"So. What's magic like?"
Isabela drops easily to the sand beside Hawke, tucking her legs beneath her. Hawke smiles sideways at her, eyebrows lifting.
"Why, Isabela. What a concise and straightforward inquiry." She sighs. Isabela rolls her eyes, offering something in her closed fist. Hawke splays her palm and in drops a merry assortment of nuts, seeds, and berries. Her brows, as they often do in the pirate's company, lift ever higher. Isabela tuts.
"Merrill is presently foraging up the hill out of sheer boredom." She explains, popping a magnificently purple berry between her lips. "I was helping, but then I got bored of that."
Satisfied, Hawke plucks a seed from her palm and rolls it between her fingers. She drops it into her mouth and bites down and it tastes just like dirt and it's perfect.
"Are you going to answer my question?" Isabela prods. Hawke shrugs.
"I suppose I don't really know how." She says, shrugging and chewing. "What's piracy like?"
"Bloody amazing." Isabela laughs, and the sound of it is something velvety and firm. "See? Not so hard. Now you go."
Hawke sighs, looking over the Waking Sea. The sun has just dipped over the horizon, casting the lazily sloshing waves an uncomfortable red. The kind of red the sea shouldn't be. It's quite pretty. Unnerving. She wonders if it's holding up the smugglers they were supposed to rendezvous with half an hour ago. Sailors are a superstitious lot. Isabela doesn't seem the type, though. Egregiously pragmatic, that one. Although, Hawke supposes a sailor without a ship does bely some sort of failing. Maybe she wasn't superstitious enough? They haven't gotten to that bit just yet. Sordid pasts and lingering regrets can take a good while to drudge up.
Isabela clears her throat and Hawke thinks that somehow, Isabela can tell that she hasn't been thinking about her question even a little bit. There's something uncanny always dancing just beyond reach with her.
"It's… alright, I guess?" Hawke ventures. Isabela scoffs.
"Well! What do you want me to say?" Hawke exhales on a laugh, dodging a rather violently tossed berry. "It's all good fun, excluding the apostacy of it all. Sometimes including the apostacy of it all, though, if I'm being quite honest. Could do well enough without the demons."
"That's all you have to say about it? Just last week I saw you dangle a man by his ankles over the side of a sodding mountain with just your mind."
"He was a tit, wasn't he?"
Isabela shakes her head, throwing up her hands in defeat. A smile plays on her deliriously full lips, and Hawke can't help but offer one in return. Even so, she's happy to let the subject drop. The only other person she'd ever been able to speak with frankly about magic was Bethany. Growing up, it had felt like this clandestine sort of club for just the two of them. They'd wander over the low, sweeping hills about Lothering, sometimes smuggling out armfuls of their father's books, others not, chatting and waxing philosophic about what they thought they understood. Until the watery sun collapsed on itself and they stumbled home, tripping over themselves in the dark.
Talking about it with anyone else feels wrong, still. Anders thinks it a waste, even if he won't say so aloud. Merrill, though, seems to understand it. Even if she's never said so outright.
She stares at Carver, keeping watch on the exposed reef that curves around the bay. She's glad he didn't hear any of it. Sometimes she wishes he'd been born like her and Bethany. Maybe they'd fight less. Maybe they'd fight more. At least they'd have more in common than their hair color, jawline, and penchant for starting fights in taverns.
"You know," Hawke starts when the silence begins to itch. "they never kept me waiting like this when I was working for Athenril. This freelancing thing is shit."
"Oh, do cheer up." Isabela says, laying down in the sand and salt-stained pebbles. "You've nearly an almost-respectable amount of coin, for Lowtown."
Hawke plucks a particularly round stone exposed from where the tide rolled back, peeling itself from the beach not an hour ago. She rolls it between her palms.
"Not quite enough, just yet. Soon, though." She says absently. Isabela shifts onto her side, resting her cheek upon her hand. The stud beneath her lip catches, glinting sharp in the sunset.
"I still don't think this is your most thoroughly-baked scheme, Hawke." She says, and she sounds so convincingly put-upon that Hawke nearly mistakes it for concern. "Willingly stomping around the Deep Roads, it's absolutely barking."
"It doesn't sound picturesque to you? Millenia-old mummified dwarves, enough darkspawn to swim in, spiders the size of horses?"
Isabela scoffs and pushes sand over the top of Hawkes boot, petulant.
"We've got spiders the size of horses here. I know Varric's been filling your pretty little head with notions of untold treasure, just begging to be plundered, but there's no need to go trudging through a bunch of tunnels dwarves can't be arsed with anymore. Which should tell you how not worth it the entire endeavor is, they made them. It's their stuff in there, and they won't even go out and get it!"
Hawke feels the rock in her hands gradually warming with the way she worries it, runic and sure.
"What would you suggest, then? In all your well-salted wisdom." She asks, teasing, but only mostly. If she's being honest with herself, really the only person she's been honest with in a while because she's the only one she's certain she can trust and even that gets a touch murky, she's not altogether thrilled at the idea of spending weeks on end in the Deep Roads. Cloudy spells lasting longer than three days sour her mood.
Isabela smirks, pouring more sand over the top of Hawke's foot and it's nearly well and buried by now.
"You want to know what I would do?" She murmurs conspiratorially.
"The anticipation has me all a-flutter."
"I'd just steal whatever they came back with." The pirate says, shrugging. "There has to be good stuff down there. There always is when it's someplace old and cursed."
Hawke laughs, putting the very round stone atop the lazy sandcastle erected atop her boot. It's proper, now.
"That's not terribly convoluted enough to be fun, though." She says, something uncomfortably adjacent to warmth spreading through her chest as Isabela smiles at the contribution to her work. "Why don't you just admit you'll be bored to tears without me for a few weeks?"
"Oh I'll be going positively mad, Hawke." Isabela says, nodding. "I'll be restless enough to do something entirely illegal, but you won't be around to run interference on Aveline. She may actually arrest me!"
"Well, if you're up for it, we can commit a string of random acts of kindness and chivalry when I'm back. Even the scales a bit?"
Hawke belts another laugh at the grimace that Isabela can't control from twisting over her face.
"I think it's better that I leave all the doing-good to you, sweet thing." She murmurs, and Hawke suppresses the trembling feeling at the base of her spine that starts every time Isabela uses that particular pet name.
"It's not so bad, I promise." Hawke presses, teasing. The pirate's eyes roll up into heavy lids in feigned irritation. "We can start small. Rescuing cats from trees and hanging up old biddies' washing. Demon-slaying and highwayman-wrangling are a little advanced, yet."
Isabela shifts her attention to the lapping waves, and there's an uncomfortable tangle of sympathy and pity writhing in Hawke's gut at the wistfulness in that amber gaze.
"Not to be too maudlin about it all, but doing good things has rarely ended favorably for me." She says, in a softer tone than seems appropriate for the great and terrible Queen of the Eastern Seas. It's somber and sorrowful, like the last finger's worth of rum at the bottom of a bottle. Hawke just barely catches the edge of a question with the tip of her tongue, and instead leans back into the sand, propped up on her elbows.
"The best thing about doing good things is that you get to be maudlin and nobody can say anything about it. Because of all the good you've done."
Isabela snorts, pulling a flask from the leather hand strapped to her thigh. She takes a long pull and wipes the back of her hand across her lips. Clearing her throat, she offers it to Hawke.
"Can you just imagine? Me? Sighing breathily and clutching my bosom as I contemplate the overwhelming plight of the world?"
"Well, now I am." Hawke says, mouth drying a bit despite the lukewarm liquor splashing onto her tongue. The Rivaini woman grins wickedly, silent melancholy all but evaporating into the familiar veneer of flirtation and sultry whimsy.
"And how much time do you spend thinking about my heaving bosom, hm?"
"I never specified that it was heaving, you tart."
"Wasn't it, though?"
Hawke dangles the flask just out of her reach when Isabela reaches back for it, sticking her tongue out at the other woman.
"Do you think about me thinking your heaving bosom often, then?"
"So you admit it was indeed heaving?"
Amber eyes splash with utter delight in the sun's last rays and Hawke's breath hitches for such a slight moment that later that night, when she's falling asleep, she convinces herself it hadn't. Moments like these have become more frequent over the past few weeks, and Hawke isn't quite sure what to make of it. Of course, the unbidden thoughts of yes and more might suggest that she's leaning toward liking it.
"I might've entertained the thought once or twice." Hawke admits, finally handing the rum back to its rightful handler. "But as far as chests go, you're still some long ways away from beating out Varric."
"I'll drink to that." She says. And she does.
The next silence they lapse into is easier than the last. The gulls and shorebirds have tucked in for the night, puffed up in great big bunches across the beach like so many clouds fallen to earth. The sky bleeds slow and soft from red to purple, stars visible just above the constant smoke and smog rolling off Kirkwall.
It's been a work in progress, but there's something about here that's starting to feel passably okay. After shedding the yoke of indentured servitude, Hawke has so much time. So much space to do and become. Even living with her mother, brother, and her sodding miserable uncle becomes a charming little footnote to the great adventure of it all on nights like this.
And she had more friends, actual friends, than she'd ever had at any one time. Sometimes it caught her off-guard, became a little overwhelming when they were all knocking elbows and fighting over table space around their usual bench at the Hanged Man. Or when Anders and Fenris got a little snarly for polite company, which was mercifully seldom-kept. Or when Aveline got to sniffing around a little too close around a fencing job she and Varric had set up.
But Hawke supposes that's what friendship is supposed to be like, sometimes. A bunch of people with hearts in the right place trying to make a go of it while negotiating the pitfalls of petty crime and dramatically disparate ideologies.
It's always been easier to be around Isabela, though. Hawke thinks it would probably be better to not think about the why too terribly much. Isabela certainly isn't the type to think about the why herself. Sitting on a beach, soggy with rum and boots in the sand is much prettier than any why, anyway.
Carver's sharp whistle pierces the calm, sending up a flutter of disgruntled honks from the sleeping birds across the beach.
"Andraste's chafed nipples, it's about time." She sighs suddenly, tossing the flask back at Hawke as she rises. "I'll go fetch Merrill. Don't do any negotiating until I'm back, you'll end up losing us coin."
"It happened once." Hawke protests weakly, draining the last mouthful of rum. She tries to not feel anything over the fact that Isabela left it for her.
"Once is enough to lose bartering privileges for life, you utter loon." She calls over her shoulder. "Get everything on shore and just stand there looking pretty, understood?"
"Aye aye, captain." Hawke says, saluting the pirate's retreating form.
In the cool night, nobody ever saw Hawke looking after the woman a moment too long, something grasping at the pit of her stomach wrinkling her brow.
Hawke isn't going to think about why, watching the easy sway of Isabela's hips and the way she reaches up to straighten her bandana, it's starting to always feel like she's just waiting for her to come back.