A/N: For tumblr user bettydice, inspired by her piano: post/116668909099/isabela-knew-that-you-could-never-tame-the-sea
Hawke is not a sailor. When she speaks of the sea she groans like yardarms in the breeze, holding firm against the billow of sails. She tells the story of a tiny frigate tossed between the waves, of rain that drips down between poorly caulked decking planks and into the dank cramped darkness of a hold, a place where skin grows pale and soft in the damp, where brightness hurts the eyes and one might forget what it means to see the sun.
Hawke doesn't know the joy of hands braced against the bow, feet planted wide against the sway of the deck, the way it feels to rise high - high - higher than anything else for miles, buoyant atop a crest that carries her up until even the horizon falls away beneath her. Lightning flashes and the sea goes opalescent, blue to white to silver to blue, and there's danger - but it's not the kind of danger that is really danger, it's the kind of danger that's fun. Isabela stands atop the swell, drenched in the spray of cold salt and warm rain, and laughs into the sky.
The sea is not meant to be tamed, it's not a stone one can hew, not a plant to be contained by garden shears or pots or even the limitations of gravity. The sea is infinite, endless and depthless and ever moving, blue like the deepest night, like sapphires in a jeweled crown, like glass in a Chantry window, like the patina on brass and the tarnish on gold, and flowers that grow in the shadow of old oaks, too fragile for the sun. It's the salt and iron in her blood, she who comes from nowhere, born full grown on the deck of a ship. Her arms careen toward the horizon, sails outstretched like reckless wings; she is free and whole and new, pulse leaping beneath the gold at her throat in the space between swimming and flying that is to sail.
Hawke is not a sailor. Hawke is a storm.
The tide rises fast around her legs, a second's difference between standing and swimming. The current is strong but the water is warm, and she could fight - if she wanted. Therein lies the beauty and the danger, the harbor and the anchor.
There is a storm that brews on Hawke's lips, a tempest between her thighs, a whirlpool cast in the shadows of damp and rumpled sheets. Sighs roll like the last of spent waves creeps up over the shore, moans like stones overturned, drawn back hissing into the sea, spun over and over. She can feel herself begin to wear smooth, change shape into something different.
It means so much more than it's supposed to. It's thrill, it's sex – it's hands in her hair like the whip of a strong wind on the open sea, the swells of breast and hips, the writhe of a body beneath her, serpentine with passion. It's dark hands on the rigging of a body crisscrossed with scars silver like lightning, eyes blue as the Eastern Sea. It's a current so fast and strong it makes her heart beat wild in her chest, makes her blood rush in her ears, laughing with head thrown back because this – this is what freedom feels like.
Or is it?
There is no way to come through a squall completely untouched. Wind whips sails and rigging snaps, mast bending – bending so far she fears it will break.
There are moments when it seems like the ship will come apart beneath her, pulled in too many directions by her fear, by her indecision, and she knows – as sailors do – that she'll bow to the way of the winds; that she'll have to change her course. There's danger in it, in the fun of it, in the sails she unfurled in a gale just to see where they would take her, but she's been carried far from shore and the only thing worse than losing her way is deciding whether or not to turn back.