disclaimer: disclaimed
dedication: to Emily, oldest and truest; to Claire, a thousand miles and the tips of my fingers away; to Sonya, still wandering the world.
notes: i think i've been trying to write this fic for a very long time. please be gentle.

chapter title: three blind
summary: Hawke reckons with the Champion, and Isabela reckons with Hawke. — f!Hawke/Isabela.

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now i'm the villain in this piece
and back when i was a thief
i broke hearts like they were teeth

whitehorse, fake your death (and i'll fake mine)

The sun is always sodding rising.

The sun is always sodding rising, and the sheets are cool, and Dog is snoring away at the foot of the bed. The sun is always sodding rising, and nearly her entire family is dead, and there's still an unlaced white shift tossed careless over the chair at the desk. The sun is always sodding rising, the fire is burned down to embers, and Isabela is still gone.

Marian Hawke rolls over, presses her face into her pillow, and screams her sodding lungs out.

That's just how it has to be, sometimes, doesn't it?

Raintown in the nighttime, candlelight through the gloom like an endless glittering sea.

Hawke staggers against the windowsill, knuckles white as she catches herself before she falls over. All her nerves sizzle with lightning pain, blinding and sudden, crackling through her abdomen red, violent red.

"Bollocks," air hisses out through her teeth. Sheer willpower keeps her standing, and even that's an effort of grit. "Shite, piss, Andraste's bloody pyre in the sodding Void—sod this—"

She doesn't know how long she leans there against the wall, gasping through it. Time passes, and Hawke hurts, and hurts, and hurts. Time passes, and Hawke rides it out like a bad Carta bet. Time passes, and Hawke breathes through it. Because she can. Because she has to.

Time passes.

It must. Maker, it must.

And the pain ebbs, finally.

Anders had said that it would be a long healing. Magic can't solve everything, he'd told her very quietly, when she'd woken up to glare balefully at the ceiling with her throat raw from the screaming. There'd been worry in his eyes and an ocean of Hawke's own dried blood crusted on his shaking hands, like he'd been holding her insides inside of her.

Hawke had hated him then, hated that he cared, hated that he was the person sitting beside her when he wasn't the person she wanted to see.

She'd woken with her pirate's name jagged behind her teeth, but thank the Maker it hadn't escaped her into the open air. That would have been worse. Anders' worry is something Hawke can survive.

His pity is not.

"Shite," she says, again. Hawke slides to the floor, drops her head back against the wall, closes her eyes. She can't make herself look at the wound, but she presses her palm over it, now, shuddering at the sting.

There's a click. Hawke forces herself to look up.

Dog noses through the door, whining. The liquid dark of his eyes is mournful, and he comes to lay himself against her side, his big brown body growling low and warm as a furnace. Everything hurts, Maker, but the heat is welcome. It soothes away some of the ache, which is better than none.

"You silly creature," Hawke sighs into his fur. She loops her arms around his neck, lets him press a cold wet nose beneath her chin. "You're not supposed to care this much, Dog."

Dog snuffles into her skin, content.

"I'm not supposed to care this much, either," she mumbles, and the wound burns, and her eyes burn, too. "I'm being terribly banal about all of this, aren't I? What do you think, boy?"

He grunts, and tries to put her entire face in his mouth.

"Charming," says Hawke, and laughs, and then hurts all over again because laughing makes her insides shake and shriek with pain.

No more laughter, then. Hawke writes Varric off for a bit; he can't help but make her laugh, it's what Varric does best. Well, that, and telling lies. Varric is very good at telling lies. And drinking. And cheating cards, although Isabela—

Isabela might have him beat, there.

Hawke allows Dog to take more of her weight; her heavy, heavy heart.

Maker, Isabela.

All Hawke has to do is allow it the leeway, and the memory swamps over her.

Firelight over the smooth brown curve of a bare brown hip, glinting off the gold in her lower lip. The heady music of her laugh, low and smoky, just one more oil-slick in the Hanged Man's filth. Cards tossed careless over the table, the shadows between her breasts, the hot sweetness of her mouth a conqueror descending. Her eyes, golden-wild at the end as she'd looked back over her shoulder and caught Hawke's gaze, shot through with embers and the city on fire around them and the damned book beneath her arm, and then disappearing into the night.

Hawke had let her go, because what else was she to do?

The world had been falling apart.

The last thing that Hawke had wanted was for Isabela to fall apart with it. She'd thought it would have hurt more, grief howling a thousand nights alone, but that wouldn't come 'til later. There'd been too much else—the blood on her hands and her face, the distant screaming from Hightown, the Arishok. The sword through her stomach.

Grief wouldn't come until Hawke woke up alone.

And now she's sitting here with her back pressed to the wall and her mabari pressed against her, trying to swallow it all down. Hawke is ruthless with herself in this; she flattens the emotions out, bites down vicious on her tongue until they're nothing, until bloodcopper hot and briny in her mouth is the only thing she can taste.

Dog whines high and concerned, licks the side of her face.

Hawke spits sick to the side, and forces her lips to curl up. It's not a smile, but it's not quite a grimace, either. Dog pays this show of good cheer little attention, and digs his way between her arms.

"You're not a puppy anymore, knob, you're too big for this," Hawke murmurs, and allows it all the same.

Dog settles there, half across her lap and half not, careful to avoid the bandaged section of her middle. Hawke will never know how he manages it—Maker, he's the only thing getting her through.

Her mabari is what she has left.

Hawke drops her head back to stare at the ceiling again, unblinking through the ink-dark sheaves of her hair. Dog rumbles against her. The estate is empty; it feels as though there isn't another person alive for a hundred leagues. Mother's room is untouched save for dust, and Bethany had never had a room at all; never mind Carver, never mind Father

Shite, Hawke thinks. She grinds her palms into the hollows of her eyes. Shite.

She'd been fine. She is fine. The sodding sun is still going to rise and set across the sky, and so will Satina and her pale twin. Days will pass. The wound in her stomach will ridge into scar tissue, will become just another jagged silver line, will become nothing but another memory made of flesh. Time will make a numbness of the pain; it won't hurt forever.

Death and dying and loss are things that Hawke has some experience in, unfortunate though it is.

But the truth is this:

No matter how much time passes, Hawke will think of Isabela, and will always feel the echo of that last desperate meeting of their eyes inside the chasm of her heart.

Three days after Anders clears her to walk through Lowtown—you can walk, Hawke, walking is not killing—Hawke slicks back her hair, and goes to work.

Dagger-shine cuts through the air as smoothly as it ever has, but every muscle yowls with betrayal. The estate's garden is a tomb of overrun weeds and watery sunlight through patchy clouds; green, blue, very pale gold.

There's no one around to see it happening when her legs give out and she collapses into the dust.

Hawke curses savagely about this weakness, and forces herself back into standing.

Champion.

The word crackles over Hawke's tongue; she chases it across her teeth. Who thought this would be a good idea? Thank you, Lady Hawke, for your service. Skewed near through, bleeding and screaming and fighting through the pain, trying to hold in her guts and Isabela, Maker, Bela

There isn't a point in dwelling on it.

The armour had been a nice touch, though.

Crimson and dusk and muted heather greys, Hawke had strapped herself into the armour that morning with the flat efficiency of someone who'd done it a hundred times before. A thousand times before. Her fingers remember the steps, belts and buckles, silverite-shadow nightmare claws to tear through the world and leave it behind her in ribbons.

She might not be able to hold a sodding dagger straight, but she can still damn well pull on a set of armour.

But Hawke's second attempt at the whole daggers muckabout isn't much better than the first.

Andraste's arse, it's a travesty, really.

Hawke sprawls on the ground panting, staring up at the pale blue of the sky, hot and irritable and grinding her jaw on nothing. Even her bones ache. It's all so heavy.

She doesn't know how long she lays there.

Worse: she doesn't want to know. Her body doesn't work. Ignoring a healer's advice is long, awful habit—Hawke had ignored her father when he'd patched up her skinned knees, and she'd ignored Bethany when she had magicked away Hawke's black eyes. Ignoring Anders' medical instruction is only staying the course, ships and sails and going where the wind blows.

And thinking of the wind always makes Hawke think about Isabela, and then it's all moot, anyway.

She forces herself into standing, wrestling with her own weakness about it, because it's stupid, it's so stupid, and Hawke knows that it's so stupid but that doesn't mean she knows how to make it stop. Her daggers laugh at her in the sunlight, long beautiful blades that have ground-in sweat marks where her fingers sit when she holds them right.

"You don't need to be such a twat about it," Hawke tells them, matter-of-fact.

But talking to daggers never gets a person anywhere, Hawke is aware. They're just blades; they're not people, and they're not going to forgive her or laugh at her or bring the wind back, no matter how much she wants them to. It's not the way of things.

Makes her feel better, though.

Makes the screaming in the muscles easier to ignore, too. Hawke starts the set again, fluid in the footwork, her knives spinning in her palms. The movement darts, left and right, and she finds herself swimming through it, arms feeling like lead.

Hawke barely makes it through the first set before she eats dirt again.

Bloody Void, the sharp inhale-hiss of her breath, by the Maker's sodding tits

What the shit, Hawke, Varric would say.

But Varric's not here.

No one is.

Just Hawke, alone.

(It might not be so bad, if someone were about. But Mother's dead and buried, and so's Carver, and Bethany—Andraste, Bethany's still in the Gallows, and with the way things are, Hawke's more of a hindrance than a help in that particular situation. There'll be no rescuing her baby sister, not the way she is right now. Hawke presses a hand to her abdomen, and hates herself the way fire hates a forest. So hungry, underneath.)

And so Marian Hawke hoists herself up from the ground a second time, arms shaking, grit beneath her hands. Shite, everything hurts, she absolutely did not sign up for any of this, but—

Andraste, the armour stays on.

The daggers, however, go back into their sheaths. The quiet snick of sound is a strange comfort in her ears, awfully familiar, awfully reassuring. It's her oldest friend, so maybe that's it. Hawke knows the sound of a weapon sheathed the way children know the sound of their mother's laughter; down in the bones, will'o'wisp magelights to follow all the way home.

Hawke's own mother had stopped laughing the day her father died, and had never started again.

Bit depressing, that.

It hurts to think about, but it doesn't hurt as much as breathing does. Hawke has to take air in slow, exhaling the pain out, counting—however briefly—every breath the way a dancer does.

She presses a palm to her scar, feels her pulse pound against it.

Still alive, she thinks to herself, mouth twisting bitter. Don't bleed out in your mother's garden, that's tacky.

She staggers a little, pain shooting sharp and hot.

(She is fervently glad that there's no one around to see. What sort of Champion can't stand on their own? What sort of Champion can't even hold their own sodding daggers? What sort of Champion—?!)

Hawke pulls her hand away from her side.

Hisses when it comes away wet.

Sodding shite, Anders is going to have a fit.

It feels like it's been a thousand years.

(It's only been six months.)

No one notices when Hawke slips inside the Hanged Man, too deep in their cups at this hour to be concerned with anything else, even the Champion of Kirkwall come to call.

Bastards, every one, Hawke thinks, terribly fond. She lists against the wall, trying to find her place in it after all of this time; Hawke hasn't felt like Hawke in a very long while, but it settles, some, here in the familiar ache of the Hanged Man's broken teeth. Corff still serves the most terrible ale. Varric still deals cards in his suite, telling objectively flagrant lies to anyone who comes within hearing distance. Norah still ready to toss half the louts trawling around out through a window; unplaceable lutesong still floats through the air.

Everything in its place, except—

Hawke braces herself to look at the corner half-hidden behind the bar. She knows in her bones that it'll be empty, because Varric can't keep a secret to save his own life.

If Isabela had come home, Kirkwall ought to have shifted back to normal. It hasn't done, so she hasn't done, but—

But there's a part of Hawke, soft and small beneath her sternum, that had needed to pretend that even after everything, that corner out of sight of the door might not be unoccupied. She'd needed to pretend that there was someone waiting there, brown-skinned and honey-eyed and alive, waiting for Hawke to come back despite everything.

It was a stupid thing to pretend.

Because Maker knows, she's going to pay for it. Now, right now, when she raises her gaze to find it empty. She's going to be paying for it for the rest of her life, every single time she walks in.

Hawke swallows hard, caught in the Hanged Man's sway.

It takes more willpower than she wants to admit, to force the facing of it. Hawke steels herself: girds her loins, grinds her teeth, anything to try to be ready for the hurt in her throat, hot like a new knife against skin.

Hawke had been ready for the hurt.

She'd not been ready to find the space anything but unoccupied.

"Oh," Hawke manages, wounded. "Bela."

Isabela turns at the sound of her name. Hawke doesn't know how she hears it over the nighttime din, but she does, and then it's just the pair of them, staring at one another over what feels like a thousand leagues.

Hawke is aware that she might be dying.

What else could it be? After everything, what else? Maybe Hawke's still laid out in the keep, drenched in her own entrails, and this is just a kindly interlude that her mind's constructed to make the passing easier.

Dizzily, Hawke thinks sodding shite, Mother's going to be so disappointed.

Hawke waits very patiently for the blood loss-induced vision to disappear. Any minute, now. Maybe it's not a kindness at all, making her see this. Allowing her to see this, when it's going to go.

The sight doesn't have the decency to vanish into the Void.

Instead, the moment goes on and on. The Hanged Man jangles around them, and Hawke stares at Isabela, and Isabela stares at Hawke. It's raw-edged; there's nothing between them but air.

Horrifying!

Hawke swallows hard. But she, having never left a single thing well-enough alone in her entire life, can't leave this well-enough alone, either.

Crossing the floor is like slipping into the Deep Roads.

It changes everything, and it changes nothing at all.

Isabela watches her, and she waits.

Andraste, but Hawke steadies herself against the bar, allowing it to hold her weight. She looks at Isabela, and she flutters her eyelashes as though she's twenty again, and not a whole decade older.

"Hello there. Funny meeting you here," Hawke says. Lightness, she aims for lightness; anything but the heavy-handed need that she thinks must be leaking from her every pore. "You look exactly like someone I used to know!"

"Oh? And that is…?"

"A right bit of a pirate," Hawke smiles out of the corner of her mouth. "But only a bit. Has a thing for ostentatious hats, it's a travesty, really—"

"Don't start," says Isabela, shortly.

"Start what, darling?"

Isabela's eyebrows pull together, crinkling over her nose. Hawke is seized by a sudden, irrational urge to press her thumb against it, to smooth the lines away.

Madness at its finest.

"Exactly what you're starting," Isabela snaps every word off. Her mouth is a thin line in her face, honey-brown eyes gone narrow. She swipes the bottle that Corff is placing in front of her away before he's entirely let it go.

"And what's that?"

"This, Hawke!" comes the reply so, so sharp. Isabela turns on her heel with a toss of her head, stalking off towards the Hanged Man's back rooms without another word. She moves like an ocean wave, crashing around the corner.

Hawke, being quite stupid about these things, follows her.

(Isabela hadn't said not to, and Hawke will take what she can get.)

The Hanged Man's back rooms are a twisting labyrinth of tunnels, but Hawke follows Isabela through them as if it's something she's done every day of her life. They go up and out, leaving the tavern proper behind; ascending three flights of stairs in quick order, cut right into Kirkwall's rock.

The first breath of fresh sea air from outside has Hawke gasping out loud.

Kirkwall splays out before them. This high up, everything looks small—the market stalls' ubiquitous roar dulls down to an insects' buzz, washed mostly away by the sound of the Waking Sea. Not quite dusk, yet; the sun sinks beyond the horizon, turning everything to gold.

Already, Isabela has installed herself on the edge of the roof, the bottle uncorked in her hands. She's kicked her boots off, legs swinging bare in the breeze.

After one whole heartbeat of hesitation, Hawke joins her.

It's quiet between them for some time.

Maker, but she wishes she knew where to start.

"I didn't think I was going to see you again, you know," Hawke says, finally, too light. Hightown glitters above them, way up high, white stone lit gold with the Chantry's thousand candles against the heavy indigo of the night sky. She leans back against the rooftop, the last dregs of the day's heat hazing up from Lowtown's streets in hazy waves.

Isabela drags her mouth around the neck of the bottle, wine-dark. She doesn't smile. "You almost didn't."

"Almost," Hawke says, sighs. The wind off the sea carries the word away.

"Don't forgive me so easily, Hawke," Isabela murmurs. "I don't deserve it."

Hawke tips her head back, chews on this for a long minute. The ridge of her scar twinges in the middle and she ignores it, because Hawke is good at ignoring things that ought to matter. But how could there be anything else, with Isabela sitting next to her like this?

It's not as though she can say, oh, darling, there was nothing to forgive.

"Give that," Hawke says, instead. She swipes for the bottle, catches it only by the bare tips of her fingers; succeeds in keeping it out of sheer stubborn audacity and the four inches of height she has on Isabela put to good use.

"Twat," Isabela sniffs at her. She could steal the thing back in a heartbeat.

But she doesn't.

Hawke drinks long and deep. It's bitter wine, gone near-sour and cheap, dirty as anything else in the Hanged Man. It tastes like home, as much as Hawke understands the concept. Which is terrible, actually, because it's really just the most atrocious swill that Corff's somehow managed to pass off for coin.

"Why are you drinking that?" Isabela asks.

"You brought it up with you!"

"I don't think you're supposed to be drinking, Hawke," says Isabela.

"What Anders doesn't know can't hurt him," Hawke grins behind the bottleneck. It twitches in her jaw, and never reaches her eyes. "Besides, it probably won't kill me! Nothing has, yet."

Isabela refuses to look at her, all of a sudden.

Too soon, maybe.

Hawke's words die a gruesome death in the bottom of her throat. She swallows hard, lips against cool glass, the tremble in her hands smothered down to nothing. Isabela's thigh radiates heat half a hairsbreadth away, skin-cloth-armour-skin-again, touching but not.

There's nothing for it.

Hawke tips her head back, and drains the bottle whole.

"Hawke," Isabela says, too quiet.

"Leave it, Bela," Hawke murmurs. "It's fine."

It isn't fine, not really, but it's easier to ask her to leave it alone than it is to talk about it. Hawke wouldn't know what to say. Doesn't know what to say. She wants to drop her head to Isabela's shoulder and leave it there, listen to the pound of her pirate's heart through her body, go to sleep for a thousand years until things don't hurt so much.

A sigh shudders out of Isabela's shoulders. She leans back on her hands, stretching out against the rooftop, and Hawke catches a flash of dagger-shine beneath her shift, right at her hip. It catches in her throat; tears jagged and leaves her breathless with want.

"I shouldn't stay," Isabela says. "I don't even know why I came back."

"Nothing to do with me, I hope?"

"You're being a twat, again."

"Mmnm, yes, I try," Hawke smiles, and actually has the gall to bat her eyelashes. "You like it."

Isabela stares at her as though she's never seen Hawke before in her life. "Why aren't you angry?"

"Would it change anything?"

"No," Isabela says, too quick. And then, after a moment, "I don't know."

"Then what'd be the point, darling?"

Isabela looks away. "I don't know what I expected."

A lie, that. Hawke knows exactly what Isabela had expected: a cold shoulder, a sharp sneer, the Champion's own nightmare gauntlets around her throat. And it's not hard to think of it, when Hawke has two seasons worth of brutal, sour hurt beneath her ribs, right where the sword went through.

The healing's been a right bitch; no righter of wrongs, only seething pain.

Hawke had nearly died for it.

And she would do it again, which is likely worse!

Of course, Hawke understands, too, that no matter the pulse still pounding beneath her skin, there's something a little off-putting about watching someone you care about bleed to death on the Viscount's polished marble floors!

Hawke doesn't remember much of the fight. Frankly, most fights are a blur; this one was, too.

But there's been someone screaming, at the end. Hawke knows that there had been someone screaming. It might have been Bethany. It might have been Aveline. It might have been Hawke, herself.

It might have been Isabela, too.

Maker, it's not as though it's a good batch of memories—losing a fight so badly hadn't been the most excellent thing Hawke's ever done. And she'd been so cold by the end of it, every Lothering winter, endless snow down the back of her neck and the bite in her bones. Blood had gone tacky, congealing, feeling it pool in her lungs.

Hawke had felt herself dying, and isn't that the worst thing of all? She'd felt herself dying. And to be dying, and then to not have the grace to finish the job?

Appalling, really, the lack of follow-through.

But it does mean that she's sitting here in the gathering night on the Hanged Man's roof, right now, with Isabela only a scarce half-inch away. There's a sort of calm that she can't quite put a name to.

Strange thing, to be so oddly, tentatively—alright.

Hawke tilts her head just enough to glance at Isabela from the corner of her eye. Isabela's head is down, the tight dark of her curls obscuring her face. Everything about her screams like an apology; the curve of her spine, the clench of her knuckles, the chewed-down nails. She's an absolute wreck, truly.

Affection blooms, bubbling sick with longing up into Hawke's chest, tasting like a new bit's hot bright copper.

It's not right that Isabela look so wretched, none of it is right.

Hawke has to allow herself a moment not to be overwhelmed. Too much, the way she feels is too much, and it's still never enough.

But she'd known that from the beginning.

"We could pretend it never happened," Hawke says, lightly, once she's finally managed to get herself together. This takes longer than she wants to admit, twisting horrible in her stomach. Pathetic, honestly, the lengths to which she'd go to keep Isabela exactly where she is.

(Healthy, too, whispers a voice in the back of her mind that she doesn't recognize.)

"Don't be flippant," Isabela says, flippantly.

But beneath it there's a truth that Hawke can't entirely ignore. Isabela's mouth sets hard. mulish, more serious than Hawke ever thought she could be.

It makes Hawke want to reach out and touch the brown round of Isabela's shoulder, to find if the stars have fallen and settled into her eyes, instead. She's so lovely, half-shadowed in the twilight, that Hawke doesn't know what to do with herself.

Isabela was always beautiful. She's still beautiful, now.

But she's bitter, too.

Hawke doesn't give into the urge. They—neither of them—are ready for it. It's a line, you see, but—

Always lines, isn't it, always storm-breaks, always fences that she ought not to cross. Hawke hasn't met a rule that she didn't immediately want to break; probably it's a good thing that this isn't one.

And it hadn't ever been just sex.

Maker's breath, if it had done, this wouldn't be so hard.

"Bela," Hawke says.

"What?"

"Wine's all gone," and she holds the dark glass of the bottle out, not quite a peace offering, but almost as good as.

Isabela finally looks at her. Hawke's breath catches in her throat, choking down on disbelief when Isabela's fingers curl around her own. The eye contact lasts only a bare split-second, but it sends shocks to the ends of every one of her limbs. Death, but in reverse.

"Well," sighs Isabela, smoky and low; it sounds like giving in. "I suppose you ought to go get some more."

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tbc.