Notes: For a prompt offered by tumblr user hornkerling: Isabela and Zevran, five meetings.
1.
He is a man, or so they say, brought along to meet the Crows' benefactors, to learn their weaknesses in the event they choose to remove their support. He is a toy, a handsome elven thing, brought to entertain the guests, should the lady of the house prove...difficult.
She appears, dripping gold and rubies, her eyes downcast. She dances, graceful, but without joy. She speaks on command, quiet and cowed. He wonders why they think her intractable.
She is passed from man to man, fondled, tasted, her hair combed by too many fingers, her trinkets jangling as Claudio tosses her into his lap. She does not look at him as he runs his hand gently—too gently, he knows, and he will be beat for it later—down her cheek, tilting up her chin with his thumb as his fingers slip round her neck and her eyes—
He shoves her away, her perfume lingering in his nose, addling his brain, and he laughs to hide his breathlessness. He is intimately acquainted with death; and he saw murder in her eyes.
2.
He appears in her window in the grey twilight before dawn, not, she thinks, an assassin's hour, but perhaps her time has come.
He says, "You remember?"
She does not think they usually speak. "Yes," she says, and draws her hair away from her neck, to ease the killing blow.
His eyes crinkle—fondly, amused, sharing the joke. "I would not come so close to kill you," he says, but closer he comes, his hands reaching to unclasp the choke around her neck.
She sits still, as still and quiet as death, and he pauses with his fingers on the clasp. "May I?" he asks, and his voice is—the wind, a childhood memory of a breeze in her hair, her toes in the sand.
She permits this. He touches her earrings, and she permits this as well. The bracelets at her wrist and ankles, every ring on her fingers and toes—she is struggling not to laugh, the sound bubbling in her, as he unwinds the cords around her waist, as playful kisses land on her elbows, her nose.
"Your name," she asks, standing before him in nothing but the skin her mother gave her—a gift she probably begrudges now—and he gives it, and she takes his hands and names him; she says, "May I?"
His eyes are uncertain, the game turned on him; she watches and waits until he has chosen, until he draws her close and whispers her name in her ear. "Yes," he says, though she cannot see his face, and as he presses into her and she gives under his touch her voice tangles with his in a desperate whisper:
"Please."
3.
"Well, signora," he says, "or should I say, signorina," and she laughs, and her husband lies dead at his feet.
"Yes?" she says. She is dressed for adventure, bangles adorning her neck and arms, nary a sovereign in her pocket. He knows; they counted them all.
He is dressed as a Crow, though strictly speaking the contract didn't quite come from them and someone might disapprove, if someone had been there to see. "Your husband is dead," he says, savoring the next few words, "and you are free."
"As are you," she points out, and he retreats. She narrows her eyes. "Have I not paid you enough?"
She has given him every sovereign in the house, and the keys to her dead husband's many vaults; he dare not open them all at once. Some of them, perhaps never. He cannot meet her gaze. "Nothing is enough for the Crows," he says evenly.
"Come with me," she says, but she has neither the keys to his cage nor the skills to teach him to fly, fledgling that she is. Yet she is determined; and he is—afraid.
"I cannot," he says, and though he is too lowly a Crow for politics he still cannot untangle the truth from the lie.
"I want you to come with me," she insists, and the force of her—wanting—will drive lesser men to their knees. And elsewhere, but she will not ask this again. He sees it in her eyes, murder replaced with this demand. He will refuse; she will not think to be so weak again.
"I cannot," he says again, and then, "isa bela," and her eyes are mirrors of the strange cracking in his heart, "be free."
"If that is what you want," she says tartly, and it is not what he wants but he barely knows how to want anymore, their time together already an unexpected grace beyond his understanding.
Instead he turns towards the door, towards the stairs that lead to the cellars that lead to the secret passageways that he will never need again. That he will never forget, even if he tries. "Farewell," he says, and he cannot keep himself from looking back one last time, from seeing her eyes shutter, her heart close, her guard rise.
Good, he thinks, relief sagging his shoulders as he disappears into the dark. She will not lose herself; she will live.
4.
She hears his name, of course, though not nearly as often as she thinks he hears hers; pirate queens are much more flamboyant than assassins, after all. She smiles fondly when she does, for the first breath of the sea was enough to ease the bitterness, and too many years and lovers have come and gone for her to begrudge him anything other than his inability to make a choice.
She is still surprised to see him in Ferelden, of all places, even more so to hear he has left the Crows for the sake of the Grey Wardens—and from the comfort of her Wicked Grace game she watches him watching the Warden, the one everyone's talking about, and she seems so quiet, powerful, of course, but disapproving, her mouth a tight line as they move through the crowd at the Pearl.
And he is—vigilant, of course, unsurprising, but he doesn't even notice her; his sphere is entirely focused around this Warden, his concern not for his safety—also unsurprising—but entirely for hers. The Warden hardly needs it, and yet he keeps close, murmuring in her ear, laughing at her tart reply, and she sees a smile tug the Warden's unsmiling mouth and she...
She is envious.
She barely has time to recover from the shock, a girl standing in her dead husband's bedroom with her heart in her hands, and in that time her hand slips and her opponent notices and starts demanding money and she has to do a few fancy tricks with a blade to discourage them, and then the Warden's standing before her with the elf who locked her heart away and his eyes crinkle fondly and she thinks, damn.
And then she laughs, like waves washing over the rough edges she'd thought she'd smoothed years ago, and says, "And look who we have here."
5.
One good turn deserves another, and he supposes he shouldn't be surprised to see her with the Champion, especially not after the rumors of the past three years about the Arishok and his quest—and yet it seems so terribly unlike her, to be here three years later. Of course he's heard her name elsewhere—every port between Kirkwall and Rivain; and yet, here she is. Here they are, both of them free, though the Crows haunt his steps and he hears she still doesn't have a ship, and yet—
She asks, and he does not miss the dark look in the Champion's eyes though he would have thought the blonde mage was—he declines, as much a sense of cold self-preservation at the Champion's unspoken disapproval as a memory of firm hands and a gentle, wondrous mouth, though he may never touch either again.
He declines and he departs along the seashore and she finds him there, hours later, idly skipping rocks in the surf.
"I thought you had a war to wage?" she asks, leaning against a rock, close enough for the spray to dampen her tunic.
"Ah, yes," he says, his eyes on the sea, "but it never hurts to practice one's aim, no?"
She laughs a little, a sound that warms him with its ease, and for a moment the waves speak for them, coming and going, ceaseless, inviting.
And then she says, "You loved her, then?"
Loved, and the pain of not knowing squeezes his chest—but he has lived through worse. "And you?" he counters, glancing at Kirkwall hanging off the nearby cliffs, smoke curling from the foundries into the sky.
"I don't know," she says, and she sounds—weary. "Probably, though I'm a damn fool for it."
His lips twist, laughing and rueful, and he flicks another rock across the waves. "Aren't we all."
A wind comes off the sea, tangling her hair around her face, but she crosses her arms and turns her face towards it. "I never thanked you," she says eventually, the words whistling away even as she speaks.
He shrugs and says, "It was nothing that wasn't already yours."
"You reminded me," she says.
He looks at her, the determined hatred he'd first seen long gone, a grain of sand in his memory. Well. Perhaps a pebble. "And you," he says, hesitates, ends lamely, "made me wonder."
She half-smiles. "Wonder is a powerful thing."
"And you are a powerful lady."
"No," she protests, and then, looking to the sea again, says, thoughtfully, "I suppose I am a pirate queen."
"And I merely a hunted Crow. We return to the beginning, I see."
"A beginning that ended, as I recall," she says, and she pushes off the rock and stretches. "I suppose I should go see what fool's errand lies in wait for me in the city. And you?"
He looks to the cliffs, the mountains, and beyond them—nothing he hopes to find. "There are always more Crows to kill," he says lightly. "They are like a beast of legend—cut off the head, and five more sprout."
"Then I shall hope to be long gone before they find you again," she says, "but, if I'm there—"
"Thank you," he says, and reaches out a hand.
She takes both of his and he—remembers, and smiles. "Zevran?" she says, half-smiling back.
"Isabela," he says, and if a grave note underscores his levity, well, he is a man of death.
She touches her forehead to his, briefly, then releases him and steps away. "Goodbye," she says.
"Farewell," he says, and she is off. "Good sailing," he calls after her, and her laughter echoes in his mind long after she is nothing more than a trail of footprints in the sand heading in the opposite direction of his.
The tide rolls in, the wind roaring atop it, and the sand is washed clean.