Characters/Pairing: complicated F!Hawke/Isabela, unhealthy F!Hawke/Anders
Rating: T
Word Count: 1500
Prompt: from anonymous: F!Hawke/Isabela, Just another soul for sale?
Notes: Unhappiness all around, featuring Jade's Thistle Hawke and all the difficulties entangled therein.
Warnings: Character death.
Soundtrack: Hurt by 2CELLOS. Listen here: watch?v=ozNEdMcWZvQ
—
All souls have a price.
It's one of the first lessons Isabela learns. She's seen men sold for sword and coin and other things, promises that don't shine in the dark so much as thump with the clasping of gloved hands. She herself goes for little more than a song and someone else's faith, sanctified by the cool jingle of silver pieces. Nothing more cruel, she thinks, and buys herself back with a blade and a word and a ship. Nothing more simple.
All souls have a price. Hers is simply smaller than others.
—
Isabela loves the ocean. It's cold and wild and honest in a way that little is in the world now, and if a summer storm swallows down her ship and men alike Isabela…can't begrudge it. The ocean sets a high price for its freedom and no sailor sets to sea without knowing it, without realizing that one red-dawned day she will call the cost home again. Straightforward, though. A clear bargain; a choice without coercion.
How fortunate the ocean cares nothing for names. She chooses a new one, with a new course and a new sky to cover it, and wonders if there's gold enough in the world to buy the soaring of her soul as the waves break white stars at her feet.
Convenient, really, that a grave for so many should feel so close to home.
—
Hawke, Isabela thinks, startled, is like the ocean. It's only a fleeting thought, only a moment in the first night of their meeting—but when Hayder's dead on the floor and the earth itself shakes under her feet with the force of unfettered magic and Hawke turns to her and looks—there's a storm in her eyes as dangerous as any Isabela's ever sailed through, and she doesn't even think Hawke knows it. That one will drown worlds; that one will rise and rise and rise without an ebb tide, and when she is through with this city there will be nothing left but bones and the eyeless fish of the deep places, all light burned away.
Isabela grins, puts her hands on her hips, saunters close enough to smell lightning.
She's always loved storms on the sea.
—
One by one Hawke buys souls for her collection: an amulet for an elf girl, protection for a slave, a midnight meeting and a broken heart for an apostate with old maps. They go to the Deep Roads and Hawke's brother falls from grace to grave, and the tides rise higher behind Hawke's eyes. Anders offers a high price, a bitter cup and an early death, but a brother's soul is—worth much, even here, and when Carver goes into the dark Isabela knows it's not the first time Hawke's paid a price too dear, and it won't be the last.
Not that Hawke's heart breaks. Not that the tide ebbs, or the storm wanes—no. Instead it only freezes over, thin glass preserving in frost the heart Hawke had before it was sold in sorrow, before it was bought by blood. Isabela wants to smash it open, to see the way Hawke looks when grief and anger are pried away—but she can't cheat the hand when she's not sure of the game, and instead she only waits, and wonders, and watches the weak places grow ever smaller in the thickening ice.
—
For a long time Isabela thinks Hawke is different. Not just from her, but from everyone—from all the petty souls that trade in lives and livestock and concern themselves more with coin than with people. Hawke is hardly the type to keep such small concerns, not with the city tearing itself to pieces over the placid qunari, and anyway, she's never been the type of woman to have the patience for such things. A snap and a glare and men fall away before her; Isabela can't imagine her counting bronze pieces in the light of a dim candle until the wick burns to ash.
Isabela likes that.
Likes Hawke, too, despite the sting of her nettles, and tells her so, one evening in her mansion, furnished as sparely as she. Hawke smiles. Hawke blushes, just the faintest bit, just the barest coloring at her cheeks and at her throat, and when Isabela hooks a finger in her robe and pulls her closer Hawke lets out a queer little laugh and—bends forward to meet her.
She didn't know Hawke could bend. She didn't know Hawke could laugh like that, either, and for a long time that night she makes it her personal mission to drag as much of both from her as she can. It's a good night. It's a really good night, and then morning comes, and—
You're not thinking of bringing feelings into this, are you?
Of course not.
Of course not—and they never once mention the lie.
—
She understands, after that. Understands that just because Hawke's not like other people doesn't mean she doesn't lie to herself all the same, doesn't lie to her friends and the Viscount and Meredith and Orsino and the whole damned city falling at her feet. It might not be coin—but Hawke's a peddler of souls all the same, buying them for her own purposes and selling them when she's finished, not out of cruelty but cold pragmatism, out of need, out of the eyes of someone standing high and distant from her charges.
She's not the kind of woman to have friends. She tells Isabela this, one night, not drunk but not—sober. Fenris is a blade, useful and skilled and coolly disinterested in anything more than that. Aveline has known her too long and knows better; Merrill is too dangerous to trust. Varric can't find the angle to sell, and Hawke's not interested in being sold—irony of ironies, Isabela thinks, and says nothing—and Anders—
And Anders is in love with a woman, and Hawke is a storm on the sea.
—
Anders moves out of Darktown. It's a sudden thing, surprising even Hawke, but there's no room in either of them for second guesses and if they doubt, neither of them mention it to Isabela.
It doesn't really—bother her, not in the way an arrow in her arm might bother her, but she at least is used to the old ache of bruises that don't heal well, and Hawke is a wound old enough to have scarred twice over. Isabela doesn't regret things, not her choices or her lovers or her own hurt, and she doesn't once begrudge either of them what they've chosen to make of themselves.
Still.
Still, she watches Hawke pull Anders in under her wings, not to protect but to watch and guard and jess and smother, because Hawke trusts no one and hawk's eyes are sharp enough to see danger from a thousand feet. Anders is dangerous, and hurt, and Hawke is dangerous and hurt and Isabela is the closest thing to a friend either of them has left, even if it's not a thing she's meant for. She tries to listen, when she can, and she visits Anders and goes to the Coast with Hawke and tells bawdy jokes and slings her arms over their shoulders like they're happy.
But in the end she's not a healer, and some wounds cost too much to close.
—
Every soul has a price. Anders sells his in drakestone and sela petrae. Hawke buys it back with a narrow blade between his ribs, and when his dying is done she straightens and lifts her chin and looks to the city spread out before her, kneeling at her feet, begging for her help and panting for her blood. Lightning bursts in the sky, in her eyes, dangerous and cold and brilliant, and Isabela knows enough of storms to realize this wind is too wild and hard to follow for much longer, not if she doesn't want to break her mast before it.
And as for Hawke—
And as for Hawke, as much as it's supposedly for the sake of the city and what's left of her family, both Hawke's and Isabela's families vanished long ago, and all that remains is bone and ash. Seven years and the city's found the cost of Hawke's soul at last: a throne and a crown as hard as she is, as unyielding in purpose and as coldly certain.
A soft, embarrassed laugh, and a smile, and a blush, once—
But the price is too high to allow such things to live, not when Hawke's helped set it according to the impossible standard of her own convictions. Meredith's stone idol cracks and bursts; the tide swells; a newer idol, living, immaculate, takes her place. So Isabela fights and kills and wipes blood from her face for the last time, and when it's finished she flips a grin at Hawke and turns away, out of the lightning's path. She hasn't got a ship—or a crew, for that matter—but that's all right. She's survived before. Will again.
Every soul has a price. Not all of them are bought with coin. Not all of them are worth the paying.
—
She would have liked—
No regrets.