Thalia brings her at dawn the message that Roscuro has returned from his business in Jader. Fenris stands just behind her at the doorway, already armed and armored; when Isabela gestures Thalia nods and withdraws, and Fenris enters her cabin for the first time. It's not terribly large, the desk with her maps and sextant jammed in one corner and her bed in the other, but it's a line she hadn't expected to cross quite yet.
Nothing for it now. She waves him towards the lone chair in the room, which he declines, and Isabela props her weight on her palms instead, the world spread out beneath her fingers. "He'll want to talk first," she says without preamble. "Gloating, boasting, being a general prat. You know the type."
"I'm familiar with it."
"He'll have guards, though. Probably armed. Might even be in the same room."
"A wise precaution."
"They'll probably be rather well trained too, now that I think about it. Roscuro always did like showing off the best of everything."
"Isabela."
"Not that you have much to worry about, I suppose. I don't think even he's learned how to poke a sword through a magical ghost elf yet."
"Isabela," Fenris says, and puts his hand on her shoulder. She doesn't quite know how to handle that, rough comfort as it is, but—she remembers another day in another city, Fenris's eyes gone glazed with fear at the demon standing above him on the stairs. She'd found her own way, then, found his hand gone like ice at his side—had held it, squeezing tight enough the blood pooled in her fingers until the heat came back and he'd remembered he was not alone.
The same thing, perhaps. Even here.
She shakes her head, shakes herself all over until the nerves are repressed and Fenris's hand has fallen back to his side. He doesn't comfort her again as she finishes dressing, knots her belt into place with her new little dagger at her hip; he fastens her necklace for her as she slides her hair out of the way, and his fingers brush only briefly over the tender skin at the nape of her neck. Later. Later—
The streets of Rivain are quiet in the dawn hours, the city made better for afternoons and deeper dusks, but here and there servants sweep the streets, and seers stand mute at the mouths of the streets, and the masked Qunari stride in straight lines through the silent morning. Just as she remembers.
Just as the clerk remembers too, his eyes growing comically wide at the sight of Isabela and Fenris, both significantly more armed than last time, at his door. Her snicker's a bit savage, but he does precisely as she hopes and goes scurrying up the stairs to the closed door at the top, and she can hear him whispering with great panic for his employer to greet his guests. There's a low, amused answer—and she remembers that too, that self-satisfied amusement at all the world, and at her, too, the last time she cried—
"He says to go up, please," the clerk tells them. His cheeks are brilliant red.
"Thank you," Fenris says gravely, and follows Isabela up the stairs.
She doesn't knock, doesn't kick in the door half as rough as she'd like to, either. Roscuro's office is large enough to take up most of the upper floor, his desk backed to a grand window with the dawn sun risen behind him, throwing his face into shadow deep enough she can only make out the broadest strokes over the details her memory provides.
A sharp-cornered smile. Dark eyes, a darker brow; black hair curled close to his head. Neatly trimmed beard, threaded now with grey; silver earrings at each ear, dull with years. "How little you've changed, Roscuro."
His laugh is as cold as she remembers. "And how much you, Naishe."
How odd that a name could feel like a knife between her ribs, but she refuses to give him the satisfaction of seeing the wound. "I've come to tell you to back off. You won't be getting your money from me. Not now, not ever."
"A long way for a few words. Did you consider a letter?"
Movement in the corners—and now she sees the two bodyguards, one on each side: a tall, heavyset man with a maul on his right, a pale, slender woman with white-gold hair and needle-thin knives on his left. "I thought about it," she says, and feels the air change as Fenris draws his sword at her back. "But I couldn't remember if you were the reading type."
Roscuro sighs and stands, the silver threading in his coat catching the light as he circles his desk to lean against its front. The same slenderness; the same softness that came with wealth and no need to carry more than a pen. He crosses his arms, lifts one black eyebrow. "You owe me a lot of money, you know."
"Correction: my husband once owed you a lot of money. Maybe it's time you stopped living in the past."
"You expect me to write off the cost of an entire ship and all its cargo? You stole that ship, Naishe, and I'll have the cost of it from you or out of you."
"I didn't steal anything. A pirate named Everton stole that ship, and as you became the beneficiary of my dear dead husband's estate after I failed to collect it, I think you've rather had enough repayment for one lifetime."
Roscuro frowns, straightening, and runs a hand over the back of his neck. "I remember you being more pliable, once," he says almost fondly, and steps forward, his hand outstretched—
Fenris is quick, his gauntleted hand swiping between them to knock Roscuro's hand away, but Isabela has her knives unsheathed in the same instant. Her voice is so light for all her hatred—had she known there was this much hate in her? "You won't touch me again," she tells him, and smiles.
He lifts his chin. There is the snake she remembers, eyes cold and hard as flint, a viper stung when denied. There is the cruelty she remembered for so long—
"Kill them both," he snaps, and his guards leap forward.
They're faster than she expects, especially the man with the maul; the roof isn't quite tall enough for either his maul or Fenris's sword to make the great arcs they need for true freedom, but even sideways he has reach well beyond her own his first blow nearly catches Isabela square in the chest. She jumps back only just in time; behind her she can hear Fenris squaring off against the pale woman with the knives, his sword guarded between them, lyrium humming in her teeth. Roscuro has moved behind his desk again, watching—
"Come on," she taunts, dancing sideways, flicking her new dagger around her knuckles, listening to the cold edge of it whistle. "Hit me!"
The man snarls, swings again with his maul; this time it smashes into a low table set beside the desk, and at Roscuro's shout he drops the maul in favor of a thin longsword at his waist. Good, better than that hulking thing—Isabela darts forward again as he grasps the hilt, catching a deep blow on his upper arm that sends him staggering back. She bounces on her toes, ready, so ready, and Fenris shouts behind her with a blow—but no pain, and she grins fiercely as the man strikes with the sword.
No expert, this; she ducks under his clumsy thrust and catches him again with the katar's tip in the soft flesh beneath his armpit. He snaps his arm down quicker than she'd thought and strikes a heavy glance of a blow across her temple—she stumbles sideways, ear ringing, but manages to throw herself to her knees just in time to avoid another shriek of a swipe where her neck has just been. A shift of his weight and a thrust—but she's already gone into dawn-shadow, blades reversed, ready, ready, only waiting for the right moment—
"Behind you, idiot!" Roscuro shouts, and the man turns—
Too late.
He'd never stood a chance, really. Isabela jerks her shoulder and the dagger shoves an inch or two further into the man's gut, driving upward behind his ribs into his heart. The longsword falls with a muted thump to the carpet behind her; the man's weight slides forward into her chest, his knees buckling, his eyes rolling up into his head until only the whites remain.
"Poor sod," Isabela mutters with a grunt as she yanks the dagger free. A step back and he's free to fall—and he does, going slow to one knee, then the other, and then at last to his face. He does not move again.
Across the room Fenris is panting, the woman a heap on the floor just beyond him. Her eyes are glassy in death, a ruined hole where her heart used to be; the red bleeds very stark against her pale skin. Isabela's eyes skate over Fenris quickly, more worried than she'd like to admit, but he waves a dismissive hand and save a thin, sluggishly-bleeding scratch in the crook of his elbow she can see no severe injury.
Good, she thinks viciously, and turns again to Roscuro. "Anyone else?" she asks, flattening the bloodied blade to the desk beneath her palm. "Or should we start gutting all your employees one by one until you leave me alone?"
"You think this is so easy?" Roscuro says, incredulity in his voice, and spreads his hands between them. No knife. No blade, and she is abruptly afraid— "Naishe, when will you learn that everything you have belongs to me?"
Fenris gasps.
She knows. She knows before she turns, and then Fenris gasps again, and by the time Isabela has made it to his side he is clutching his throat with one hand, his eyes wide and black with panic, the thin cut in the crook of his elbow radiating stark blue lines along his veins where the poison has spread. He gropes at his neck, the gauntlets scratching his skin to bleeding; she slits the neck of his jerkin with her dagger and spreads it wider, but it doesn't help, doesn't help, and Fenris, Fenris who came here for her, for her sake, goes to his hands and knees on the carpet, gagging, choking on air he cannot breathe.
"Help him," she says.
Roscuro says, "Why?"
An odd thing, that this fear should be so easy to rein when Fenris's life hangs in the balance. She stands, leaves Fenris behind her, crosses to the desk and behind it with measured paces, places the tip of her dagger at the hollow of Roscuro's throat. She is heady with rage. "Because if you don't, I will kill you as slowly as I can."
His eyes are smaller this close. The cruelty too, or just lost behind the fury so white and brilliant behind her eyes she cannot see through it, the sheer savage reality of holding a winter-thin blade to a man she feared for so long. The tip holds steady as a rock; her blood is hot as fire under her skin.
"I will kill you," she says again, no threat, only promise. His eyes are so wide. She does not know what he sees; she feels enormous, made more in this moment than she has ever been, formless and wild as the sea.
He swallows. Swallows again, and behind her Fenris's breath comes thinner and thinner, his nails scratching against the carpet, his leathers creaking with every whine of breath—
"In the desk," Roscuro says softly, smaller than he was before. "The black cap."
"Get it for me. Uncap it."
He does, with shaking hands, and Isabela takes the thing in hand and goes in three steps to Fenris's side. He's on his back, writhing, his lips blue, his mouth open in useless gasps, the lyrium from throat to toe flickering violently. His eyes fix on hers in blind horror and a deep, terrifying trust; she cups his cheek in one hand, upends the bottle at his lips. He spits a little, startled; he cannot swallow properly, but Isabela pinches his mouth shut with firm fingers, unhesitating, unfaltering despite the flinching inhales through his nose that cut through the silent office. If he dies—if Fenris dies here, right here, and she—
Fenris gasps.
Not the thin thready terrifying thing it was before—a broader gasp, more air than he has had in minutes, a lifetime. His back arches off the rug; his mouth stretches open, the lyrium bars down his throat blazing white as he swallows air. "Again," she demands, and he breathes again, more this time, more, and his hand clenches like iron around her wrist. She doesn't mind; let him have the whole thing, she doesn't need that wrist anyway, and then—in the corner of her eye—
It happens in an instant. Roscuro's arm is already back to throw, the glint of sunlight off a silver blade—then a wet thud, and a low sigh, and Roscuro falls with her little dagger embedded hilt-deep in his throat.
There is a single moment of perfect silence. Isabela doesn't know quite what to do, arm still flung forward, the world too quick even for her; then Fenris's grip tightens on her off hand (lucky stars, her off hand), and when she drags her eyes down from the place where Roscuro stood to Fenris, it takes her near ten seconds to realize his lips are no longer blue.
"Fenris," she tries. A good, safe word. Probably appropriate.
He closes his eyes, licks his lips. "Dead?" he asks, hoarse as the dying.
"Yes."
"Good."
"Yes," she says again, and this time when Fenris tugs she lets him slide her palm over his chest, over the place where his heart beats in the warm midmorning sunlight, still panic-fast and pounding, but there, alive, there, still there. "Balls, Fenris," she says this time, and if her voice breaks, he says nothing of it. "His sour blood's all over my new dagger."
He only quirks one corner of his mouth into a tired smile, and draws in a deep, clean, steady breath, holding her in place until she can breathe again along with him.
—
Her hands tremble all the way back to the ship. It's annoying as piss, especially when it takes three tries to get her little knife out of Roscuro's throat, when she cannot hold the match to strike the flame and must get Fenris to burn the last documents binding Naishe to this life in white flame. Hard to threaten the clerk properly too, though the bloodstains suffice where their arguments do not, her hands shaking, Fenris's arm draped heavily over her shoulder with his sword dragging behind them. It's been a long time since she's been so rattled, longer still since she's had to face that sort of fear, and blood and pyre if it doesn't make her more irritable than she's been in a long bloody time.
"My cabin," she says flatly when they make it back to the ship at last, Escra lifting Fenris's arm from Isabela's shoulders to replace them with his own. "There's elfroot in the chest."
"Aye," Escra says, and goes, Fenris beside him, his shoulders still slumped with exhaustion, and she will never in her life forget the sound of his thinning gasps—
"Captain?"
"All aboard?" she snaps.
"Aye," Thalia says with a brisk salute. Her crew stands at Thalia's back, awaiting orders.
Blasted fools, the lot of them. Looking to her with such trust—who is she to lead them? Nearly killing Fenris with her own history, all because she couldn't tell herself to shove off with the lot of them before he came, all because she dared to try her hand at being something like a friend.
She closes her eyes, takes a breath, lets it out again. Your fault, Hawke, she thinks, not entirely bitterly, because if she's learnt nothing else from the woman she's learned there are fools who'll trust her no matter what she wants.
Well. Better give them a reason to trust, then. "Lift the anchor!" she shouts, and throws a hand into the air. Her fingers are no longer trembling. "Kirkwall, you worthless dogs!"
"Kirkwall!" comes the shout before her, a dozen faces breaking over with glad smiles, and before Isabela can lose herself to the lump in her throat she turns again to Thalia. "Yours, for now," she says, and looks to the door of her cabin where Escra has just emerged.
"Aye," Thalia says again, more gently, and this time when Isabela goes she doesn't look back.
—
Fenris is half-asleep on her bed by the time she makes it to him at last. His color's better than it's been in an hour; the elfroot vial sits empty on the table beside him, though his breath still comes just too thin and his arm when she checks it is hot and flushed around the edges of the thin-bladed cut. Still—he is alive, and so is she, and Roscuro is dead and Naishe with him, and for once she thinks it might be enough to leave them that way. It takes her a moment to find the hidden catches of Fenris's gauntlets; when she does she pulls them free, rather more gently than she'd ever like to admit, and sets them aside on the table atop her maps.
The business of cleaning the cut is rather stickier; it's been long enough that she doubts the usefulness of suckling the wound, and instead she slathers the whole thing in a salve she'd found years ago, the thick cream made by a man in Antiva who kept vipers and had taught himself at the cost of several fingers to cure the poison in their teeth. Still, it's better than nothing, and for several minutes she's content to smear the cool salve along his skin until the fever in it begins to ease. Her heart is still racing. Idiot. Idiot.
"Isabela," Fenris says, and her jump knocks the pot of salve to the floor.
They both watch it roll for a moment, kicked back towards her booted feet by the roll of a wave beneath the ship; then she bends to take it up again, tightening the already-tight lid even further, incensed at herself for caring, for being unable to drown these last lingering vestiges of her concern. It's over. It's over, and they are safe.
"Isabela," he says again, and she slams the salve to the desk.
"You shouldn't have come," she tells the wall flatly. "I knew it from the start. No one else should have ever been caught up in my mess."
"Hawke did."
"Yes, and look where that got her. Impaled like a pig on a pike, kept from bleeding out only because we had the good fortune to keep an apostate abomination in close quarters for exactly that reason. What a stupid—stupid everything."
His hand closes over hers, a cage she can't bear to flee. "It was my choice."
"It was a stupid choice."
"It was mine," Fenris repeats, fiercer, and this time when she looks at him he holds her eyes. "I came here to keep you safe."
"I wouldn't have been," she murmurs, hardly knowing what she's saying. "If you'd died. I wouldn't have been. Not like I was. I hate you—this is awful."
His grip tightens on her hand. He pulls, and she lets herself be pulled, and somehow he props himself on one elbow and she bends down and she's kissing him, furious, heartsore, relieved beyond words. She's kissed enough people to know the taste of them, even in the briefest touches; this is bitter enough to make her mouth twist, and yet there's promise in it, too, something she's wondered of for seven years, something that's had roots in fear and flight and the twinned desire for freedom above all, even at the cost of death. She'd known he understood. She'd known there were demons, ghosts from his past and hers alike, death before there could be life…
He is alive. So is she. Let that be enough.
"I wonder," Isabela murmurs against his mouth, and smiles as he reaches up a hand to toy with the bright gold disc of her earring. "I wonder, very handsome elf in my very personal bed."
He snorts, draws in a breath. "What?"
"I think this means I finally get to discover what color your underthings are."
It's thin, a bit cracked yet with exhaustion and illness both, but she can't keep back her grin when Fenris starts to laugh.
—
He sleeps in her bed that night, and again the night after, until Isabela is sure enough that his breath will hold and she will not wake to a dead man beside her. The third night he does not come, and by the time the tiny eleventh bell strikes and he still has not knocked Isabela throws back the covers in irritation and goes in search of the truant elf herself.
In the end she finds him at the stern rail, his feet bare, his shirt half-fastened, his hair a silver stain in the faint lamplight. He does not turn when she climbs the small, narrow stair; she says, annoyed, "Don't tell me you're practicing knots up here again."
Even from behind she can tell he smiles. He says, awkwardly straightening, "I did not know if my company would be—welcome."
"That's stupid. Why not?"
He turns, eyebrow raised over the dim scars that cut through his chin. "Despite appearances, I am no longer in danger of dying."
"What difference does that make?"
"I thought—" he pauses, looks over the rail. "The crew."
Isabela purses her lips. It's not a bad thought—it'd stopped her before, after all, but at the same time this is her ship, and her crew, and she's tired of wondering. Tired of waiting, too. She's not sure which has been harder. "You're not technically a member of my crew."
Fenris frowns, open doubt. Isabela grins, steps closer, and another step after that until her breasts brush over his chest and her knees bump against his own, until she's close enough she can feel the air change between his mouth and hers. She doesn't kiss him, not yet; instead she lifts her fingers to his back, her thumbs just barely skimming over the rise of his hips. "Fenris," she murmurs, throaty and low, and smiles at the sudden twitch of his mouth. "Just so we're both clear, I'm telling you that there is a bed not twenty feet below us that will in short order have me in it, naked, and you are invited."
He laughs, a startled breath against her mouth, and all at once his hands close around her upper arms. Strong, she likes that—and the thrumming lyrium she likes very much too, just as welcome a second time, though she can still feel the reservation in his grip. "I haven't," he says, his eyes sliding away, "not since I ran. And there is nothing before the ritual."
She's not fool enough she can't read into the time between. Neither is she fool enough to say; instead she smiles and slides both hands flat against the small of his back and downward, pulling his hips flush against hers as she kisses him. His surprise stops him only a moment—he's such a quick learner, she'll have to set up lessons—and then she's coaxing his mouth open, slipping her tongue against his, laughing as his grip slips from her arms to her waist in sudden eagerness. Then all at once in a whirl of white stars her back's against the rail and he's pressed against her flush as dovetails, his knees trapping hers, his arms—yes, she's definitely a fan of the lean strength thing—pinning her in place. The lyrium at his mouth flickers once, twice; she slides her fingers into his hair and gives a very encouraging moan, just loud enough to carry no further than his delightful tapered ears.
He swears in Tevene, going wholly stiff against her, and bends his head until it rests in the crook of her neck and shoulder. "You will be the death of me," he tells her, muffled by her skin, and she feels his mouth open gently over the rise of her neck. Fascinating.
"All that means," she sighs at last, sliding a finger pointedly down his half-bare chest to his navel, "is that you have no bad habits to unlearn."
He laughs again, softer, and this time when he straightens there is no hesitation in his gaze. Isabela kisses him again just because she can, her mouth open and hot and inviting as she can be, not just because she's Isabela but because he's Fenris, her friend, more than her friend, Fenris who came with her to Rivain for no reason but to keep her safe. Fenris, who inexplicably cares for her, and not just for her body or her blade. For her.
A terrifying thing, to realize that she cares for him, too.
But she can't dwell on such things with an armful of warm, eager elf, and she can't deny she's eager, too, and when Fenris draws back to breathe she lets him, slipping her hand into his, lifting an eyebrow as she gestures at the stairs to her cabin. "So? Bed, me, naked? Are you coming?"
His laugh is rueful, but his hand tightens around her own. "I enjoy following you," he tells her, his voice low, and when she tugs he goes with her, both of them leaving the ship's wake behind them, froth dim in the glow of the lamps, fading gently into the dark.
—
Six days later, Isabela stands on Kirkwall's docks for the first time since Cloudreach. It's gotten hotter since she's been away; already she misses the cool salt wind of the open sea, and she can't help but sigh as she watches the perfectly good ship—hers, if only briefly—set sail again with someone else at her helm. Such a good sky too—cloudless and brilliant blue, the kind of sky that had her men singing shanties about women who lived in the sea and surfaced only on the brightest days.
Well. She knows where they are. They'll come when she calls. And—so will she, when her friends need her. How odd a thing to realize about herself after all this time.
Fenris touches her shoulder, his hand warm and familiar. "Varric has sent word. The others are waiting for us in the Hanged Man."
"Eager little otters. All they want are the sordid details."
A corner of his mouth twitches upward. "As if you have no wish for a ready audience."
She grins, but her eyes are still on the departing ship, sails spread white and perfect against the distant horizon. "I'll have one of my own someday, you know," she says abruptly.
Fenris laughs, low and full of promise. "I know."
The wind is salt-thick against her face; she breathes it in, just for a moment, filling every part of her lungs with the weight of the sea. Then she lets it out again, long and slow, and when she turns she takes Fenris's arm and knocks his hip with her own. Enough for now, this little piece of the sea she carries with her; she's got a family to face first, and a lover's horizons to infinitely broaden, and if she's learned nothing else from the sea she knows the price of patience and the gift of it.
The sea will wait. Her ship will, too.
She can live with that.
—
end.
