rubyvroom asked you: Fenris/Isabela, 20, if you don't mind?
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Characters/Pairing: Isabela/Fenris
Rating: T
Word Count: 1600
Prompt: #20 - author's choice
Notes: Oh man, I enjoyed this so much. I picked "neck kiss" ostensibly, though it kind of grew a little larger than I expected. Anyway, I really hope you like this; I had a ton of fun writing it, and I'm so glad you gave me the opportunity to write a different ship.
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Isabela wears her jewelry like armor, gold and bronze and brass at her throat, in her mouth, where she is soft.
Fenris does not know this, not at first, not the first time. The first time he is half-drunk on death and she is freedom incarnate, and despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that he considers her a friend he finds himself at her door, at midnight, at something of a loss with this freedom he has won. And yet—and yet, he is certain she knows where he should start.
If she is surprised to see him, she doesn't show it. Fenris doesn't know if it's because he's that predictable or if she simply knows him that well; regardless, Isabela fists a hand in his collar and lets loose a smooth hot promise of a laugh that makes his mouth go dry and his feet nearly stumble as he follows her into the dark. Her boots stay on, that night, along with her bandanna and her necklace and the brassy discs at her ears. Next time—
There will be a next time. That is the start.
—
The next time is not long after that, and the time after that even sooner. Isabela cares nothing for his inexperience, as he'd both feared and hoped; rather, she laughs and slides her dark, sea-weathered hand across his stomach, and whispers all the better to keep you from bad habits. Still, Fenris finds himself an eager pupil and Isabela a very willing teacher, and between the two of them he learns how to make her gasp, and laugh, and clutch at his shoulders; she teaches him a better way to use his tongue than shouting, and another purpose for lyrium Danarius certainly did not intend, and that pain has no place in a bed unless both parties wish it. They are only little things to learn, he thinks, only small truths he should have known before—but Isabela drops them into his hands one by one, carelessly, endlessly, baubles of gold and silver from the vast rich stores of a pirate queen given freely and without price.
Sometimes he stays; sometimes he does not. Isabela keeps other lovers occasionally—Fenris does not begrudge her that, because he knows as well as she does the sea loves many—but he cannot deny that on the quiet nights, when it is only her body and his and no sound between them save the glide of skin on skin and soft breaths like the murmur of waves, there is something in his heart that stops its wounded beat, nears somehow closer to—peace.
He watches her eyes, those nights, turned to him like brass burning in the dark, and wishes he could read their heat.
—
One morning, when the sun is bright and hot and Isabela's little room is overwarm with Kirkwall's summer, Fenris lies on her bed and watches her dress. It is not until she tugs up her boots that he realizes how much he cherishes the long bare muscles of her legs, not until she brushes her hair in the mirror that he realizes how infrequently he has seen her without gold at her throat, at her ears, at her lip.
Isabela is not a woman willing to be cherished—he knows that, if nothing else—but he asks her about the jewelry nonetheless, his voice still low and rumbling with sleep, curiosity victor over comfortable silence.
Isabela looks at him in the mirror, her black, perfect eyebrow lifting, her kiss-reddened lips curving into a smile as beautiful and devastating as a storm. "Ask me again sometime," she purrs, rising from the vanity, sashaying out of the room into the brighter daylight of the Hanged Man proper.
Fenris rolls to his back, throws his arm across his eyes. Lyrium tugs at his skin, faintly, a suggestion and a reminder; a small smile slips across his own mouth, and he says to the empty room, "I will."
—
He does, some weeks later, when they are at last through with the Coast and he can barely breathe through the heavy weight of salt air sitting thick in his chest. Not with words, not exactly—rather, he reaches up and touches her face as she bends over him, a touch of neither lust nor simple friendship, and as she stills to something guarded and impenetrable he lets his fingers slide to one ear. Her hair is dark and heavy against his skin, still smelling of sea salt—but she does not move away as he brushes it to the side, does not flinch as he finds the little hook that holds her earring in place.
He pulls it free. She lets him.
The other comes after, two bright etched-brass coins almost as bright as her eyes in the dark. He puts them to the side, not forgotten but not—needed, not now, and when Isabela bends closer to kiss him there is something new in this touch that she has not yet taught him.
He learns, though. He does not forget.
—
Fenris keeps this lesson over the next days, and weeks, and months. The earrings come off nearly every time, whether it is by her hand or his; he knows human ears have little of an elf's sensitivity in them, but he enjoys the flesh of her earlobe between his teeth, the heady noises she makes as he puts his mouth to skin beneath them and sucks there. She pays back the favor as often as not—though he suspects, sometimes, she enjoys too much the sight of him shuddering beneath her mouth—and when one day he catches her tongue working at her own lower lip, he is not entirely surprised to see the small gold stud slide free, into his waiting palm.
It is only a little thing, only a little ball of metal and gilt and a long straight post to fix it. Isabela glances at it against his callused skin, against the lyrium striping across his palm beneath it, then looks at him with brows raised as if to say: so what now?
He smiles, and puts it with the earrings, and they both pretend they cannot feel his heart thudding fast and hard in his throat.
—
The necklace, then, is the last to go, the final piece of armor shed like so many errant leaves in autumn. Fenris unclasps it himself, one evening, when the moon is full and clear and more than enough to light Isabela's little room, when she comes to him without a word, naked save this last bit of gold, and turns, and sighs, and pulls her hair from the nape of her neck. It spills over her hands like water, tangling around her fingers; he wishes he had that excuse for the sudden clumsiness of his hands as he reaches up for the tiny clasps holding the pieces together. The first one is harder than he expects for something so small and delicate—Isabela snorts a quip about men and women's smallclothes and he cannot help but laugh—but it comes free eventually, as they all do, as surely as the chains she'd taught him to snap inside his heart, and the gold and brass and bronze clink softly against themselves as he drops the necklace to the bed.
He stands there for a long moment, his fingers tracing over the bumps of her spine, the smooth dark curving skin so much softer than his own; then, when he feels her shoulders lift with a slow breath, he bends his head and presses his mouth to her neck.
It is not the most heated kiss he has ever given her; neither is it the most passionate.
It is the most intimate. And as her hand comes up slow and sure to slip into his hair, to hold him where he stands against her, his arms slide around her shoulders in nothing less than an embrace. And it is an embrace, because he wishes to embrace her, because Isabela has taught him that not all cages are prisons and not all yield means restraint.
His mouth moves, from her neck to her ear to her throat. She lets him, her head tipping back to bare herself to him; then she turns and puts one hand on his chest with her eyes like burnished brass and in one deft motion pins him to the bed beneath her.
She does not release him until dawn. Even then, he does not go.
—
Isabela wears jewelry like armor. Each piece is a shield, a guard, a bright distraction from the tender parts of her they hide—but Fenris knows what lies beneath them, now, knows too that armor has its place in battle and in their bed and even between them, occasionally, when teeth and tongue wound more than heal. There's death between them, too, and behind them, quiet fights and bruised places marked by more than accident; and yet they're caught in freedom all the same, because no bars can hold a ghost and no lock can stop a thief, and if somehow they've tangled themselves into each other it's only two halves of the same coin coming home again.
"What do you think?" Isabela asks him one evening, bare feet on the table, half-empty bottle of rum dangling from one hand. "A ship, white sails, and the sea?"
"Only with the right captain," Fenris says, and she laughs as she looks to him, her eyes shining like gold.