A/N - Thank as always to Skeasel for the beta. Thanks also to Sphinxes and fifespice for their reviews.

Translate this into hieroglyphs;
'Your sandy vagina has a seven year itch!'

Marilyn Monroe (via Peter Shukoff)

THE NEVARRAN JOB - 4/5

How Many You Got, Hawke?

9:38 Dragon
09th Solace

The Free Marches
The Outskirts of Tantervale

3 Years Ago

ISABELA

"Merrill, set the cows on fire!"

Isabela had been dancing with five men, her blades and the open sky all around her on the suspended bridge, flipping her hair and laughing and slitting one of her partner's throats open when Hawke shouted that. Such an odd thing this was to hear that she stumbled in her little performance of death and the arterial spray she usually liked to avoid (unless she was trying to impress someone) hit her directly in the face, blinding her with sticky red matter.

"Shit," she shouted, trying to blink the blood out of her eyes unsuccessfully.

A gruff voice nearby said, "Gotcha now, bitch," and there was a flurry of footsteps to her left. She raised one dagger in the air above her and heard the contact of steel on steel, immediately thrusting her other blade directly in front of her, feeling that wondrous, exhilarating sensation of a cold, sharp edge piercing the flesh of an enemy and drawing forth the warmth they kept inside.

The battle had been raging for the better part of an hour now. She was tired and bloodied, separated from the rest of the group. Stranded on top of a thin, wooden bandit's bridge about thirty-five feet in the air and surrounded by at least three more men. Worse still, she was blinded by blood. Yet every time Isabela killed someone who was trying to kill her, the adrenaline rush made her positively giddy and, frustratingly, more than a little horny.

The man stuck to Surfeit, her right hand dagger, was gurgling out an unmistakable death-rattle, which meant two things. He was no longer an adequate dance partner and, more importantly, she was still blind and wasting time.

More footfalls fell behind her, heavy and looking to take advantage of her current predicament. She turned, dragging the dying bandit with her, attempting to use his body as a quick shield against the coming blow. That was, at least, until his feet met open air beyond the walkway and he slipped from the dagger, falling off the ledge down to the bloodstained, green valley floor below.

"Merrill!" Hawke's voice had risen into desperation and there was the clear clanging of axe on sword in between her words, "I said set the blighted cows on fire!"

Isabela felt white-hot pain travel down the length of her left shoulder as the swing of a long sword made contact with her bare skin, parting the flesh. She grunted, side-stepping, flexing her grip on The Miller, her left hand dagger, making certain it didn't slip from her bloodied grasp. She deflected the next two thrusts with Surfeit and lashed out with her right leg, kicking her attacker in his stomach and knocking the wind from his lungs, causing him to stumble backward.

She took the opportunity to back up several feet in the opposite direction.

"No," Merrill shouted back with equal parts defiance and exhaustion from somewhere across the field beneath her, "I'm not burning anything that moos, I'd never forgive myself!"

Isabela was about to wipe the mess from her eyes when the hairs on the back of her neck rose and she sensed imminent death rushing at her from either side. She took the only option left.

She jammed her daggers in their leather holsters along her back, ignoring the screaming pain from her shoulder, twirled at a forty-five degree angle and took a single step back, directly off the bridge, raising her hands and hoping that she'd judged the distance correctly.

As the busty rogue had learned over the years, there were positives and negatives to almost any decision made during performances like this. Sometimes the scales didn't weigh evenly but, considering that she was still alive and robust after dancing with as many men as she had, she'd come to trust her instincts when a split-decision had to be blindly made. Literally, as the case sometimes was.

The two bandits who'd been charging at her couldn't stop their momentum and wound up striking each other instead. One's war axe cleaved into a skull, the other's great sword did an impressive job of a brutal disemboweling, a steaming pile of intestines slopping out onto the wood.

Unfortunately, Isabela had ever-so-slightly misjudged the length of the walkway in her attempt to drop down and grab the ledge. She hadn't stepped back far enough. This became apparent the second her ample chest hit the ledge followed by her nose, which cracked on contact, knocking her head back.

Somehow, through the grace of the Maker, her hands still found purchase, and she dangled a moment, stunned, unable to breath, blood flowing freely from both nostrils in a near-fountain. The pain in her left shoulder became too great to bear and she released her grip, holding herself up with her right hand alone.

"Rivaini," a tired voice cried up at her, "you good?"

Isabela found her breath, filling her lungs, breathing in deeply. She took the opportunity to finally wipe the blood and viscera from her eyes with her left hand.

"I busted my nose."

"I saw that."

There was more incomprehensible shouting from a scuffle nearby, Hawke's voice being the only clear thing. "Damn it, Merrill! Now!" She sounded as though she was at the end of her rope.

Ignoring Hawke, Isabela asked, "Am I still pretty?"

"Bianca certainly thinks so."

She blinked as her vision returned and she instantly wished that it hadn't. It was a long way down. "Balls," she whispered.

Varric, standing amidst a slew of corpses, was staring up at her, a fresh gash and a thick sheen of sweat on his forehead and several tears in his leather duster. Bianca, gripped tightly in his hands, looked completely fine. It said something about a man who would treat his weapon with a greater sense of preservation than he did himself. Exactly what it said, Isabela wasn't sure, but she knew that she liked it very much.

"Fine," Merrill shouted from beyond Isabela's field of vision. In the distance, something whoomphed in a small explosion, which was immediately followed by two dozen angry moos.

She was about to tell Varric how good his chest looked from this angle when the boards of the bridge creaked and she glanced up. The last bandit on the bridge was standing above her, holding a long, curved sword.

She gave him her best 'but I'm so sexy' pout, despite the broken nose suggesting she not make any more facial expressions. "Don't suppose you'd give a lady second to catch her breath?"

The bandit, a handsome, shirtless man with dark hair and tanned leather breeches, grinned back her. "Sure, sweetheart," he said, stepping on her fingers, "I'll give you all the time in the world."

The pain, adding to the nose and sore body, pounded in her temples.

Then there was the familiar twang of Varric's crossbow and a shock of air passed her head, tousling the locks of hair that spilled out beneath her blue bandanna. The handsome bandit jerked backwards with a shout, a bolt in his shoulder.

Isabela swung her body forward, building momentum. "Thanks!"

"No prob- oh shit!"

Isabela didn't have time to see what was wrong. With every ounce of strength she had left she pulled herself up onto the bridge, using the body of one of the two dead bandits to help her. As she swung her legs up behind her and rolled fully onto the bridge, over the bandit she was using for balance, she landed in the pile of wet intestines from his gutted stomach. She grimaced and backed up onto her haunches, just as the handsome bandit was getting to his feet.

Growling, Isabela launched herself at him, jamming her wounded shoulder into his bare stomach and wrapping her arm around him, pushing him onto his back. His sword clattered on the wood several feet away.

Isabela grunted, wishing she'd used her other shoulder.

Grappling with him, she could see through the cracks in the boards. "Oh, shit."

The bandit, out of breath, stopped struggling to get her off of him. "What?"

She rolled them over until he was on top of her and jerked her head, motioning for him to look down.

His dazzling blue eyes left hers and widened as he saw the stampeding herd of flaming cows rushing beneath them, with one very anxious dwarf clinging to a cliff side, trying to avoid being trampled to death.

The bandit swallowed nervously. "Oh, shit."

Isabela and the bandit watched the cows wind their way up the incline and around the bend in the land, disappearing around the rise. There was only one route they could travel, up the hill and towards the cliff the bridge was connected to.

"Dammit, Hawke," Isabela grumbled.

"They're not going to slow down, are they?"

Isabela shook her head.

The bandit, still straddling her waist, leaned forward. She appreciated the view of his sweaty abs, wishing her nose wasn't filled with blood so she could get a good whiff of musk. At least until the point where she heard his sword scrape against the boards as he picked it up.

"Well, then," he said, "guess I'll have to make this qui-"

She reached up, grabbed the bolt in his shoulder and twisted it at an angle.

He reared back, sword in hand, screaming in pain.

With her other hand, Isabela quickly pulled Surfeit from its scabbard along her back and slashed the blade along his chest, drawing a thick line of blood.

As she angled the next strike to thrust the dagger inwards, the bandit failed blindly at her with his sword, the flat of the blade landing solidly against her wounded shoulder. She lost her grip on the bolt and he leapt from her, struggling to keep his balance on the bridge and clamping a hand across his bloody chest.

Isabela scrambled to her feet, twirling the pommel of her dagger in her fingers.

The hunched bandit chuckled, whirling the blade back and forth. "I'm going to enjoy sticking you deep, bitch," he said, sneering. He didn't seem quite as handsome like this.

"If I had a silver for every time I've heard that," she replied, lunging at him with Surfeit.

He took two small steps back, striking her blade with his. "Then what?" He swung the sword down at her in a sharp angle.

With remarkable speed, Isabela whipped the Miller out, pushing past the pain in her left shoulder and jumping forwards, blocking the blow with the flat of the dagger and swiping Surfeit at his face, forcing her opponent to jerk his head back to avoid having a permanent grin.

"I wouldn't be on this bridge," she said, continuing to press him back, buffeting him with attacks from both daggers, forcing him to focus on blocking over countering.

The bandit gave a breathy laugh, continuing to back up along the bridge. They were nearly at the end of it, back onto the grass-covered cliffside. "Bullshit," he said, "where the hell else would you be?"

Switching tactics as the pain in her wounded shoulder grew searing, she put all her strength in to a series of heavy strikes with Surfeit, keeping her forward momentum. She punctuated each strike with her tired, angry response. "Off the coast," clang, "of Rivain," clang, "on a boat," clang, warm and drunk!"

The last strike did not end with the clang of met steel as she used his focus on blocking Surfeit to dance inward and swiftly jab the Miller into his side. He gurgled, stunned, dropping his sword. "A very," quick stab to the shoulder, "pretty," slash across the jugular, "boat!" And a thrust through the chest to the heart, bringing him to his knees, a soft sigh leaving his lips, his blue eyes glazing over, staring up at the sky.

…Damn it. Without the look of murder in his eyes, he was handsome again.

"Stick it to me, will you? Hmph." She withdrew her daggers in single, violent tugs and placed them back in their scabbards as he fell over. "Somehow I doubt you could've reached the depths I'm accustomed to anyway," she said, reaching down and gripping the bolt in his shoulder, yanking it from his flesh. She wiped the blood from it on his breeches and stood, placing it in between her belt and her tunic.

"Drat," she said, staring down at his pretty face. She ruffled his dark hair with her boot. "I should've thought of saying that when you were alive."

"Isabela!"

She glanced up at the cry, finally stepping off the bridge.

Hawke was just over the rise in the hill; pale, bloody and sprinting madly towards her, one of her daggers in her hand, a wild look in her eyes. She shouted something else Isabela couldn't understand.

"It's alright," Isabela called back as the beautiful woman kept pounding feet towards her, "I'm all done! Wanna tell me I'm a good girl and make out?"

Hawke didn't slow down. She slammed into the pirate, grabbing her by the arms. "Maker, Hawke, have it your way; tell me I'm a bad girl, that works too."

"What part of run didn't you understand," Hawke asked, nearly hyperventilating, looking back the way she'd come.

"I didn't hear any…of…" That's when Isabela noticed that the ground was shaking. Bandits appeared over the rise, then. A lot of them. Heavily armed and running very, very fast.

"Oh, right. Forgot about them," Isabela said, sighing and drawing Surfeit yet again.

The act wasn't necessary. A second later, the bandits were trampled into the grass in dark showers of blood under the hooves of a blazing stampede of nearly two dozen extremely hearty and belligerent cows.

"OH, RIGHT!" Isabela cried fearfully, "forgot about them!"

Hawke grabbed her hand forcefully and pulled her back onto the bridge. The two of them sprinted for the other side, the bridge shaking and swinging wildly from the approach of the oncoming horde.

Just ahead of them, the two bodies of the men who'd rushed at Isabela from both sides and struck each other were rolling from side to side, jostled by the swinging bridge. Isabela leapt between them with ease, followed quickly by Hawke.

The bridge, at that moment, swung to the right, just as Hawke stepped on the intestines of the disemboweled bandit. She slipped, stumbled and pitched to the side, over the edge. Isabela grabbed her flailing arm, just as the first flaming cow rushed onto the bridge.

That was all it took.

The meager supports at the edge of the bridge snapped and the wooden floor beneath Isabela gave way as she tried to swing Hawke one-handed back onto the bridge.

With a shriek of sheer terror and one last blast of adrenaline, Isabela sunk Surfeit into the bridge as it became a wall before her, embedding the blade deeply in the wooden planking, clinging desperately to Hawke's arm with her left hand. The bridge, the pirate and the champion surged forward towards the wall of stone on the opposite cliff side, the air whipping around Isabela's face, ripping the bandana from her head, her hair spilling out and streaming behind her for several seconds before-

THWUMPH. The falling bridge slammed into the stone cliff side and Isabela and Hawke slammed into the bridge, the force of which popped Isabela's wounded left shoulder from its socket and she released her grip on Hawke, nearly blacking out, swallowing back the rush of bile in her throat as the pain hit in waves, one after the other, racking her body.

She hung there for what felt like an eternity, listening to the ground quake as cow after burning cow leapt to their deaths from the top of the cliff. She trembled and shook, her eyes squeezed shut, not wanting to open them, not wanting to see what had become of Hawke, cursing herself for not holding on. As silence finally fell over the valley, tears brimmed at the corners of her eyes. "Shit," she whispered. "Shit, shit, shit…"

She couldn't stop from imagining the look on Merrill's face as she found Hawke's crumpled form on the valley floor. Not like this, she thought to herself, not because of cows.

Not because of me. A sob wretched itself from her aching chest, escaping her lips.

"What's the matter with you," an amused, exhausted and pampered voice asked beneath her.

Isabela gasped, her eyes popping open. She craned her neck back, looking down to find Marian just beneath her, smiling and more than a little dazed, hanging onto her own dagger, which jutted from the bridge just as Isabela's was.

Isabela choked back a second sob of relief, averting her eyes from Hawke's. "Nothing. My arm's cut, and it needs setting, I think."

"Oh, that's all, is it?"

"No. I broke my nose, too. Earlier. The last time I was hanging from this blighted bridge. And I lost my bandana."

"Okay, sure, you got it," Hawke's tone disbelieving.

Maker, but she's a smarmy bitch. Isabela grimaced. "My tits hurt too."

"Well," Hawke said from between her legs, "you sure look fine from this ang-"

The other end of the bridge snapped, dropping them.

They fell the last twenty feet or so to the ground, landing amongst the smoking remains of a herd of dead cows.

Isabela crashed into a fleshy bovine stomach on her shoulder, which popped it back into place. Unable to stop herself a second time, she jerked her head to the side and vomited onto the carcass.

It was during moments such as these, of which there were many in Hawke's company, that the pirate's mind retreated to a happy place. A rocking ship, an ocean breeze and a captain's cabin with a lock on the door, a fully stocked liquor bar and an assortment of hard and wet vices, pretty and strong young things, sprawled out along a massive bed fit for four. And for a brief, wonderful time it was here that she stayed; resting her side against taut abs and nuzzling her face between pert breasts instead of lying in a field of corpses, smelling the thick scent of sex instead of the stench of burnt flesh and her own vomit. …well, the vomit was fifty-fifty, actually, but Isabela told herself it smelled better on an ocean diet anyway.

After a long while, when she'd finished revisiting everything she'd eaten in the last twelve hours and had grown tired of lying on the ground twitching, she shakily got to her knees and stood up, wiping her mouth.

Hawke was tramping around the bodies, examining the remains of the bridge.

"Hello," a lilting voice yelled nearby, around the corner of the cliff, "is everyone alright?"

Isabela, realizing what Hawke was doing, stumbled to another piece of the bridge and lifted it.

"Anybody? Well, I mean, if you're a bad person, you don't have to answer," Merrill called out, "you can just stay where you are. That would be fine."

Dropping the section of broken wood, Isabela eyed Hawke expectantly. "You going to answer her?"

The short-haired rogue muttered something about timeliness in response, her mood clearly having soured now that the adrenaline was fading. She chucked a loose board away from her, moving on to the next.

Isabela rolled her eyes. "Between the cliffs, Kitten!" She limped to the next bit of rubble, spotting a glimmer of steel despite the heavy shade. Hawke's dagger, she thought as she stepped closer, from the look of the pommel.

"Isabela?" Merrill peeked around the corner and spotted her and Hawke. "Ah, ma vhenan, there you are," Merrill said, trotting up to them, "I was getting a little worried."

"Oh, we were just fine, Merrill," Hawke said, her tone dry, "thanks for the cows."

"Ohh… no, would you look at that!" Merrill mewled softly, walking amongst the bovine bodies, using her staff like a walking stick. "This is just awful. …I'll never forgive myself."

Isabela pulled Hawke's dagger from the loose plank and brushed off the grit with the flap of her tunic. She turned to find Hawke doing the same thing with Surfeit. They exchanged appreciative glances and tossed the blades.

Isabela caught her dagger and sheathed it next to its partner, stepping over several corpses of cow and men alike to Merrill's side. The elf was crying a little, poking one of the cows with her staff as if doing so would simply wake it up.

She took Merrill by the shoulder and brushed the elf's bangs from her eyes. "Hey, it's all right, precious. Sometimes, when the chips are down, you have to go for broke. And we won't be going hungry for the last leg of the trip, that's for sure."

"Well, we can't very well eat all of them," Merrill sniffed.

"I think Varric might disagree with you there," Isabela said.

Merrill let out a reluctant giggle.

"Is the caravan alright?" Hawke asked, interrupting them.

Merrill blinked. "What?"

"The caravan, the Nevarran nobles, are they secure, Merrill?"

"Um," Merrill nodded, "yes, I believe so-"

"You believe so? Merrill, they were the one thing we had to protect out here, I gave you very simple instructions before we left to deal with the assault; 'keep the nobles safe.' Are they all right or not?"

"Yes, they were fine when I left them with Udina," Merrill said, her tone growing defensive, "completely, I made sure of it before I came looking for you, I'm not a fool."

"There, you see," Isabela grabbed a healing potion from Merrill's waist and popped the cork on the glass vial, "the cargo's fine. Unclench, woman," she said, pinching the bridge her nose, gritting her teeth and resetting it with an audible crack.

The pirate then quickly chugged the thick liquid, numbing the pain in her nose and the wound on her shoulder beginning to close in on itself at an accelerated speed.

When she lowered the vial from her mouth she passed it to Hawke.

"Tits feeling better?" The rogue asked before gulping down the remaining tonic.

"Much. How's the stick in your ass?"

Hawke tossed the empty glass aside, ignoring her. "Let's find Varric and get back to the-"

Isabela saw him at the last moment, from the corner of her eye. The handsome bandit, eyes rolled up in his head, blood caked to his neck and chest, lunging for her. He grabbed her shoulders, opened his mouth wide and leaned in as if to lick her neck.

He suddenly stopped with a single, violent jerk.

Isabela blinked in shock. She leaned back. Hawke's dagger was in one side of his head. A steel bolt was in the other.

"That's one more for the dwarf," a voice cried out victoriously from her left, "how many you got Hawke? Cause if it's less than fourteen, you owe me a sovereign!"

"That was my kill, Varric!" Hawke shouted back, yanking her dagger from the bandit's skull and stepping around Isabela as the body collapsed onto her. "And it puts me at fourteen, which means you owe me two sovereigns! I got two to one odds, or have you conveniently forgotten that again?"

"What?! That's my bolt in the blighter's temple, are you blind?"

Hawke glanced back at the bandit Merrill was helping Isabela extricate herself from. "Yeah, so? It only hit after I put my blade in the other side." She waggled her dagger at him as he approached. "No points for shooting a corpse, Varric."

"Um, excuse me," Isabela interjected, brushing herself off and staring down at the bandit suspiciously, eyeing the broken bones from the fall, the slit throat and the wounds in his shoulder and chest, one of which was directly to the heart. I watched him die.

"Don't bullshit a bullshitter, Hawke, if you'd have gotten him first, Bianca would've noticed it. It's two against one and Bianca never lies."

"Piss off, Bianca lies all the time! Didn't she tell you to tell Isabela there was gold in the bottom of the water-barrel in The Wolf's Den when she was too loaded to reason with? Fenris that the owner of The Hanged Man was secretly drowning puppies in the ale when you were still trying to get ownership? Or Merrill that dire bunnies were starting to burrow in the walls of homes in the Alienage and pop out late at night."

Merrill frowned and pursed her lips. "Evil little creatures. I never did sleep there aga-, wait, that wasn't true?"

"Excuse me!" Isabela said again, louder, "but neither-"

"You paid me for that one, Hawke, or did you forget that? Just like you'll be paying me now. C'mon. One sovereign; cough it up."

"I'm not paying you a single copper, you stumpy prick! That was my kill!"

Varric pointed a finger, "Don't! …Call me stumpy, human."

"You what," Merrill asked incredulously, stepping to Hawke. "You paid him to scare me out of my bed, my home?"

"That-," Hawke flinched, sighing with frustration, "that wasn't your bed or your home anymore, remember? Your place was at the manse, with me."

"Oh, so it was that important to get me into your bed permanently then, but now you won't even-"

Hawke whirled to face the elf fully. "Now is definitely not the right time for that discussion."

"Well, when is?" Merrill asked, refusing to back down from a look which usually quieted her. "It wasn't the right time in Starkhaven, it wasn't the right time in Nevarra, it wasn't the right time last night or this afternoon, so when would be the right time… honestly," she said, beginning to lose her nerve as she rambled, "because when the right time does come up, and… I mean, if I missed it…if I didn't say anything at that moment and it passed, I-I'd be pretty broken up about it."

"If the right time comes up, I'll be the first to let you know, but I can pretty much guarantee that it will not take place in the middle of a field filled with dead men and burnt cows, alright?"

"What's happening?" Isabela asked, bewildered. She didn't even care about the handsome bandit returning to life at the moment, instead feeling a growing sense of dread as the three people before her continued to tear at each other.

"That's nice Hawke, why don't you comfort her a little more, I think there's still some bit of her heart you haven't stepped on yet," Varric said.

"You'll stay out of this, dwarf, if you know what's good for you. You're the reason she's even in this mess in the first place. I told you, I blighted told you we were done with this."

"Yes, it sure took a lot of convincing, didn't it?" Varric said, stepping in, "One wave of a promissory note with that many zeroes and suddenly, 'I don't want her in any more danger,' sounded a whole lot more like, 'when do we leave? I'll get the gorp.'"

Hawke balled a fist up.

"'If'?" Merrill asked quietly.

"What?"

"'If', you said. You said, 'if the time comes.' Not when. So you mean there's a chance we won't even talk about this at all, no matter what's happening between-"

"Merrill," Hawke said in a low, trembling voice that bordered on rage, "not… now."

"Andraste's tits, Hawke, everybody knows. Daisy's not a child, you can't treat her like-"

"People with genuine emotions are speaking, right now, Varric," Hawke cut him off, "when I want an opinion on gold or bullshit, I'll ask you. Otherwise, do us all a favor and, for once in your damned life, shut your mouth."

"Hawke!" Merrill grabbed her arm.

"HEY," Isabela shouted, finally drawing the attention of all three of them, "What the fuck is happening? What are you doing?"

Hawke sneered, a darkness in her eyes. "And then there's you."

"Hawke, stop!" Merrill pleaded, "It's not what you think. She didn't have anything to do with it."

"Right," Hawke laughed bitterly, keeping her eyes on Isabela, "I'm supposed to believe you lost your innocence all on your own."

"You're being a fool," Merrill said, "I am not a child!"

"I'll be the judge of that," Hawke approached Isabela.

Isabela stared back at the noblewoman, defiant and angry. She had no idea why Hawke was so enraged, why any of them were, actually, nor was it clear to her what she'd done (recently, anyway), but she'd paid her dues to these people, and for the first time in her life that she could recall, she wasn't about to walk away from this, no matter how much she might wish she had later. If this was what it was like to fight with blood, then this is what she'd do.

So she closed the distance between her and Hawke. "There's something you'd like to say to me, too?"

"You? The pirate queen of Rivain? No, what could I possibly have to say to you? You're an angel. A model citizen, never sullied a girl in your life."

"I never said I was an angel, and I've never touched Me-"

"Of course not, you're as pure as the driven snow."

"Knocking off the sarcasm might be a good start, gorgeous, or we'll be here all night."

Hawke shook her head. "You know, Isabela? I never judged you. All of the men, all of the women, all of the booze and all of the bad ideas, and I still said 'fine, not a problem, she might be a violent, drunken lout and a walking venereal disease, but at least she's loyal.' Unless, you know, there's a lot of money or a boat or decent sex involved, in which case, you're at least predictable to the point where I could see the knife coming, except for that one time you lied to my face for three straight years and then ditched me before your conscience, for once, caught up with you. But even then, after all of that, I never judged."

They were eye to eye now. Hawke lifted her fist. "But so help me, Isabela, if you ever come near Merrill with your filth again-"

"Damn it, Hawke, she didn't-"

Isabela grabbed Hawke's fist firmly. "My filth never touched Merrill," she said, surprised and mortified to hear the pain in her own voice, "I never touched Merrill."

"No," Hawke replied in a flat tone, "you did worse than that. You tried turning her into a worthless, drunken whore like you."

Hawke didn't see the hit coming that dropped her to her knees. For that matter, neither did Isabela, and for a moment she thought her fist had acted of its own volition, before she looked dumbly down at it and saw that her hand was still at its side.

That's when she noticed Merrill, shocked at her own action, her staff still hanging in mid-air from where she'd struck her lover.

Hawke stumbled on the ground, holding her cheek. She coughed out a cold, hollow laugh. "Right. Brilliant. That's it. I'm done."

"Hawke, I-"

"Don't apologize, Merrill," Varric said, walking to her, "she had it coming. Didn't you hear her? She's done."

"No, you idiot," Hawke spat, getting to her feet, her gaze roaming over the three of them, "I mean I'm done. For seven years, seven long, interminable fucking years I've been carrying you people. I've been putting up with you, cleaning up your messes and handling your ridiculous emotional baggage and that's it! I'm saying, 'I am done'. You can carry yourselves from now on."

For a moment, the group was silenced; Varric, Merrill and Isabela watching Hawke walk past them, a look of grim determination in her eyes. That moment did not last long.

"You pompous, arrogant, stuck-up-"

"Hawke-"

"Let's see how far you make it on your own, Champion-"

She whirled around, shouting, "I mean it! When we reach Tantervale with those Nevarrans and collect our pay, you can go get your ship back, Isabela, and we'll see how long it takes you to lose it in a card game this time, because something tells me you'll be back to sloppy, drunken mercenary jobs on dry land in no time, and sloppy, drunken blowjobs on any land in less time than that. And you can slink back to Kirkwall, Varric, and sell your bullshit to anyone who'll pay to listen, although without a brother to create capital ventures or me to create any sort of interest in your life whatsoever, I see that list of paying customers dwindling pretty fucking fast…"

"And what about me, ma vhenan?" Merrill asked.

Hawke paused, confused. "What about you?"

"Where will I go?"

"…You're coming with me, Merrill, that's not going to change."

"Why? Because I'm a child, who needs looking after?"

"Because you're mine."

"So what," Merrill said, every ounce of fear and emotion drained from her voice. "I'm yours. And what do you do with me? Set me on a high shelf and tell the guests that they can look but they can't touch, she's fragile and she breaks easily? Put me down in expensive sheets and torture yourself by refusing to handle me the way you'd like to, the way I'd like to be handled? Tell me over and over of how sweet and innocent I am when we both know that's not true, that I grew up years ago in your company and in your arms and you just refuse to let it be. No, I don't think so. I can protect others and I can handle myself."

"You're not going anywhere on your own, Merrill-"

"Because I'm a child?"

"Yes!"

"And what does that make you?" She asked, seemingly with genuine curiosity.

Hawke stood there for a long time, staring back at her. Finally she brushed her fingers through her hair and along her cheeks. "Tired. It makes me tired… I'm going back to the caravans and I'm going to sleep. At least I know that this will all be much, much worse when I wake up."

They walked in silence across the field.

When they reached the road they were greeted by a cloud of smoke, underneath which the two wagons roared in flames.

They broke into a run, each of them praying that the nobles had escaped to safety, hope dwindling with every step.

Because the smell of burnt human flesh hung heavily in the air.

AUTHOR'S NOTE ON ARTHUR'S NOTE(S)- Sometimes in writing, as is true in many other activities one performs whilst amongst the living, you get tired. On fortunate days, you have the wherewithal to close the laptop or put the desktop to sleep and turn off the monitor and you fall into bed and let that be the end of it.

On the not-so-fortunate days? Well, the following can happen. You get loopy without even recognizing the fact that you're tired. You keep on writing as if everything were fine, but strange things begin to happen. Ideas that would seem outlandish and out-of-place begin to make perfect sense, sex and violence become far more important than they should (not that they aren't very, very important) and everything can take on an air of being set to the beat of a metronome until finally, dialogue and prose spiral into little more than gibberish.

This was all compounded by two things; one, that I had finally reached the first flashback chapter, which also happened to be the chapter that contains the idea that started this entire story. Varric yelling, "That's one more for the dwarf! How many you got, Hawke?" and Hawke throwing an absolute temper-tantrum after having heard this same line for nearly ten years. And secondly, that this was the first time I was writing from Isabela's perspective, a character pretty much defined by a mixed bag of violence, sex and alcohol.

Eventually, I did fall asleep. Laptop still on my chest, electronic cigarette resting in the crook of my arm. When I came out of the self-induced coma, I found myself reading through two horrific scenes. An utterly unusable chapter that read like a narration of a music video on MTV (directed by a coke-addled student of Michael Bay, performed a death metal band and starring Miley Cyrus with massive breast implants cosplaying as a blood-spattered, dark-haired pirate) and a series of 'Arthur's Notes' that rambled on for two and-a-half pages about daggers and sex.

In my loopy state, I had apparently decided that it was a super idea to give Isabela Jarvia's Shank and Beraht's Revenge, the two daggers from the first Rogue Item Pack. Only I didn't want to call them as such because 'Jarvia's Shank and Beraht's Revenge' are a sequence of letters that is rather cumbersome to type repeatedly, so I called them Jarvia and Beraht instead, and subsequently felt the need to explain my actions. So that's how the following series of notes began. How it got to where it winds up? Your guess is as good as mine.

The chapter is gone, for the most part. Whatever remains of it was in the material you just read(i.e. a herd of cows on fire, the bridge being the major setting of the first half, a few lines of dialogue). But I have left Arthur's Notes fully intact as a cautionary tale of writing tired. (Actually it's because I enjoy laughing at myself, but the first reason sounded better.)

One final warning, that word being in bold (and should probably be in all caps) so as to catch the attention of people who might be skimming this. The following, as it progresses, becomes increasingly vulgar. I know that there are far more descriptive and grotesque things available on this site, but the WARNING is there nonetheless:

Here there be perverts.

ARTHUR'S NOTE(S)* - *****

*This is to those vets of Origins and DAII with the Rogue Item Packs who might've been saying, "Hey, wait a second, shithead! Those aren't the names of the daggers, you tool! If you're gonna do it, do it proper, or eat my mighty Warden-Commander's boot! He/She didn't run through the Carta Underground for four and-a-half goddamned hours on Normal/Hard/Nightmare difficulty one night in Origins just so that you can get the names of the fucking daggers wrong, bucko! Do you have any idea how annoying it is to run around a massive map with idiot companions setting off traps every fifteen feet, or the fact that there even were traps every fifteen feet! Get the names right!"

C'mon, what do you want from me? Do you really want me to write the daggers' names in full every single time they're mentioned? If I do it once, I can't just stop, because then that would be the name of the fucking dagger. Beraht's Revenge, Jarvia's Shank. "Hi, these are my daggers, Beraht's Revenge and Jarvia's Shank. They'd like to dance. Now you're dead in a pool of your own blood, mister bandit jerk-off, and 'jerk-off' begins with the letter 'J' and 'bandit' and 'blood' both start with a 'B' and just so you know, the letters 'B' and 'J'** were brought to you today by Beraht's Revenge and Jarvia's Shank."

"Why not nicknames, then?" You ask. "Introduce them as Beraht's Revenge and Jarvia's Shank, but then just have Isabela calling them Beraht and Jarvia after that."

A.) Because the operative words here are not Beraht or Jarvia, but rather Revenge and Shank. Both daggers stand for something. When Beraht died, Jarvia, his first-in-command and ever-constant fuck buddy, as is quite evident, lost her friggin' marbles. And don't tell me otherwise, because no sane motherfucker lays down twenty-seven thousand trigger-wired explosives in their own extremely well-hidden crime den. Just imagine the daily on-the-job casualty reports from her subordinates failing to remember where every single wire was. Why else would she have had to bring in so many outside contractors into Orzammar, the capitol of the Fuck Tall People nation? There were a lot of Tal-Vashoth and elven assassins with puckered buttholes walking around that place on pins and needles, let me tell you, friend; everyday life in the Carta Den probably looked like a scene out of Scooby Doo, watching the crew of The Mystery Machine creeping around a haunted mansion and praying to Christ that the asshole janitor did it so that Scoobs and Shaggy wouldn't freak the fuck out in some pot-fueled frenzy at the first sign of paranormal activity, and if you even mention that little shit-stain Scrappy I'll…

Um, I seem to have gotten off-topic. Oh, right, the operative words are Revenge and Shank, because Jarvia became the leader after Beraht's quite timely demise and used those daggers to rain a shit parade of misery down on her enemies (and subordinates), effectively putting the shop-owners and the commoners of Orzammar into a choke-hold. There's depth and passion in her shank and her dead fuck buddy's vengeance, and I can't screw around with that.

B.) Because using nicknames suggests a level of familiarity with her weapons that borders on 'friendly', which is intruding on occupied ground, if you know what I mean. Bianca is the only belle of the ball at this party, my friends.

"Okay," you say, "then why not use Heartbreaker and Backstabber or Fiona and Bard's Honor?"

First of all, Heartbreaker and Backstabber were effectively useless beyond their names, which I'm happily willing to admit are some of the best uses of foreshadowing I've ever seen in a videogame, and secondly because those were specifically meant as elements of storytelling which, once all was said and done and you decided to duel Senior "I'm about to chase your ass around the room for the next twenty minutes and skewer you in the least glamorous boss battle in years," {discounting Space Magic Boy, that scummy little twat}, didn't mean anything after that. Isabela, like all the characters, develops and becomes more than she was at the start. So she most certainly should not still be using them, for any reason, beyond writing a story or flashback chapter within the setting of the first two Acts.

As for Fiona and Bard's Honor? Well, to be honest, once I'd begun the Nevarran Job 4/5, and realized the rocky road I'd started to walk down by mirroring my actions in the game (if my FemHawke was romancing Isabela, they'd share. One axe and one dagger a piece. If Hawke wasn't romancing her or if she simply couldn't resist Merrill when the dainty little thing traipsed awkwardly into her foyer and started rambling, then they'd go back to individual sets; but one thing was certain once I had both Rogue Item Packs; the Revenge, the Shank, Fiona and Bard's Honor would always be in play) I did attempt to rewrite it so that Isabela had the axes. But I found in the writing of it that Isabela simply doesn't gel with axes like she does with daggers.

Isabela is a force of nature, a dusky goddess smelling of brine and ocean winds and the exotic oils of distant lands, and whether or not all of this is done in an effort to mask the otherwise overbearing stench of booze and burped semen***, she is an artist of sorts, and you can't paint the canvas she uses red with the kind of flourish she has by putting axes in her hands. She's a dagger girl.

So, essentially and to wrap this up before I delete the whole thing out of a hatred of pointless verbosity (who am I kidding?), I guess I'm trying to explain that I consider these daggers to be non-canon canon. They are Jarvia and Beraht, two daggers heavy with lore that the good Lady Hawke came upon in her travels and bequeathed unto her besty Isabela as a way of saying "I love you, stay alive, if at least because you're a really good lay." Where they have been and why they were named as such is up to you to decide as I leave the matter in your very capable hands, but vengeance and shanking are no longer a part of the equation.

** Tee-hee, BJ. I swear, I didn't do that on purpose. I was doing the Sesame Street shtick. I didn't realize until after I'd put apostrophes around the letters what was happening, and then stopped to giggle for longer than was appropriate for a man in the latter half of his twenties.

*** Yes, that's right; burped semen. Let's be realistic, people, birth control in this land consists of waiting for menopause**** or that rare fortunate fall down a flight of stairs. The day Isabela lets any man plant a load inside of her is the day pigs find out that clouds aren't giant, edible fluffs of cotton and Fred Phelps wakes up bright and early, throws back the curtains, opens a window and shouts to the world, "Would someone please, for the love of all that is holy, bring me some cock!"

Which, oddly enough, I'm fairly certain Isabela has shouted on more than one occasion. Because, as is made evident through both games, she is a highly proficient and very skilled lover with a monstrous sexual appetite and, ahem, seeing as this is the case, there is no way in hell that she'd simply let a man… y'know, spend himself on the sheets or the floor or the deck or the grass (unless he was especially gross and Isabela simply had to scratch an itch, in which case, I'll grant you she's probably just going to be burping the booze it took to fuck him in the first place). Otherwise? As the nun said to David Duchovny, "Well, something tells me it's not gonna suck itself, Hank."

It might be slutty, but it's also the mark of a true craftsman. And Issy's no slouch.

**** Wynne, I think, not being a slut and knowing that she has already popped one out (ugh, another brow-beating 'the good of the many' Communist running around in Thedas, it's enough to make a motherfucker wretch at the thought) probably had a great deal more sex in her later years. Not that any of that sex entailed blowjobs, mind you. Wynne has always stricken me a missionary first, cowgirl second and only when intoxicated.

I'm just spit-balling here, but with all of the sexy talk in the party banter between her and the guys, albeit ninety-nine percent being harmless flirtation amongst getting-to-know-you chitchat, I think there's one percent wildcat in there, and methinks that once she decided to travel with Shale, after Urthemiel bit the big one, instead of returning to the Circle and helping with the rebuilding efforts, she probably became quite the cougar, prowling around towns at night searching for easy prey. Yes, menopause has its ups as well as its downs, I suppose.

Still, this shouldn't dissuade anyone from shooting her on sight.*****

***** This message has been approved and paid for by the ECCHF.

Evil Commie Cougar Hunting Force, unite!