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Isabela wakes up slowly, just barely dragging herself up from the depths of sleep. Through half-lidded eyes, she observes the dim room with a growing sense of delight; she can see the snow coming down hard outside her window, bright against the charcoal sky. And to top it all off, the gentle swell of a snowdrift peeks up right over the edge of the windowsill. Snowed in, she thinks. Nothing at all to do but waste away the day in bed—ideally with a blazing fire and a bottle of whiskey. She exhales contentedly and burrows deeper in her blankets, piled up around her like the snow outside.
And then Hawke's cold feet bump against her leg and she screams.
“What are you on about?” Hawke mumbles, a big sleepy smile on her face. She shifts beneath the blankets and Isabela scrambles away to the far side of the bed as Hawke tries to prod her with those freezing feet again.
Hawke still looks half-asleep, long lashes hiding her eyes, smile just a touch dopey; if she wasn't so lovely, Isabela might smother her with a pillow. She still might.
“You know what, you fiend! Get away from me before I throw you through the window!” She grunts, trying to sound offended as Hawke scoots closer to press up against her, but doesn't pull away. “This is why I had that rule about no spending the night, you know.”
“Cold feet?” Hawke asks. She yawns and presses her face into Isabela's shoulder. “There's a metaphor in there somewhere.”
And then she pokes Isabela with a toe again, earning a yelp and a flick in the ear.
“How are you so cold?” Isabela demands, shoving at Hawke's shoulder. “Go start a fire.”
Hawke wiggles out of bed without complaint and pads across the room. Isabela grabs Hawke's abandoned pillow and adds it to her own side, scooting back into a nest of warm bedding to soak in the sight. Hawke is still naked from the night before, pale and tall and gorgeous, all muscles and angles and scars. And the big purple bruise on her elbow from falling down the stairs last night. Isabela will never understand how someone can be so graceful on the battlefield, so elegant when she's still, and so tragically clumsy the rest of the time. Dangerously long legs, she supposes. She takes another moment to admire those dangerous legs, humming low in her throat; she's getting marvelous ideas about how to spend the day. Not for the first or the thousandth time, Isabela thinks that she's a terribly lucky woman.
Hawke pulls back for just a second to admire her handiwork of a small crackling fire, and then she hangs the kettle right above the flames unprompted. Cold feet utterly forgotten, Isabela thinks her heart might just burst with fondness.
“Toast and tea?” Hawke calls over her shoulder, making her way across the room and into the little nook of a kitchen. Isabela pulls the blankets up to her chin, closes her eyes, and sighs blissfully.
“You know me well, sweet thing.”
When Hawke comes back to bed with wool socks on (hand-knit by Merrill, hideously misshapen) and two full mugs in her hands, Isabela can't keep the smile off her face. The tea was a gift from Varric, who refused to reveal where he obtained the little red tin, and as far as Isabela's concerned, it's her most priceless possession. Nowhere in Kirkwall sells anything worth drinking, not that she can afford; it's all weak and brown and bland. But this—this tastes like home. It's as bright as blood alone in the cup, a gorgeous orange with a splash of milk, and it settles in the belly like fire. And as she's recently discovered, it tastes even better with a tall, charming, blue-eyed lover bringing it to bed.
Hawke passes Isabela a mug and clambers back into bed, wrapping one of the blankets around her bare shoulders like a cloak. “Let's go out today,” she suggests.
Isabela pins her with a suspicious look and takes a sip of tea, brewed just-right. “Why would we go outside?”
“It'll be fun. We'll go frolic in the snow—”
“—and get horribly ill and die—”
“—and buy holiday gifts for our friends and drink gallons of cider and pelt all my stuffy neighbors with snowballs. We can't stay in! Snow's fun!”
Isabela sniffs. “How very Fereldan of you.”
“Thank you.” Hawke beams—the grin that Isabela can hardly bear to say no to, the one that makes Isabela's heart jump and skip in the most achingly wonderful of ways, the one that Isabela's never once seen Hawke turn on anyone but her. Isabela takes a long moment to burn the image of Hawke's crooked smile and crinkled eyes onto the back of her eyelids. And then she turns up her nose.
“Wipe off that smile. I'm not going anywhere.”
“You owe me.” Hawke leans forward, lifting her brows high over earnest eyes. Isabela scoffs.
“I didn't ask you to nearly get us both arrested stealing that hat last night.”
Hawke grins again. “I didn't need to be asked. I'm awfully thoughtful.”
Isabela sighs and turns her gaze up to the ceiling, as if the beams above might commiserate with her. But no such luck. “If you're not going to let it go, then get dressed and bring me something to wear. And I'm wearing your big coat.”
Hawke leaps from the bed so quickly that it's all Isabela can do to hold on to her mug. But as she watches Hawke dress at a record pace—hopping across the room on one leg while trying to get the other through her pants, pulling her shirt on backwards the first time and getting twisted up in it the second time—she can't help but smile. After weeks and weeks of back-and-forth, it's the seventh night in a row that Hawke's spent in Isabela's bed, the seventh morning that Isabela's watched Hawke get dressed from a growing pile of clothes in the corner of the little room. She's starting to think it's time to stop counting.
*
Isabela pulls the collar of Hawke's thick wool coat up around her neck and peers skeptically out the open door. She's wrapped in two layers of Hawke's clothes—long pants bunched up thick in her boots, tunic too long and too tight all at once, and thrice as warm as anything Isabela's ever owned—but she can feel the chill of the snow settle in her bones even from the doorway. “It's coming down quickly,” she says doubtfully.
“Perfect for an adventure.” Hawke holds out a gloved hand, smile as wide as ever; after just an instant, Isabela returns the smile, takes her hand, and steps out into the storm.
Almost no one else is out on the streets; the city belongs to them and them alone, untouched by any footprints, unmarred by the sound of any other voice. The wind blows the snow haphazardly: it swirls about them at unnatural angles, and great snowdrifts change their shape like dunes with every gust. The lights of buildings dance across the sleek surface of the snow, casting the unfamiliar world in strange hues. And as lovely as it is—even Isabela has to admit that it's lovely, this transformed city of theirs, all its grime masked under a pristine white cloak—she thinks that the most wonderful sight of all is Hawke, tearing through the snow like it's her very first winter all over again. It's enough to burn the chill right out of Isabela, the way that Hawke's joy spreads out to wrap her up in it, too.
Hawke practically gleams with childlike glee as she spins in a circle with her arms outstretched to the snow, head upturned to capture fat flakes on her tongue. “Isn't it beautiful?”
“Mm,” Isabela agrees, focusing instead on scraping a handful of snow off a drift, shaping it into a missile. If there's one thing she's learned about wintertime in Kirkwall—wintertime with Hawke around, at least—it's the importance of landing the first blow. But Hawke beats her to it: right as she straightens up with a snowball in hand, Hawke lets out a whoop and pelts her square in the small of her back.
Isabela's jaw drops and she stumbles backwards, but it's a calculated move; when Hawke bends over with laughter, Isabela sends a snowball to burst right into Hawke's open mouth.
“Hey!”
“That's what you get, you goose!” Isabela leaps away from another shot and digs her gloved hands deep into the snow, shaping another ball as quickly as she can.
She's got the advantage of accuracy, long honed with weapons more dangerous than snow, but Hawke has the advantage of long limbs and a devastating laugh. She comes flying towards Isabela through the snow, wrapping her up in a spinning embrace before Isabela can get off another snowball.
“I don't think you play fair,” Hawke declares, planting a kiss on Isabela's forehead and another on her cheek. Her grip is blazing warm, the only warmth in the entire city, and Isabela lets the half-shaped snow slip out of her fingers—only just resisting the temptation to stick it under Hawke's collar—as she matches the embrace.
“All's fair in love and war, sweet thing,” Isabela tells her.
That catches Hawke's attention; she takes a step backwards and lifts one brow, something between hopeful and unsure. “Which one is this?” she asks.
Isabela steps back into Hawke's arms and lifts herself on tiptoes to press a kiss to Hawke's cold, flushed cheek. “It's a little bit of both,” she says. She can feel Hawke's lips curl up in a smile. It's been years since Hawke first croaked out that particular word—bloody-mouthed and nearly dead, the Arishok freshly slain on the floor behind them, the whole crushing weight of it enough to send Isabela running. But she's been trying it out lately, now that they have everything spread bare between them but the word itself. Carefully. Sparingly. I love having you here. I love the way you laugh. Or casually, almost offhand, waving her hand to encompass a table set for two, a bed just right for both of them, and Hawke, standing right there with a bottle of wine and a sunlight smile: I love this. All of it.
“Both sounds right,” Hawke says. She pulls back to grin. “Let's go get a warm drink.”
“I'd love to,” Isabela says. Hawke's smile is deliriously wide; Isabela knows just how she feels.
*
Isabela expects them to make a turn towards the Hanged Man, but Hawke pulls her down a street she's never explored before, not in all the years she's been stubbornly lingering in Kirkwall. Right when she's ready to ask if Hawke's gotten them lost yet again, they round a corner and Isabela spots an open door, orange light spilling through it to paint the snow in sunset hues.
“Buttered rum and almond tarts worth dying for,” Hawke declares, lifting her voice as they approach the clattering noises of the shop. “I stumbled in last week with Merrill and I've been waiting and waiting to drag you here.”
“If you'd mentioned the rum, you wouldn't have had to drag.”
They stagger through the door and into a sudden dizzying rush of heat, laughing and kicking snow off their boots, before Hawke strides up to the counter like she's been best friends with the shopkeeper all her life. Isabela lingers in the back as Hawke orders; she can't hear them speaking until one of them cracks a joke—presumably Hawke, always infatuated with her own jokes—and Hawke crows with laughter, the warmth of it washing over Isabela. Her whole chest aches.
Hawke turns from the counter, fixes Isabela with those glittering eyes, and makes her way across the shop with two steaming mugs of rum and a crumpled sack tucked under her arm. “A drink each and a tart to split,” Hawke declares, passing one mug to Isabela and lifting up the sack. “We'll go home the same way. I got something sweet for the children we passed, if they're still out playing.”
We'll go home, as if Isabela's little room was the only home Hawke knew, as if she'd choose it again and again over her own grand estate, as if she'd at last caught on to the unspoken invitation. It's just like Hawke to unthinkingly place her whole heart on the table, Isabela thinks. Just like Hawke to say exactly the right thing without even knowing it.
Isabela takes a long swig of the creamy drink, studying Hawke over the lip of her mug. “Hawke,” she says at last, a hundred words all crushed into one. Hawke's smile is almost shy.
“That's me.”
“Spend the night again,” Isabela says, like it was anything other than inevitable. “Stay. Until the snow's gone for good.”
“What happens then?”
“Anything could happen then. Maybe you'll steal me a ship and we'll summer in Rivain. Maybe you'll finally let me redecorate your estate. Maybe we'll both be killed by some new horror you've unleashed upon the world.” Isabela pauses. “But this—this having you around, being together—I could get used to it, sweet thing. I want to. We've wasted enough time, haven't we?”
Hawke looks just slightly dizzy. She nods. “If I'd known it was as easy as half a tart, I'd have brought you around here before now.”
Even if it sticks in her throat, Isabela knows exactly how she feels about Hawke. She knows it, deep in her bones. She's never been so certain of anything—never had so much faith in anything but Hawke. Best of all, Hawke knows it, with patience enough for the both of them. And as they step back into the roaring winds of a worsening storm, she feels warm and sun-soaked and loved, even with snow melting into her hair and the shoulders of her coat. As long as Hawke's there, Isabela has summer itself at her side.