disclaimer: disclaimed
dedication: yeah, yeah, the existential ennui, we know about it
notes: don't me.
notes2: hayloft ii — mother mother.

chapter title: liar's toss
summary: Hawke reckons with the Champion, and Isabela reckons with Hawke. — f!Hawke/Isabela.

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Hawke wakes up alone.

Maker, her entire body feels rusted, screeching like an unoiled hinge. She'd couldn't feel worse if she'd slept for an Age; every movement is stiff with leftover hurt. It's so quiet, and the sheets are cold.

Isabela's been gone for hours.

Laughter bubbles up between Hawke's teeth, wet and wretched. Isabela's gone, and Hawke's own abdomen is still on fire, and the sun is still sodding rising.

No rest for the wicked, after all.

(No rest for the Divine, neither. Hah!)

Hawke covers her eyes with the thick of her arm; still laughing, helpless with it. She wants to roll over and scream until her throat bleeds on the inside. She wants to stop hurting, even if it's only for a little while.

She wants Isabela, and the sun is still bloody sodding rising.

Ashtown in the morning, mist rising thinly from the streets where the sun burns the night's rain off into roiling clouds of steam.

Hawke keeps making promises that she can't keep, but at least she can strap herself into her armour without falling over, now.

Kirkwall beckons, and Hawke answers her call.

It's a lovely day in the way that all days in Kirkwall are lovely; too many templars, too many people who know the Champion of Kirkwall and not enough who know Marian Hawke. The Champion makes it halfway through the day before someone accosts her.

(Varric stuffs his fist into his mouth to muffle his laughter. Prick.)

Hawke bears the fawning of Kirkwall's nobility with a fairly shite grace, it must be said.

"Oh, but Champion, you simply must come for lunch—!"

Dying would be less terrible, Hawke is certain. She glances at Varric, entirely desperate with it, who only ducks away to contain another fit. Hightown sparkles around them, the lady in expensive purple-blue and Hawke in her shadow-leathers, unable to escape. Her dwarf does nothing to remedy the way the woman has accosted them; the gall of it, really.

Hawke hates him magnificently.

"I'm so sorry, Lady Wynledge, but I really must speak to the Knight-Commander. She's expecting me, and it would be so uncouth to be late," Hawke manages. She holds her hands up like a supplicant, appealing to the Lady's good graces.

If nothing else, her mother's unwarranted etiquette lessons as a child were good for fending off rogue nobility. A certain lateness is fashionable, but the Knight-Commander isn't the sort to care about fashion. Timeliness, it is.

Thinking of Mother only aches a little, anymore. Hawke breathes through it.

The effusive praise takes another ten minutes to shake.

"You are absolutely no help," Hawke gripes at Varric, once they've turned the corner out of earshot. She butts her hip against his shoulder, and the touch is grounding. "Remind me to never do anything heroic again, it doesn't pay enough."

"Pretty sure I told you that," Varric says mildly, but his eyes glint like firelight off good whiskey.

"Next time I'll just let the Arishok finish the job, hm," Hawke says, too light. "It was a travesty of skewer, really. Missed my spine entirely!"

"Can't even die right, huh?"

Hawke bursts into peals of cackling, horrible laughter. It bounces up through Hightown's glittering white stone, ugly, crow-wing awful-dark. Varric looks terribly pleased with himself.

"Bastard," Hawke says, devastatingly fond.

"Hey, my parents were married," Varric says. His mouth curls up crookedly. "You sure you want to take a bastard to talk to our illustrious leader?"

Hawke loves him so much she thinks she might die of it. "Maker, no, who do you think I am?! We're going to get drunk!"

"You woke up alone, didn't you," Varric says, shrewd. It doesn't sound like a guess at all, and he's tipped his face up to squint at her, shaded against the sun.

Her dwarf knows her far too well.

(It would be insulting, except that, well, he's not quite wrong, is he.)

Hawke bumps him with her hip again, but gentle, now. "Must you drag me through the streets in my smalls, this way?"

Varric crooks an eyebrow at her, considering. After a moment, he says, "You're buying."

"Not on your life," Hawke says, crooking an eyebrow right back.

"A sovereign says I'm right, killer. Did she leave?"

"I don't think I'd be out of bed if she hadn't," Hawke sighs. Her shoulders slump. The city is heavy. Loving Isabela is heavier. "It's insanity, Varric. I'm insane. You would think I would try something different at this point!"

"I mean, yeah. Kinda."

"Aren't you supposed to comfort me, or something? You're a terrible best friend."

"But I'm the only best friend you got," Varric grins, very smugly. He nudges her elbow. "Pretty sure you're stuck with me."

Hawke knows in her bones that she wouldn't trade him, even if she could. There's no one like Varric; there's no one else who knows what her fragmented puzzle pieces look like on the inside, not even Isabela.

There are so many kinds of love, Hawke reflects, but in the end they all taste like blood and apples; violence and devotion, crisp red and creamy white. Varric, whiskey and smooth, cheering her up the only way he knows how. Bethany, her only sibling left, still trapped in the Gallows so far from the sun.

Isabela, too. Blood and apples between the teeth, metallic-gold shimmer in the split of her smile.

Hawke might go to her grave for loving her, but at least it'll be well-earned.

And besides.

It's not as though she really has a choice in the matter. Isabela is a guiding star, Hawke's own, and there never could have been anyone else, even if either of them had wanted there to be.

And Hawke certainly hadn't.

Wanted there to be, that is.

Hawke understands burning, after all. Her palm comes up, almost involuntary, to press against her middle. Varric's eyes track the movement because Varric is an unfortunate person who misses nothing but mercifully says nothing, as well. He just stares at her for another long moment, and then he reaches up to clasp her elbow.

(For someone who spends so much of his time talking, Varric is remarkable at knowing when words aren't enough.)

Hawke cracks a smile like she might crack a joke or an egg, bruise-yellow all the way down. "I suppose you'll have that pint after all, then, hm?"

"Suppose I will," Varric agrees, and it's easy between them again. He doesn't let go of her elbow, and that's good, too.

Hawke's abdomen throbs with her pulse. I-sa-be-la.

Shite, if only it could be this easy all the time.

If wishes were mages, Hawke thinks, teeth grit. Isabela's breath is hot on her neck, pinned down beneath Lowtown-gang arrow-fire as they are.

"You would think that this wouldn't keep happening, what with all the louts our good Knight-Commander has patrolling," breathes Hawke, more wind than sound.

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Aveline with her shield up over Ander's head, entirely cross. Her patience isn't long for the world, Hawk thinks. The night is young and pale blue, still clinging to the last vestiges of twilight-dusk, and Isabela's arms curl around Hawke's own waist, her nails digging in. Between a rock and a hard place, they are.

"I don't know if this is the time, Bela," Hawke says, rather lightly for the predicament. "I'll let you into my knickers when we're home!"

"We can do both," Isabela smiles against Hawke's ear, hooking her chin over her shoulder. "Don't be angry."

"As if I could, darling—"

Aveline roars.

The arrow-rain pauses. Battle-tide shifts as the attention snaps away from the two rogues 'round the corner, back to the snarling warrior in their very midst. Blood trickles down Aveline's furious face and she roars a second time, somehow louder than the first.

The air trembles in her wake.

"Oh, finally, big girl's got it right," Isabela sighs, low and pleased, and seems to melt away into the shadows. She's there in Hawke's arms one moment and then she's gone, just like that.

Isabela always was a much better sneak than Hawke.

(Not a better killer, but a better sneak. Hawke thinks that maybe this says something about their priorities.)

It's enough. The split-second distraction has Hawke throwing herself back into the fray, laughing high and bright. Blood splatters hot across her cheekbone, copper-bitter terrible. At least it's not her own blood, for once!

Flesh and leather give way to the moan of pain and the glassy-eyed look that precedes a death gurgle. Aveline is still stomping around and murdering anyone what comes within her range with great prejudice.

Eurgh, Hawke thinks. There are bits of bodies scattered about. She has to kick away what looks like someone's lost elbow.

Aveline, at the very least, does seem appeased.

But Maker, that's not going to be a pretty clean-up.

Hawke aches a little because she always aches a little. Laboured breathing is the last loud thing, once all the throats are cut, and Aveline's faint growling about guard patrol routes and gang warfare, and still somehow managing to bicker with Anders about the healing he's trying to do.

Hawke can't stop herself from grinning out of the corner of her mouth, even as she lists to the side. They're all so terrible, really.

Isabela slips beneath her arm, and helps carry her weight.

Andraste's burning pyre, but Hawke does love her.

"Will you be taking me home, then?"

Small and soft and deadly as sin, Isabela laughs a low rich sound. It rolls through Hawke's bloodstream like brandy; heady, heavy, intoxicating in the loveliest sense. She wants to keelhaul into it, quartered and drawn, wants whatever she can get her filthy, bloody hands on. Whatever

"You'd like that, wouldn't you," she muses.

"I do need you, you know," Hawke murmurs, maybe a little too honest. But she's covered in blood from people who aren't alive anymore, and her pirate smells a little like sweat and a little like salt, and a lot like wild ocean victory, so what's a little too much honestly? Hawke can still feel the press of Isabela's nails into her sides. Still wants to feel it, too.

Isabela tips her head to regard Hawke, a strange half-smile lighting across her mouth. "You do, do you?"

And Hawke thinks about Varric and Bethany and her mother, and dying because that's really what she's always doing, isn't it? She thinks about whorls of mist burning away beneath the morning, and her empty bed when she woke up alone, and how it always feels like she's putting herself back together.

Hawke breathes very slow.

"Yes," she says.

This, too, is a confession.

Isabela stares at her for another unending, unbroken moment that takes all of Hawke's breath out of her lungs. The gold in her lip winks in the shifting silver light of the moon. Her eyes are whiskey-clear, liquid-soft, and it's a knife twisting right into Hawke's heart.

Not for the first time and not for the last, Hawke thinks that if Isabela asked her to follow her down into the dark, she would go and all the more happily for it, without question, without asking for anything more,

It's knowing that Isabela is scared, too, even as they cling to one another in this filthy alleyway while Hawke tries not to bleed out via sheer willpower.

"Let's get you home, Hawke," Isabela murmurs, at last.

The tenderness of it could break Hawke's heart clean in half. She struggles for levity, but she's always struggling, these days, and it's not as though her heart is under any less kind of strain. Isabela brushes a speck of dirt or blood away from Hawke's cheek, and it feels like a grieving just as much as it feels like a resurrection.

"Oh? Are we already getting into my knickers, then?" Hawke manages. It comes out like a joke, and only falls a little bit flat. "Get my hopes up, shall we?"

"No," says Isabela. She doesn't take her hand away. "It's about that favour I mentioned."

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tbc.