Hawke doesn't even remember buying this statue.
It's very ugly. She thinks she can make out a face, somewhere, if she tilts her head just so. It leers over the study, she has a study, with revulsion. Or maybe ecstasy. Whoever made this really did quite a bad job. She almost feels compelled to track them down and congratulate them.
Maybe she stole it. Most of the accomplished thieves she knows also happen to be prodigious drunks, which would account for why she has no idea where it came from. But, no, her golden rule is to only ever steal what she would happily spend coin on. Or, it was, at least. She keeps forgetting that she's part of the gentry, now. There are appearances to keep up, so she has been informed by her mother at least twice daily since they relocated to Hightown.
Hawke thinks she's happy. There's certainly plenty to be happy about. She recovered the deed to the estate, and produced the coin to actually buy it back. Her mother doesn't have to live in a mouldering shack, dodging Gamlen's resentful sneers or the enterprising bats that colonize the rafters. They have their own rooms and a wine cellar and several fireplaces and statues that seemingly materialize out of thin air.
This was always the point. Of all of it. The year spent pinned under Athenril's thumb, the next year spent desperately hunting for every odd job even Darktown's most destitute wouldn't take, that blasted Deep Roads expedition. This was the point of coming to Kirkwall in the first place.
And yet.
Hawke feels like an ass for even thinking it. And yet. And yet, what? What does she have any right to complain about, after everything? Bethany died trying to get here, Carver signed away his life to the Grey Wardens so he wouldn't die, too, and she's the one miring herself in the ennui of having a better home than either of them ever got the chance to live in.
She pours herself more wine and throws it back, bristling. She hates this fucking statue.
"Beg pardon, messere, but there's a letter for you." Bodahn says from the door. "It's stamped with the Viscount's seal, so I thought it best to let you know straight away."
Hawke winces, then wrenches her lips into a smile before turning. Bodahn is helpful. Bodahn means well. Bodahn does so love to interrupt her brooding.
"Maybe he's finally caving on my petition to dig a moat." she says, popping the wax seal open.
"You have been diligent in your correspondence, messere." Bodahn agrees.
"It's got me in a fit of pique, my good man." she mumbles, poring over the flowing script. Bran wrote this. It's quite haughty. And not at all what she was hoping for.
"Afraid it's just some business with the Qunari. Tell Sandal we'll just have to keep holding our breath." she says, folding the paper up and handing it back to the dwarf. She got involved with the Qunari once last year and suddenly the Viscount is decidedly not paying her to play ambassador.
"I'll break it to him gently." Bodahn says, dutifully slipping the letter into his breast pocket. "Will you be off to attend to matters presently?"
Hawke rubs her temples. She's not going anywhere near the Qunari without Fenris, and tracking him down has been an absolute nightmare, lately. She's been meaning to ask him if something's going on.
"No, I don't think I will."
"Very good. Is there anything I can get you, while I'm up?"
She contemplates what's left of her wine. It's still daylight out, or at least she thinks it should be. The curtains have been shut all day. But she's trying to be decent. She shakes her head.
"I'm alright, Bodahn. Shut the door behind you, if you could."
The dwarf gives a little half-bow before shuffling away. As soon as the door swings shut behind him, Hawke collapses into the armchair placed far too near the fireplace. With a flick of her wrist, the cold, charred logs are engulfed in flame.
The Qunari are a problem. She's not entirely sure when they became her problem, but Dumar seems to have gotten it into his mesmerizingly shiny head that she alone can reason with them. It isn't the first time he's asked, either. She's just been putting it off, hoping he'd get the message and pass the matter over onto Aveline and the city guard to sort out.
She'd been anxious about her reputation as Kirkwall's errand girl following her to Hightown. She said as much to Varric, who said she was being paranoid. That the nobles never paid any mind to what went on in the parts of the city they wouldn't debase themselves to set foot in. As it turns out, she's made herself a reputation that quite precedes her. She pours another glass of wine and frowns when that's the last of it.
She also supposes that this means the Viscount's office has been getting her letters about the moat and is just dodging them. Maybe if she deals with the Qunari this one time, he'll be open to it. It's not like she's asking the city to help with it. She just needs him to sign off on some paperwork she'd drafted saying it was perfectly okay and absolutely legal for Sandal to get industrious with those charming little exploding runes he makes.
Maybe Bran would be a better target. Just last week, she'd come into some intriguing tattle about him by way of the Blooming Rose. If Hightown was bent on making her their errand girl, they'd just have to get used to good old Lowtown leverage.
She's contemplating whether or not she ought to go outside today when there's a knock at the door. Hawke sips her wine, not bothering to look up.
"Come in." she drawls, as though her mother would have even waited for the invitation.
"Oh, Marian. This is rather depressing." Leandra tuts, making a beeline for the drawn curtains. Hawke winces at the sudden, wanton intrusion of the setting sun, casting the study in a bleeding, bleary orange.
"The word you're looking for is maudlin, Mother." she corrects, rubbing her eye. "And I'll have you know, I've taken to it like a duck to water."
"I can't argue that." Leandra says, pursing her lips. "We've received another letter from Carver, dear."
"We have or you have?"
"Well, he doesn't need to address them to you." her mother says, matter-of-fact. "He knows I show them to you. Whatever he writes is for the both of us."
Hawke sighs, heaving herself to sit up straight.
"Where is he now?" she asks. It doesn't bother her that Carver hasn't written to her. Mostly because she refuses to let it. He's allowed to be angry. It's not like he would have been livid and resentful, enough that he threatened to run off to join the Templars if she didn't bring him along on that miserable expedition. She doesn't know why the decision was ever hers to make in the first place.
"Somewhere in Orlais." Leandra says, flipping the letter over to confirm. "They're due to winter in Amaranthine, then they're off to the Anderfels to join the rest of the order at Weisshaupt."
"I'm sure he'll be happy to be in Ferelden again." Hawke says mildly, folding her arms. Leandra hums, distracted by something on the page.
Since the first letter her mother received from Carver confirming his survival, Hawke hasn't been able to reconcile it. His ashen face, run through with veins blackened by the taint, his cloudy grey eyes, frantic and unseeing, have become affixed to her dreams, jolting her awake drenched in sweat, throat ripped raw from gasping under miles of imaginary dirt. She hasn't slept in the dark since returning. More often than not, she waits to sleep until the sun swells over the jagged backbone of Sundermount, curtains thrown open wide. He's alive and well and somewhere in the world, and still she dreams of the dirt on his face, his brittle breaths, the gravitational inevitability of his death. She exhales sharply, restless.
"My love, he'll come around." Leandra sighs, perching delicately on the arm of Hawke's chair. "You know how he is. But your brother loves you. He won't be angry forever."
"Oh, I'm sure he'll make the effort, all the same." Hawke mumbles. It's bitter in her mouth. Her mother sighs, lifting a hand to smooth her daughter's mussed hair.
"Marian, I know you did your best to protect him." she says, gently. "I know you've always felt it was your job to take care of your siblings. I put a lot on you, after your father was gone. I don't often regret it, because you did it well. I don't think either of us imagined that there would come a day when being good at it no longer mattered."
Hawke taps the rim of the wine glass against her teeth, then sets it down on the small end table beside her. It's as close to an acknowledgement of the past five years as her mother's ever come. She could vomit. Leandra's thumb rests against her cheek.
"You've done enough for us, my love. I miss Carver, but I'm proud of him. And I believe he's on a path to make something of himself that he can be proud of. It's what he's always wanted. Give him time, that's all."
Her mother pats her cheek fondly, as if to punctuate her certainty. She's glad the conversation is over, at least.
"And you, young lady, need to figure out what it is you want. There will be plenty of time to turn into an aristocratic recluse when you're old. You'll burn through the wine cellar before your first grey hair, at this rate."
"An unavoidable consequence of having to suffer through dinner with the de Launcets, I'm afraid. I can't believe you almost married Guillaume." Hawke says, standing and stretching. She is rewarded by a resounding series of pops and cracks up the length of her spine. Being an aristocratic recluse couldn't be too far off for her, at this rate. The notion is thrilling. "The way that man goes on about longbows, you'd think he's compensating for something."
"If you're fishing for gossip, you'll have to do better than that, Marian." Leandra says, sliding from the arm into the chair itself. She's commandeered what's left of the wine. Hawke pouts. "Visit Aveline, or spar with that unfriendly elf down the way. There's nothing to sulk about, I'm afraid. Go on."
She bends to kiss her mother on the cheek, exasperated, and turns on her heel, heading up the stairs toward her bedroom.
She supposes she's long overdue for an appearance at the Hanged Man. When the estate was released into their ownership, she threw herself bodily into getting things in order. The distraction of minutiae and sheer cliffs of paperwork had been welcome, in the harrowing in-between when they didn't know whether or not Carver survived. Now, she almost feels embarrassed at the thought of reappearing there, as if nothing had happened. As if she wasn't suddenly richer than the people who'd tossed petty coin at her for favors and miserably dirty work. As if the last time she was there, she hadn't cried herself into half-sleep in Isabela's bed, wrapped around the woman like she'd float into the sky if either one let go. Hawke groans at the fuzzy memory of it.
Isabela has never been one for Hightown, outside of the Rose. Or the holding brig at the Viscount's Keep, under duress. Something about not needing to wear pants to have more pride than to spend any amount of time gazing up into noble nostrils. Her mother mentioned she'd been by Gamlen's on more than one occasion, while the expedition was away, to chat and play cards. Now she's scarcer than she's ever been in the year Hawke has known her. Maybe it was ridiculous to hope that she might have made an exception for this.
Huge Dog lifts his head, sprawled in front of the hearth, and chuffs a greeting at her as she enters her room. At least he has the decency to pretend he wasn't dozing in her bed when he heard her approach. They've talked about this. She had even bought him an enormous and ridiculously posh cushion for him to sleep on, but apparently the urge to muddy up her sheets is overwhelmingly enticing.
"You don't think I scared her off, do you, old boy?" she asks, opening her wardrobe and contemplating the options. Something easy to slip armor over, all the best shortcuts to Lowtown were the most lethal. "It was just a rough night. You remember."
The mabari offers a muffled woof, not even bothering to open his jaws for the effort.
"A meritorious point, my hirsute companion." she mutters, scratching her temple. Where did she leave her pauldron? The nice engraved one she'd gotten just last week.
Maybe she had scared Isabela off. She hadn't considered it terribly much, but the pirate has always been transparent about her stance on and and all intimacy that dares to go beyond a straightforward fuck and duck. Hawke turning up in her room in the smallest hours of the mourning to have her grief kissed better after a month away would certainly have toed well past that line.
She hadn't been expecting anything to come of it. She really, truly hadn't. She was just too terrified to sleep, her mother just too angry and too hurt, her words too full of knives, to stay home, to be near. The Hanged Man was close. She'd hoped Isabela would have still been awake when she got there, eager as ever to help her drown the thick vines grief and guilt had woven inside her throat. Instead, she had been in bed, curled up like a sliver, like she expected her to come, like she was happy to see her. Isabela left a space for her. It was being spat forcefully, hatefully from frigid, churning seafoam onto sand kissed warm by the sun. Hawke threw herself ashore, the relief of finding land again altogether too shocking and necessary to deny.
Maybe she'd read into it all too much. Maybe the space beside Isabela was empty because someone else had been filling it earlier. Maybe she was studying Hawke and attempting to fathom the audacity it must have taken for her to materialize in her room uninvited. Maybe it was only pity.
Still, Isabela had been the one to kiss her. Of all the things she was able to bury under heaps of busywork, the taste of ale and mint on her lips, the scrape of her teeth, the furious, desperate fist in her hair have remained agonizingly insistent along the edges of her thoughts.
She's itchy under her skin. It's all rapidly turning into something to drink about.
Hawke kneels and scoops Huge Dog's boulder-ish head into her hands, worrying his jowls.
"You haven't eaten my very lovely, very expensive new pauldron, have you, boy?" she asks, squishing his face gently. "If you have, I'm afraid I'll just have to turn you into soup. I let the boots slide, but I told you if it happened again, it'd be into the pot with you."
"Maker's balls, that's grim, Hawke."
She whirls, lightning snapping at her fingertips. Isabela is straddling the windowsill, silhouetted dark and moody against the raw pink sky, the tip of her boot dragging daintily across the floor. The pirate lifts her eyebrows, easily swinging her leg over the ledge and dropping into the room.
"You always go for lightning when you're startled, have you noticed?"
The streaking blue light dissipates with a rattling pop and the lingering scent of ozone. Hawke shakes her hands. Channelling lightning always leaves them tingly and strange.
"I hadn't, actually. Weird."
Isabela hums, crossing her ankles and leaning against the wall. Her hands are behind her back.
"Should I be concerned about you breaking into my house?" Hawke asks, leaving the question of also, why entirely to Isabela's discretion.
"I'm more concerned about why you never bloody leave." she replies, flinging something across the room in an arc. Hawke's pauldron lands on the bed.
"Oh, of course."
Isabela sighs, shaking her head.
"Varric thought he had a lead on the relic. I should have known it was going to be a bust when he said it required disguises." she says, gnawing the inside of her cheek. "My Orlesian accent has gotten pitiably rusty, but my tits looked fantastic. Anyway, you're the only person I could think of with the wardrobe to sell the whole bard gimmick. That burgundy tunic of yours is beyond repair, by the way, so don't bother."
Hawke picks up the pauldron. It's a little scuffed, but she'd have gotten around to it herself eventually, anyway. The tunic, though. That's a shame. She glances irritably at Huge Dog, now stomping toward Isabela, progress hampered considerably by the velocity of his wiggling, stumpy tail.
"Rabbit jerky?"
Isabela winks, pulling a shred from the pouch at her hip and tossing it toward the mabari.
"It was a good tip. You really shouldn't have told me." she says, patting Huge Dog on the head affectionately. She's almost knocked over when he leans bodily into her legs.
Hawke folds her arms, studying the welcome stranger in her room. Uncanny, like she was summoned. Her hair is a little damp, and she's brought the smell of rosewater and smoke in with her. Isabela clears her throat.
"I'm not keeping you, am I?"
"Not anymore." Hawke says, waving the pauldron. "It's just the Hanged Man, it'll still be there. Well, no. I shouldn't jinx it. I take it back."
Isabela smiles, something soft and distant, then takes a few ponderous steps toward Hawke, the bed.
"It's not bad. Y'know, if you like this kind of thing." she remarks, gesturing vaguely about the room.
"A contiguous roof? I can think of worse things, sure."
The pirate scoffs, tracing the carvings on the post of her bed, moving closer.
"I mean Hightown and you know it, you wretched crow." she says. "Don't you miss it? Lowtown?"
Hawke shrugs. In all honesty, she does. Everyone seems pleased to have the Amells back, but their smiles are empty and Hawke doesn't know them. She isn't an Amell. The overall smell is an improvement, though. Isabela rolls her eyes.
"This isn't-" she cuts herself off, shaking her head as if to rattle the rest of the sentence from her tongue before she says it aloud. "It just seems awfully dull here, that's all."
Isabela seems nervous. It's a surreal color on her, almost unrecognizable.
"You're only saying that because you haven't seen the wine cellar yet."
"Go on." Isabela hums, rounding the corner of the bed. She has just bathed. Something settles in Hawke, hot and pulsing.
"There's a vintage in there somewhere that would make even you blush." she says, waggling her eyebrows, suggestive, silly, in the way that Isabela always seems to say yes to.
"You'd have kept her all to yourself if I hadn't broken in. You would have!" Isabela says, finally meeting Hawke's eyes. There's something peculiar about them, dancing madly just outside of reach. "Selfish."
"She's delicate!"
"We'll see, won't we?"
Hawke knows she's grinning like a lunatic, but she doesn't suppose she can summon a care for it. Isabela is here and they're going to drink. It's warm, comfortable. Like slipping into the bath. Like it used to be. Like it should be. Isabela shoves her and she skitters out of her room with Huge Dog at her heels, barking excitedly.
It takes a good several minutes and she's pulling cobwebs from her eyelashes, but she's able to track down the bottle. She swings by the kitchen and pointedly ignores Bodahn's inquiring gaze when she collects two glasses, this time.
"Huge Dog has revealed himself a traitor." she says over her shoulder on the way out. "The meagerest ham bone we have for him, tonight."
"Very good, messere."
She very nearly shatters a glass in her scramble back up the stairs, but doesn't. Force magic is very rapidly becoming the best horse in her stable, now that she actually has the time and space to practice without worrying about Gamlen's neighbors turning her into the Templars for a handful of sovereigns. Bumping the bedroom door open with her hip, she presents the bottle to Isabela, who is shuffling through the papers on the desk, looking bored and a little disappointed.
"8:71 Blessed." Isabela whistles low. Hawke wrenches the cork loose from the bottle with her teeth. She's been getting better at it, under Fenris's tutelage.
"I told you, she's a lady. We have to treat her right." Hawke says, filling their glasses enough to make a sommelier faint dead away in horror. "Mind your manners, scurvy pirate."
Isabela hums, taking a glass and perching airly on Hawke's desk.
"And you can speak from experience, then? Handling a highborn lady?"
Hawke's eyebrows lift. It almost sounds accusatory.
"What if I said I could?"
Isabela scoffs, taking a sip. She contemplates it for a moment, then smiles something cunning and sharp and entirely too pleased.
"I'd call bullshit." she says easily. "You wouldn't know what to do with such a sweet thing, sweet thing."
Hawke drinks, too. The wine is light and dry, too refined for her clumsy palate. She pulls the chair out from her desk and sprawls into it, one foot on the floor and the other slung over the arm.
"How do you figure?"
Isabela leans forward, cupping her glass between her knees, rolling it in her palms. Her gaze is appraising, figuring out Hawke's weight in gold, or how much time she's worth sparing. It's rather warm in here, even with the window left hanging open.
"You'd get bored. Halfway through. Not even enough time to love them before you leave them, I think." she says, like it's as obvious a certainty as the sky being blue or Ferelden being brown. "You need something with teeth, something that puts them to use."
Hawke's mouth is dry. She swallows another mouthful of wine, and that only makes it worse.
"Oh, I don't know." she sighs, tossing her head back over the arm of the chair, gazing at the ceiling. "Maybe I'd fancy it. Find a perfectly boring, dry crust of a husband, have some rich idiot children, drive them all to resent me with years of drinking and pointed criticism, and die from eating too many pastries. Could be worse, eh?"
Isabela swats her knee, tutting.
"You wouldn't be happy with anything less than being eaten by a dragon, do come off it."
Hawke laughs, and it feels like she actually means it for the first time in a while.
"Plenty of teeth, sure." she says, cocking her head toward the pirate. She's running her finger around the rim of her glass, slow, slow. She is watching Hawke watch her, the unsteady standoff of two animals unsure of who is hunting whom.
"There are other options, you know."
Hawke smiles, guileless, shifting to sit proper in the chair, facing Isabela. The hammer of her heart grows steadily until she can feel her rib cage throbbing.
"It seems you've got a suggestion."
Isabela stands, smirking, and takes the glass from her hands. She sets them both down on the desk and slides her hand around the nape of Hawke's neck, fingers twisting languid and curious in her hair. Hawke fights the impulse to close her eyes, the molten intensity of Isabela's gaze almost burning. It's a pile of treasure, gleaming, too lavish, too obscene, to be claimed. It's looking into the sun.
"More a very firm recommendation, sweet thing. Subtlety gets lost, on you."
The course from the desk to the bed is a syrupy blur of pressing hands and scraping teeth and Isabela's mouth hot against the stuttering line of her jugular. It is a year overdue. A year spent in some fitful, half-sure dance around the inevitability of this. They're fumbling, twisting each other into the sheets, as if to fix the other to the spot.
Hawke's robe is pushed from her shoulders, nails driving hard into her exposed back and chest. Isabela's tunic is tugged hastily over her head, the dagger hidden precariously high on her thigh drawing a drop of blood where it pricks Hawke's hip. A thumb smoothes over it, smearing violent red across her flushed skin. A breathless apology falls against her lips. Hawke doesn't think she means it for a second, and that's fine, because the full of Isabela is pressed bare to her and she is quickly forgetting that anything could exist outside of this. The writhing, alight, alive weight of her, the wayward strands of tobacco hued hair that never seem to leave Hawke's mouth, the smell of bathwater and those bundles of incense she's always stealing from unattended crates by the docks, it's all the world needs to offer, now.
The sky turns purple, so Hawke digs her teeth into Isabela's shoulder, leaving a bruise to match. A commemoration. Isabela tenses, thighs flexing hard around Hawke's hips, before relaxing and rolling steady into her, pitched whines and soft curses spilling into the crook of her neck, stringing into obscene hymnals. There are too many places she should put her hands, and she reaches, hopeless, desperate, for all of them. The sloping curl of Isabela's spine, the puckered, white scar on her hip that Hawke has never heard the story of, the ticklish spot where her ass meets her thigh that makes her giggle and whine and buck her hips with mounting impatience.
When her fingers finally slip between Isabela's thighs, they both release the sigh that has been sitting, expanding unfettered, in their lungs for a year. Hawke feels like she ought to tease, keep pulling those lovely, frustrated, pitched sounds forth from her lips, draw it out into something dizzying and endless, like never knowing where the sky touches the sea in the blue of night. But Isabela grips her shoulders, drives down into her hand, eyes keen and shining. Hawke's name tears from her throat, breathy and wild, commanding and pleading.
Isabela will never beg. Hawke will never want her to.
They bury themselves in each other, Isabela's teeth sinking like an anchor into Hawke's throat, Hawke pressing ever upward, further into the aching heat of her. She rides Hawke's hand like a woman possessed, hands moving away from shoulders to grip the sheets on either side of her head, palms pressed into the mattress for better leverage. She is sweat-slick and hoarse and breathless from burying her moans in Hawke's hair, against her jaw. There is something absolutely ruinous about this woman and so Hawke chases it, digs her heels into the bed and presses the pad of her thumb against her just so, defiant of the hollow, sharp aching in her wrist.
It comes easily, eventual, inevitable as they are, riding the feverish insistence of their motions. Isabela reels back, hair spilling like curls of smoke from under her wrinkled blue bandana. Her eyes catch in the firelight, gleaming and glassy and fixed on Hawke, something like revelation. All of her shudders, then. Hawke gasps at the feel of it, clutching, cradling, promising a very happy death. No quiet, insidious boredom and malaise in a dusty old mansion. No gnashing dragon's teeth. Just this. This consuming thing beckoning her into depths no sailor could navigate, nor surface from if pulled under. Hawke wants it so bad it aches in her teeth. She knows it's a mistake, she's watching the light from the surface disappear before her very eyes, and she wants it all the more.
Isabela moves slow, languorous and spent over her. She's smirking, something private. Hawke moves with her, not daring by half to pull her hand away. This is an interlude. The night is long and there is plenty of time left to make up for a year, yet.
"Should have known." Isabela sighs, breath hitching when Hawke's thumb gets to tracing lazy circles. Hawke hums, a question, propping herself up on her elbow and pressing her mouth to Isabela's breastbone. Her heart beats hard and ready under her tongue.
"Insatiable." she breathes in answer. Hawke smiles, shaking her head.
"Entirely satiable. Just nowhere near yet, captain." she murmurs, inhaling the salt smell of her, three sheets to the wind on it.
"Oh, I like that." Isabela purrs, fingers twisting idly through the hair at Hawke's temples. "Do keep saying it."
Hawke snorts, nosing her way up to the fluttering point just below Isabela's jaw. She presses a soft, slow kiss to it, and doesn't miss the way Isabela's back straightens, tense. Her thumb circles firmer, and the woman unfurls again with a near-silent exhalation.
"What else do you like, captain?"
Isabela laughs, throaty and true. And then she shows her.
It takes hours, the sky wandering from deep purple to stormy sea blue to near black and back to purple again, a sleepier shade. It takes until the wine is gone and their hands and teeth and tongues get looser, clumsier, heedless. It takes until Hawke has forgotten that there is a city outside asking more of her than it ever offered, that there are horned giants looming on the shores, that she is afraid of the dark. It all bleeds itself dry until all that is left is the woman alternating between arching, supine beneath her and pinning Hawke to the mattress with the heat of her mouth alone.
When dawn arrives, blushing rosy, Isabela peels herself from the damp tangle of sheets and Hawke's limbs with a wink, saying they should do it again sometime. Hawke smiles, lazy, and throws up a dutiful salute for her from the bed, and Isabela disappears through the window left open all night. Sleep finds her more easily than it has in months, and she surrenders to it willingly.
The chantry bells clang out a mighty knell. It might be for her.