching her. She can feel it. "I suppose someone will have to let the guard know. Aveline will be positively thrilled, I'm sure."
"Do not—"
"Or another word starting with 'p' anyway, probably pissed—"
"Isabela."
She could pull away from his grip around her wrist. She knows it and he does too, but instead she doesn't, and when he tugs she lets herself be turned. "You're going to want me to talk about this, aren't you?"
"There are three dead men on your floor."
"Hardly the first time that's happened."
"Is that so?"
"Well." She does pull away this time, spins to sit on her low, worn bed, one foot crossed irritably over the other. "He only sent two last time."
Fenris watches her warily for a long moment, then bends to rifle through the pockets of the corpse nearest his feet. For once Isabela feels little urge to join him; something about Fenris being here has made this realer than she'd like, and she doesn't think he'll let her forget it this time. He emerges eventually with a folded letter already smeared with blood, which he hands to her without ceremony.
"What, Varric's lessons not enough for special occasions?"
"Not with any speed." He's not looming, exactly, but it's near enough to make her push off the bed to bring them closer to height. "Read the letter, Isabela."
"I know what it says," Isabela tells him, though her fingers are already tearing the tattered envelope apart. "'Dear pirate whore, please give us more money or else.' After the third or fourth one, you learn raiders are fairly predictable about these things."
"Do they often send assassins to kill you in the middle of the day?"
Isabela closes her eyes, crumpling the letter in her hand. "Well, not really. But that's because Roscuro sent these men."
"And who is Roscuro?"
"A ghost," she snaps, and she can see the moment Fenris's eyes shutter. "And it's not that I don't appreciate the concern, sweet, because I really do, but I can handle this one, all right? I'm a big girl, and I've dealt with him before."
"Of course," Fenris says, slow and careful, but the line of his jaw tells her he will not let this go.
—
Aveline, of course, is the one who brings it up again just when Isabela's sure everyone's forgotten it. In the middle of a really superb hand of Wicked Grace, too, which is just insult atop injury—and she asks loud enough to stop the game altogether, Miss Whatever-Happened-With-Those-Assassins Aveline Bloody Vallen.
"They died," Isabela purrs, which ought to be the end of it, but once the guard-captain's set a bone Hawke can't leave the meat on it, and soon enough the whole table's got her perfectly private assassins dragged out in full glory to be worried over. Fenris doesn't even say anything to stop them, just looks at her with that eyebrow lifted and that inscrutable look that tells her nothing and everything at once, and when Varric starts pressing her on the details Isabela lets out an annoyed sigh and crosses her arms.
"But what are you going to do?" Merrill asks, chin propped on her hands.
"Oh, I don't know. Does anything need to be done?"
"Aren't you the least worried they might try again?"
"Didn't work very well for them the first few times, did it?"
As soon as the words are out of her mouth Isabela knows she's torn it. Hawke's inhale hangs sharp in Varric's suite, and even Anders looks distinctly appalled; when Fenris sits back with his frown etched even deeper she throws her hands in the air. "Look, I've got it managed, I swear."
Aveline scowls. "The same way you managed the Arishok? With the city burning behind you?"
"Nothing like that. This is personal."
"Then all the more reason to nip this in the bud."
That's too easy, and despite the assortment of concern spread around her Isabela can't help the leer. "If that's all you're nipping, I think—"
"Isabela." Hawke, her round eyes rounder in worry, and Isabela's mirth falls away. She hates it when Hawke worries, hates it more when Hawke worries about her. "Are you sure you shouldn't—I mean, don't you think you should have told us? Told me?"
She blows out an explosive breath. "Considering the last time I did that you managed to get yourself skewered, no, not really."
"Isabela, I—"
"Hawke," Fenris says, and for once Isabela can't even mind that he's stepping in, because she knows as well as he does Hawke listens to him. Anything to stop this interrogation from people she likes too much to kill. "Isabela is correct. The situation is under control. Let it go."
"But—"
"Enough."
"All right," she says at last, though her dark brow's still creased with unhappiness, and she lays her nearly-forgotten cards face-up on Varric's worn, knotted table. "But if you need my help, it's yours. You know that, right?"
"I know," Isabela sighs, and looks away from the Angel of Death.
She doesn't have a hand to show. Not yet.
—
Six weeks. Six weeks it takes to charter a ship and a crew she can reasonably trust. Once she wouldn't have thought twice about the sailors with whom she rubbed shoulders—and occasionally more—along Kirkwall's docks, but six years in the same port and she's had her standards ruined. Even worse, she has friends waiting for her to return, as if that's a thing to be expected now that she's come back once already, and somehow she can't bring herself to pull the same old cutthroats she used to, once upon a time.
She snorts. There's a joke in there somewhere, reliability ruining reputations, but before she can quite work it out a long shadow falls over the water next to her own to chase the thought entirely from her head. She leans over the rope stretched between pylons, flicks a pebble into the waves until their silhouettes are entirely gone beneath the rippling water. "Aren't you a little lost, sweet thing?"
"No," Fenris says evenly.
"Are you sure? You look lost."
"I came to find you."
Damn the man and blast him. "Why would you do a thing like that? Or—don't tell me. Maybe we should discuss your eyes again. Necklace."
"Hawke thinks you're preparing to leave the city again."
"I didn't ask her to worry."
"She does all the same. With reason, as it seems."
Isabela snorts and tips her head back, letting a clean breeze from the dusk-lit sea wash through her hair. She's tired of Hawke worrying—tired too of Aveline's looks, and Anders's pointed questions, and Fenris's sideways glances every time she dances too near the edge of a knife. She's kept herself alive all these years on her own perfectly well, light on her feet and blade in her hand, ready to cut and run at the first glance of a storm on the horizon. The last thing she needs is this—dead weight, people looking over her shoulder to second-guess her every move, ready to throw their arms around her neck like drowning sailors the moment things go pear-shaped.
She can't live like this. She can't survive this, and abruptly she's so angry she wants to scream.
"I didn't ask for this, you know," she snaps, and drags in a breath. "In fact, I went to a lot of very expensive trouble to avoid exactly this situation. With coin and blood and shady arrangements in dark corners and everything. This wasn't meant to happen!"
"I believe you," Fenris says, as if he is surprised she might think otherwise, and when she glances over her shoulder his affront shows stark on his face. "As does Hawke."
"Well, that seems like piss-poor decision-making on your part."
His mouth thins; his hand comes to rest on her shoulder, a fleeting touch more suited to a skittish animal than a grown elf, but for at least that moment it's a solid connection where she had not expected one, and it's enough to ground her when he says, mouth just twitching wry, "In Hawke's company, I have learned this to mean friendship."
Damn it. She doesn't want to laugh, not now, but she can't quite keep the smirk back as his hand falls away again. "Suppose I can't argue with you there."
"I imagine you would find a way if you wished." He shakes his head at his own smile, steps closer. "I came for a reason, Isabela."
"So much for philanthropy."
"How much do you trust your crew?"
Isabela smoothes a hand over her bandanna, glancing reflexively to the tall spare shadow of her chartered ship across the pier, sails furled and spars lashed against the burgeoning night. "Enough to get me where I'm going."
"As I thought." He hesitates and his eyes drop for only an instant; then they return to hers, harder, and Fenris lifts his chin. "Let me come with you."
What? "Why?"
His shoulders shift, embarrassment and defiance and prickly charm all mixed together, and a rush of something stupidly warm surges in Isabela's chest. "Friendship," he says at last.
The worst reason she can imagine, and Isabela throws her arm over his shoulder before she can stop herself. "I'll never be one to keep a soul from the sea," she tells him, though just to make sure she's still herself she leans the minutest bit too close at the end. "Though just so you know, the captain's cabin does require a… personal invitation."
Fenris rolls his eyes, but he doesn't push her away—and despite the unimpressive light thrown by the evening's first torches on the city's walls, she can see his smirk.
—
Fenris, who is many things, is not a sailor. Isabela knows this before they board, knows too his experience with ships has been limited to a terrified stowaway near ten years in the past. This does not change her demand that all hands find use on her ship, and within the day of Kirkwall disappearing to the white wash of wake-water behind them she has Fenris at the quartermaster's hip as she makes her rounds. Thalia's a tall, dark-skinned woman Isabela would swear to have Qunari blood were it not for the lack of horns, but she's quiet and dependable and takes no shit from the rest of the crew, and for that reason alone Isabela likes her.
Regardless, Fenris does not complain, and when Isabela stumbles across him practicing knots with the bosun on the third day of the journey she's annoyed at her own surprise. Not that she'd expected him to complain so soon, but not that she'd expected this either, Fenris looking so at-ease on her ship, and she—
Balls. She doesn't know. "Well?"
"Well," Fenris says, and lifts for her inspection a length of wood with a sailor's hitch knotted twice around the middle. "Your man felt I should learn this."
"He's right," Isabela says, leaning on the rail, and the bosun rises with a respectful nod at her dismissal. "Now show me you can do this in half the time with rain lashing across your face, the ship tossing like the wind under your feet, and every bit of you colder than a witch's tit."
He doesn't laugh, though she can see the amusement in his eyes. "Give me the storm, Captain, and I will endeavor to oblige."
Oh, but she likes the sound of that. Especially in his voice, with that black eyebrow lifted just so, talking of storms. "Careful, sailor, or I'll take you in for insubordination."
He does laugh that time, and Isabela grins as she leans both elbows on the rail. Already the outermost edges of Kirkwall have vanished behind them, even the roads turning away from the shore to leave the world nothing but sea and sky, marked at their edge with a thin strip of distant pines. The ship rolls under her feet with every wave and she loves it, draws in a breath of salt and wet wood and rope and sweat and freedom, though she'd never admit it, and when she lets herself exhale it's through a dangerous lightness in her chest that makes her eyes burn.
She's missed this. Oh, she's missed it so much.
But she can't let herself dwell, not now, not with people around, anyway, and before she can quite succumb to the water's call she turns on her heel, the rail worn and smooth at the small of her back, and watches Fenris instead. His long, dexterous fingers twist in and out of the ropes, rare hesitation on the over-under the only fault, and the clear morning sunlight catches occasionally in the lyrium that runs over each knuckle. Good hands. Strong hands. They look better on her ship than she'd thought.
"You're staring," Fenris says. He doesn't sound as though he disapproves.
She doesn't either. "I like what I see."
His eyes flick up to hers, a flash of surprise before he folds it out of view. "Your boatswain, I think, would disagree."
"That's why I outrank him, sweet thing."
"Isabela."
"Captain," she says, because she is, and because she likes it. "I wasn't talking about the knots, you know."
"I know. Captain."
There's something in the word that stops her. Something new, and touched with more than friendship can easily explain. "Tell me how you like sailing so far."
Fenris rolls his shoulders, narrower without the armor, and looks back to the water behind her, the churn of their wake's froth dying away into the smoother roll of the sea. The sun glints on his hair to wash it even whiter; then he glances at her again, those damnable eyes too sharp. "The sailing itself goes well enough. However, I would prefer it if…" He tugs restlessly at the end of the knot, then makes a gesture between them. "It would be better without the danger to you."
Startled, she says, "Oh." Then she laughs, too bright, and adds, "That's stupid. We're always in danger."
"Not alone, however. Hawke was concerned."
"Hawke's concerned, you're concerned, everyone's concerned. If you don't watch yourself I'll start thinking there's a heart hidden under those delicious leathers somewhere, caring about me."
He ought to shrug it off. He has for years, after all, despite her recurrent and frankly inventive offers; instead Fenris only inclines his head, still with that look, and abruptly she thinks that if she were to ask for a kiss or a smolder or anything, right now, for the first time in their long friendship it might be more than a joke.
"Yes," Fenris says, "I was concerned."
There are a thousand things on her tongue. The most attractive option is to simply move closer right now, to drape her arm over his shoulder and see where the wind takes them. She's considered it before—in excruciating detail, in fact—and this seems like the best chance she's ever had to find out exactly how far down those tattoos reach. All she has to do is step forward. One step.
She doesn't move. Fenris's eyebrow quirks upward; a faint, dry smile twitches at the corner of his mouth. Then the bosun calls from below and the moment breaks, soft as a gull lifting off the white caps of the sea.
"Captain," he adds, low, and is gone.
She stands there for a long while, after. The bit of wood with his knots lies forgotten on the closed lid of a barrel; with every sway of the ship it rolls an inch one way and then back the other, the long woven ends of the rope just brushing the deck.
"Right," she says at last, impatient at her own confusion, and slaps both palms on the rail. Flirting she knows well, but Fenris's eyes… "What the shit was that?"
The sea offers no answer, at least not one she can recognize, but somehow she suspects it's laughing at her.
—
Regardless, Isabela is not one to worry when there are other things to be done, and soon enough she puts the conversation from her mind. She has a ship. For now, at least, but it's hers, and her crew and her waters, and for the next several days she contents herself with the wild salt winds of the sea. The sailing goes smooth enough, the waters calm and the sky fair, and when there are only three nights between her and Rivain she leaves the mess behind and goes instead to the bow. Fenris watches her go—she can feel it, the weight of his eyes warm and heavy on the back of her neck—but she does not wait for him and he does not follow, and when she gains the prow she curls both hands over the cool stained railing and breathes as deep as her lungs will let her.
She remembers these stars. A dozen years since she's seen them—more, maybe, with the shift of those memories, and the way the world was always larger to eyes not used to open sky.
How old had she been then? Fifteen, perhaps, sixteen on the outside. Old enough to know there were some things that were gone once they were lost—old enough to watch a man die at her feet and feel fierce joy at his dying. She'd taken blood for the first time beneath these stars, held a dagger, gave herself her own name. She'd learned how to shift her feet with the rock of a wave instead of forcing her weight through it, that some things were easier to flee than fight.
Fifteen, sixteen. Old enough to pull her weight on a ship. Old enough to know where she belonged.
Some fish breaches the water portside, distant in the darkness and with small-enough spray she feels no alarm. Nothing to fear in these waters—not for her, anyway, who learned them before all others—and Isabela tips her head back to better see the stars. The Bear she finds first, and the Seven Cups just southward; a trice's tracing with her fingertips and she can touch the Archer, his bow bent back far as it goes while he sights the quarry he'll never catch.
Roscuro had taught her that one.
Isabela spits into the sea, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. "Pig," she says into the darkness, the sound almost lost beneath the slicing hush of her prow splitting the waves beneath her feet. His fault she'd had to throw herself in with Devon, his fault she'd lost the ship in the first place, his fault she'd found herself in debt up to her eyes—
"Liar," she adds more quietly, and doesn't mean Roscuro this time.
But the choices are long made, and the debts long paid out, and if she's learned nothing else from Hawke over the years she's discovered sometimes there's nowhere left to run. She's faced the bloody Arishok with nothing between his army and her daggers but Hawke's word; she can kill one man with no more strength than gold's weight. She can. She has.
The galley door opens behind her in a long thin strip of yellow light. Isabela doesn't turn as her crew spills outwards with laughter and quiet conversation; the watch will change soon enough and the world will settle again, and she's too familiar with the way her ship sighs with the wind to think she needs to break the nightspell now.
She lifts her head, closes her eyes into the wind. The breeze picks up into her hair, across her thighs; a sail snaps; a man calls out in a low voice as a rope creaks beneath its tightening. The fish breaches at her left again with a shallow splash; the hull groans, deep and slow, as a turn at the tiller sends them truer north. She draws in a deeper breath, thick with salt, her eyes stinging—
"Captain," says Thalia, and Isabela opens her eyes.
"Go ahead," she says without turning.
"The watch is changed."
"Noted."
Thalia doesn't move. Isabela can see her out of the corner of her gaze, tall and dark and patient, her black hair braided and tied low on her neck. Her arms are crossed over her chest, softer without her staff in hand, gentler, as if Isabela has not seen her crack open a man's skull with one blow. "How was dinner?" Isabela asks after a moment, carelessly.
"Cook served sea bass. You know that she loves the brown sauce."
"With the—"
"Pickles," they say together, and she can feel Thalia smile. "I take it there wasn't much improving on perfection."
"No, Captain," Thalia says, and now Isabela can hear the point. "It seems one of the new ones is not fond of fish."
"Was there trouble?"
A breath of laughter, broad shoulders shifting. "None. Only, Escra saw he would not eat it."
She snorts. "Any man who can't handle a little heckling doesn't belong on my ship."
"It was not much, Captain. He took it well. He said that he would be happy to show Escra how to catch a fish with his bare hands, were he given line long enough to reel the man in again after."
Isabela doesn't try to stop her chuckle. "Escra couldn't catch a fish if it presented itself to him tail-first."
"Escra knows. He laughed also, and said in the end that he was glad the captain had a friend aboard."
Her laughter falls away, goes silent. She looks over her shoulder at last because she must know—but there's nothing there, no mockery, no unsubtle question in Thalia's dark, serious eyes. Only understanding. "Is that," she murmurs, half to herself, "what they're saying?"
"It was only dinner, Captain," Thalia tells her, calm, respectful. She touches her temple in salute and withdraws into the dark.
Is that what they're saying? She turns again to the prow, her gaze lost somewhere between the edge of sea and starlit sky. Even her crew, convinced by coincidence that their landbound captain has tethered herself to more than the dead weights of Void-taken decency and honour; that now she's gone and bloody found herself a group of friends. Not that she hadn't known herself already, Hawke and Aveline and Merrill and Varric too close to be anything else, but at least here, with Fenris, she had hoped—
She doesn't want to fuck him, and she doesn't know why.
Family, she knows Hawke would say, and worse there's a small irritating part of her that knows Hawke would be right, that it'd be the sort of thing where she'd still want to talk to him the next morning whether or not the sex had been good. It'd be different with him, and it's not that Fenris isn't attractive—because he is—and it's not that she doesn't want to have sex with him—because she does—but for once in her life she doesn't think she'd be satisfied with just one night, one itch to be scratched, one memory, no more. She doesn't understand, and she—
"Enough," Isabela snaps, the word cracking into the night like the lash of an unbound rope. She's the bloody Queen of the Eastern Seas. She's not afraid of anything, least of all her own self.
She won't be soft, either, not when her life's on the line and her crew's looking to her for more than their coin at the end of the journey. Not now. Not with Roscuro just past the horizon and a history older than her name trying to drag her down beneath the waves again. So—later, when she has a little more time, when she can laugh if it goes awry, when she has the freedom to chase a ship as far from him as she can get. Just in case.
(Fifteen, sixteen. Young enough she could still cry; old enough to know her heart, even when she wished she didn't.)
Later, she tells herself, and hates that it sounds like a promise.
