Isabela tries to stay away. She really does. She means it.
She takes jobs when they're offered and she makes her own, when she can. She'd done a few sweeps with Aveline, the smugglers they broke in on more surprised by seeing the infamous Queen of the Eastern Seas alongside the Kirkwall city guard than their inevitable imprisonment. None more surprised than she is, though. She'd wandered about the foothills of Sundermount with Merrill, watching the little elf swan about collecting herbs and chipping bark off trees only to find out she'd bled all over them later that night, in service to what, she doesn't know and doesn't want to know. All she knows, sure as the hair on a dwarf's ass, is a woman's got to have boundaries and Merrill traipses gleefully past what even Isabela thinks is a good time. She even bothers Fenris here and there, bribing him to join her on Darktown excursions and not ask questions with stolen bottles of Tevinter wine that they share together over every dawn that breaks over an unsuccessful night. Balls. He doesn't ask questions, though. He'd make a great pirate.
She manages a handful of trips to the Blooming Rose, to boot. There's an absolute doll of a woman there who does this thing with marbles and a gong that she needs to show Varric as soon as he drags his bitty ass back to daylight. Her stomach clenches when she first notices herself missing him. Missing all of them, really. She's got a kink in her neck that Anders could magic out of her with a sigh and she'd offer him a naughty limerick or a baked apple in return and he'd take either and settle in to listen to her pontificate at length about a naval battle he knows she's making up. She even misses Carver, with all his surly rippling and boyish angst.
But Hawke. Hawke, Hawke, fucking Hawke.
Isabela is starting to wonder if this is some kind of mage trick. Some thrall that makes her think about floppy black hair and nefariously pointy chins and eyes so blue they burn and lunatic grins so much and so often that it feels like it just has to be. Or she's gone fully mad and that's how the Great Sodding Ballad of Isabela: Lover of Many Fine Orlesians and Their Finer Cheeses, ends. She is cagey and itchy and stuffed full of want and the sun is too hot. Hawke would have made them go to the beach today. Balls!
So, she tries. She does, she really does, she means it, pirate's honor, whatever it's worth. But somewhere along the line, she gives up and visits Leandra. Once, twice, three times. And now, a fourth. Hawke was right about Wicked Grace, she is good. Not as good as Isabela or Varric, but much more of a fight than Hawke ever managed to put up. They don't bet coin. They bet stories and little bottles of whiskey and talk until Isabela thinks the itch has finally been dealt with and she tricks herself into believing she's exorcised herself of whatever this is. She's an idiot and is rewarded for it with warm hospitality and good gossip. It's so off.
The daylight is muzzy in here, making everything grey and warm and Isabela is approaching something close to comfortable, to her great chagrin. And drunk. She's drunk. Hawke's darling mother has gotten her drunk. Leandra is pouring another finger of brandy, Gwaren's finest, she's told, and saying something rather scandalous about the lady of the Harimann family.
"When they all come a-charging back to the surface, spitting gold ingots and you've gotten the estate back, Leandra, I'm telling you, you'll slip right in, under their stuffy noses." Isabela says, reaching for her glass. "And they won't be ready for you. And that's a good thing, it is."
Leandra smiles at her, the hook of it catching something in Isabela's chest. It doesn't reach her eyes. It's been over a month since Bartrand led them into the belly of the earth. At around week three, everyone topside started getting twitchy. Nobody is saying it, nobody would dare speak it out loud. But it's there and it rattles around the edges.
"What better way to knock the dust off of them all? Andraste knows it's needed around here." She says, sipping her brandy in a way that is so thoughtful, so elegant. Isabela feels like she should be taking notes.
"You know, Hawke's never told me why you left." She says. "I mean, not well, at least. You know how she is."
Leandra laughs, and it's sweet and fond and says she knows exactly how Hawke is.
"Oh, it was a scandal when it all happened. The long and short of it is that I was engaged to the de Launcet boy, bless his heart, when I met Malcom and we began a secret, torrid romance that ended up with him spiriting me away to Ferelden after we learned Marian was on the way." She says. Leandra always uses Hawke's actual first name, and it is very dear. Isabela has resolved she will keep it up her sleeve until such a time that she is very, very cross with Hawke.
"Ooooh, the drama." Isabela croons, dropping her elbows on the table. "Do go on."
Leandra crosses her legs, settling in.
"There was a banquet, thrown by Viscount Threnhold, in honor of some Orlesian noble. Must have been one of the important ones. One of the de Chalons, I think. It must have been." She begins. "It was dreadfully dull. I had worn my finest dress, my finest jewels, my finest shoes. All to have spent the night sitting in a corner. My betrothed wasn't a gifted dancer, you see. He was a rough sort, and would have much rather been hunting, though I hear he's gone quite soft, since. He was easy enough on the eyes, but still, I was so young, then, and I hadn't had any say in the arrangement. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew it wasn't him."
Isabela nods, taking a long pull of brandy to drown the sympathetic twinge in her guts.
"Dinner and drinks and canapes all passed by, I don't remember what was served. I'm sure it was fine, but all I can recall was that the rest of my life would be spent being shuttled from dull banquet to boring hunting party to duller banquet. It felt… Oh, it sounds so dramatic, but it felt like my life was over, and I wasn't even the one to ruin it." She says, her eyes, a calmer blue than Hawke's, are fixed somewhere above Isabela's head and far beyond. "After dinner, the Viscount introduced some mages from the Gallows Circle for our entertainment. Looking back, after having two mage children, the thought of it makes my skin crawl. But it was quite fashionable, then. I didn't notice Malcolm, at first. That was Gamlen. As soon as he pointed him out to me, I couldn't look away."
Her eyes crease at the corners, as if she's still there. Isabela leans forward a hair.
"He was handsome. Very, very handsome. You can see it in Carver. Marian, too. He seemed so much larger than anyone else I'd ever met. He was lanky and awkward, to be sure, but he carried himself in a way I'd never seen. He was proud, even as he was being trotted out as a circus animal for the nobility. But it was his smile, mostly. Ridiculous. But everything." Leandra sighs the last word out, wistful and hard. "Marian's smile, it's his."
Something tight and hot settles just beneath Isabela's lungs.
"Gamlen covered for me, and after the performance, he and I talked and talked on a balcony, romantic as you please, and by the end of the night he had gone back to the tower and I had gone back to the estate and he was all I could think about." Leandra says, looking down into her brandy, and smiling something private. "Gamlen stayed busy those next few months, arranging our meetings and lying to mother and father for me. I think I saw Guillaume twice during that time. He never seemed terribly bothered by it all. I think he had his eye on Dulci the entire time, so it's just as well. Suddenly, well not suddenly, I know how it happened, I was pregnant with Marian. Making off to Ferelden seemed like the only option, then. He was low-born, and a mage. But we were in love, and I was carrying with me this little person that we made, he and I. With that, it didn't seem impossible that we would be able to make anything ours."
"Beats hanging out with stuffed-shirts, if you ask me." Isabela hums, tapping the rim of her glass. It was all terribly, awfully, wonderfully romantic. She wonders if Varric knows the story. If not, she'll have to see that rectified.
"To be honest, I don't think we'd made it halfway across the Waking Sea before I wanted to turn back. I was spoiled and soft." Leandra laughs. "But I didn't, and I'm glad every day for it. Marian was born the next summer, full head of the thickest black hair you've ever seen, just like Malcolm's. She grounded us."
"She has that way about her." Isabela says, maybe a bit more ruefully than she meant to. Leandra's eyes smile in that wry and knowing way that is Hawke, but it is her now too, and always has been. She clears her throat, then, straightening.
"It's sweet of you to have come by so often, my dear." She says. "It has helped."
Isabela chews her tongue. She's really just been selfish and desperate. It is longing for comfort and stability that should have never been present as to be uprooted. Balls and balls and balls.
"Well, I can't have Hawke climbing out of a hole in the ground sharper at cards than I am." She says, swallowing down her brandy and all the cold creeping up her throat. "The indignity."
Leandra laughs, and it's a beautiful thing, too near for Isabela.
"And here I'd hoped she'd only been going easy on her dear old mother. She's really that awful?"
Isabela pulls a face, and Leandra laughs some more.
"She's pretty enough to make up for being so hopeless. She's got that going for her, at least." She says, unthinking.
There's that Knowing Look again, and she wishes the ground would open under her chair and devour her. Bury her far and away from those uncanny Amell eyes and motherly humor and stories of dizzying, whirlwind romances that Hawke grew into herself inside of. These things aren't for her. Salt spray and jewels and the gulls and swarthy sailor's thighs and being alone, free, to take all of it herself and never learn how to slice apart her dearest things in communion with anyone else, that's for her. She's letting the whole sodding lot of them complicate things, complicate her, and she'd happily be buried alive under actual dirt rather than be buried under them and their expectations. Under Hawke and her stupid laugh and eyes that sweep eagerly over her like she's a treasure map. They'd be happier for it, too. They'd be bored, she's a real barrel of laughs, after all, but they'd get over it. They'll have to, eventually, inevitably.
Leandra drops the subject in favor of another round, cards and drinks both. Isabela wants to ask questions that she doesn't want answers to, but instead she tells stories of the buckles she's swashed and heaps of ill-gotten gold. Leandra makes an excellent audience, humming and gasping on all the appropriate beats. This, she doesn't mind one bit. It's tawdry and dishy and all quite sporting. She even loses a hand, honest, she swears on Andraste's venerated knickers. Leandra looks a little less haggard, less wrung out by worry for her children. Isabela's allergies to meaningful connection aside, she's glad for that, at least. Leandra is a good woman. She knows well enough how places like Kirkwall can take and take and take from good women.
Eventually, they call it an afternoon and Leandra wishes her well, demanding that Isabela leave with the brandy on the condition that she'll come back soon to finish it with her. Isabela says that she will, but as soon as the words leave her lips, she regrets them. She may well be a liar. The thought bothers her more than it used to.
She takes her time wandering back to the Hanged Man. She has to go well out of her way to do it, the Hawkes only live a stone's throw from the tavern, but she makes it worth her while when she finds an absolutely absurd hat. After she's haggled the merchant down to her satisfaction, she contemplates paying Aveline a visit in Hightown. Maybe Fenris, while she's at it. No, no, too far. It'll be dark before long, and wandering about Kirkwall tipsy without any backup isn't the charming sort of poor decision making she prides herself on. It's only ever fun if she makes it out with nothing more than a bad rash. She resigns herself to the idea that the most exciting part of today has already passed and trudges back to her room. The hat is hung on her bedpost, the brandy left on the mantle. At this point, it only makes good sense to continue drinking. She can feel herself sobering up and her temples ache. Maker, she's getting older. How embarrassing.
Isabela has never made any official claims to her spot at the bar, but it's always left empty for her, all the same. It would make her feel squeamish, stagnant, if only it wasn't so convenient. She chats with Corff as she bloats her tab. She asked him to keep an ear to the ground for any scuttlebutt about the relic, but all his leads have been busts, so far. It's terribly pesky business, all of it. She's been dismissing his information and then staring at the ceiling wondering if she's just letting it slip out of her fingers again. She wonders what she would have done if she'd found it over the past month. Would she have waited for Hawke to come back before she left? She resolves that she wouldn't. She wouldn't. She knows why she's here. It's not Hawke, it's not Varric or Merrill or Aveline or any of them. It's all a mistake, an unfortunate storm of circumstance and cannonfire. She downs her ale fitfully and gestures for another.
She's halfway through her third pint when Varric comes stomping in. She thinks to cheer, to congratulate him on crawling his way back to where life is fun, through tunnels of nothing but dust and spider eggs and nug shit. But something isn't right. He's alone and, she never thought she'd say this, never ever, but he looks awful. Not just the kind of awful she'd expect after tunnels of nothing but dust and spider eggs and nug shit, either. He looks the way she thinks she must have looked after she washed up on the jagged teeth of the Wounded Coast, her ship and her crew chewed up and swallowed by the sea. His eyes are swollen and rimmed red, darting around this familiar place like a rabbit suddenly caught out in the open.
He sees her, and he doesn't nod, doesn't wave her over, doesn't do anything. He starts toward the stairs to his room. She doesn't know if she's supposed to follow him or not, but he knows she's going to, regardless, because he holds the door open for her.
"You're a sore sight for eyes." Isabela says, and he doesn't smile. Doesn't even try. He just lets out a small, hiccuping sigh and sits on his bed, burying his face in his palms.
"Varric." She needs him to say something.
"Isabela." He says, sounding older than anyone has ever sounded. She balks. He looks up at her, eyes dull and swimming. Her pulse thrums, and she waits. There are dreadful thoughts prodding dreadful questions to her tongue, but she waits.
"She's never going to forgive me." Varric rasps, finally, mercifully, and so small. She wants to scream at him to tell her that Hawke is okay. That she's here, she's fine, but there was no treasure and he flushed almost a year's worth of a starving refugee family's coin down the drain on a bust, and that's all.
"What-" She starts, but he holds up his hand, cutting her off. It hangs in the air like a white flag.
"Just give me a minute, alright?" He says, rough, a little more like himself. "Get me a drink. I'll talk. I just need a drink."
She fetches several.
They sit at his obnoxiously large table and he tells her everything. There is no room here for his usual grandstanding. He stares straight ahead, ashen, jaw knotted, as he tells her about the malignant, gleaming red idol and Bartrand locking them away to rot. He tells her about the rocks possessed by demons and the rocks possessed by something else entirely. They found their treasure after being pummelled halfway to death by a myth.
He tells her, sinking into himself, about Carver. How he and Hawke dragged the boy's failing, blight-sick body deeper into the earth, following Anders to where Grey Wardens might, possibly, maybe, be. How they finally found the Wardens, only to be told to not hold their breath. They left Carver behind, with them. He says Hawke hadn't spoken until they got back to Kirkwall, just a few hours ago, when she said she had to tell their mother. She didn't look at either of them, she was just gone.
Isabela is drinking, too.
"I'm going to find him. Bartrand." Varric is saying, knuckles white around his mug. "I'm going to find him. I'll kill him."
She doesn't know what good that would do, but she doesn't say so. She sits and she listens and she watches color return to his face and his voice get rougher and louder until he sounds like Varric again, but he doesn't feel like Varric. She doesn't tell him she was just with Leandra. She can't acknowledge out loud, to anyone, that she was in the before right before the after. It's too personal, too intimate a space for Isabela to occupy. She isn't worth it and she doesn't want to be. The poor woman has had enough befores and afters. Before Malcolm, after Malcolm. Before Bethany, after Bethany. Before this, after this. Even if Carver is alive, this is still one of those before and after things. The poor woman, Isabela thinks again. At least she won't have to grieve in that musty old shack.
"I'll mount Bartrand's ugly nug-sucking head on a pike and I'll have it shipped to the Anderfels. The kid has to make it." Varric is still growling into his cup. He's drunk and talking to himself, at this point. Isabela is relieved, honestly. She's much more equipped to deal with his anger than his grief.
Hawke, though. Her brow buckles. She won't blame Varric, and Isabela is surprised the dwarf doesn't know better. Maybe it's the creeping shock of it all that makes him think so. Hawke will blame herself. Worse, still, Leandra will probably blame her, too. Hawke told her once, when they were the soppy, morose kind of drunk that she hates to be, that her mother blamed her for Bethany, at least at first. She apologized and took it all back, after a while, and Isabela didn't know Hawke, in the before before that, but she feels like the weight of that accusation never lifted. She's seen the way guilt can bow the proudest sailor. She resolved, years ago, that she'd never let it be her. She thinks Hawke has never made herself such a promise. In fact, she knows she hasn't.
Poor Carver. He always reminded her of a strapping young sailor she'd picked up in Estwatch. He was lippy and handsome and cleverer than Carver, but nowhere near as brave. She remembers now that he died, his gut sliced open over a lost bet worth more money than he'd ever have.
In her least charitable moments, she thinks Hawke is a pushover. She never wanted to bring Carver along, but she gave in to what he demanded, same as she does for any stranger that tugs on her sleeve and asks a favor. Does she believe she's being noble? Half the time she ends up holding the door open into a burning building. Isabela's understanding of doing the right thing is theoretical at best, but giving everyone what they want is impossible. That's fine, inevitable, even. Ignoring it is dangerous.
She thinks for a moment that maybe Hawke should feel guilty. She hates herself for thinking it and buys another round.
Isabela sits and listens to Varric snarl and gnash his teeth for another hour before she puts him to bed. Not to sleep, she knows that. But he's horizontal on a plush mattress and closer to the sky than he's been in a month. He'll be alright.
She goes to her room and draws a bath. The warmest it gets is tepid, but that's fine. She's not trying to relax. She scrubs at herself like she can slough off the dirt and dust and grime clinging to Varric's coat by proxy, get rid of the tangled clumps in the beard that sprouts from his cheeks. Her skin hurts and her head hurts and the only booze she has now is the brandy on the mantle. She won't look at it. She thinks she should do something, but there's nothing to do. She throws a thin shift over her head. It sticks to her where her skin is still damp. All she has is this tomb that Varric dragged up and she's getting softer and weaker the longer she's here, to have climbed in with him. She snuffs out the lamp and gets in bed.
When she comes, it's quiet. Not quiet enough for Isabela's eyes to not fly open out of her almost-sleep, for her fingers to start toward the tiny knife in her pillowcase. She lifts her head to catch eyes that balefully reflect the moonlight in her room, the sharp cut of her chin. They watch each other, saying nothing.
Hawke is alive.
Isabela is still here.
These are things that probably shouldn't be true, but they are. One day, they won't be. They'll figure out what to do in the meantime, later, because they have to. That's all surviving can be.
Isabela shifts, an invitation. Hawke slides in next to her. There is breath and the cracking of joints and the shiver of fabric. She smells like sweat and buried things. Isabela circles her fingers around cold wrists, and frowns. It isn't a cold night, is it? She pulls them up, like a lever, to her lips and presses. Hawke's eyes are frozen, impassive if she didn't know better, but her pulse beats under Isabela's lips like bird wings. Then her hands are empty, fingers cradle her cheeks, her chin, her jaw.
"Hawke." She breathes. It is a greeting, an apology, a reprimand. The woman looks like she could say something, like she's about to, but then it's swallowed and buried and gone. Her eyes are enough. She doesn't feel alive. She is asking for help, trying to phrase it in a way that she thinks Isabela will say yes to.
She hates that she's so predictable. She hates being known. She hates that this is something Hawke believes she can ask of her. She hates that, despite hating all of it, she is saying yes, over and over again until the word is just a sound, the heartbeat in her ears.
It is a sigh, an admission of relief, of reunion. Hawke's lips are on hers. She tastes like ashes and waiting. Isabela is still impatient. She is angry. There are better ways to make coin than playing at adventure where heroes go to die. She's spent the past month scared half to death over this stupid, selfish woman who wants everyone to love her so much she'd let them die for it. This stupid, selfish woman who proved her worried mother right. Isabela bites her lower lip, hard, and Hawke doesn't make a sound. She digs her nails into her neck, knots matted black hair in her fist, scratches at her shuddering chest. She wants to see if it's gold or rot buried in there. Hawke lets her. Isabela thinks she'd let her do anything she wanted. It was only ever supposed to be a helping hand and an easy lay. Instead, it's this. It is Isabela clinging to Hawke like she didn't think she'd live if she never came back. It is Hawke clinging to Isabela like she's the only reason she did.
She is on her back, but Hawke isn't moving to fuck her. Good. She doesn't want it. Not like this. Why does it matter? She only knows that it does. Isabela smooths her hands over the welts she's left, balls her fist in Hawke's shirt and pulls her down, down. There is blood in their mouths, and they wade through it, suddenly careful with each other. Her face is wet. She opens her eyes, lips still moving, meandering, with Hawke's. Tears slip down gaunt, sallow cheeks. Her breath hasn't changed.
"Sweet thing." Isabela whispers, so soft she isn't sure she's saying anything at all. She says it over and over again, into Hawke's mouth, her neck, her cheeks, her forehead, her hair. She trembles over her, dark as her tears wash hot over Isabela's face. She is a summer storm. She is what crushed the Siren's Call to splinters.
Isabela holds her face, kisses her, until their faces are dry and it no longer feels like doom. It takes until the sky bleeds pink and the gulls cry out to wake each other. How can she be mad at Hawke for asking the question, when this is her answer?