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Isabela sets up tripwire the same way she drinks vintage merlot and gets out of bed in the mornings: slowly, lovingly, luridly, with just the smallest caress of sun-stroked fingertips to let friend and enemy and lover all be assured she’s moving in for the kill and you’d better step back if you don’t want your knickers getting dirty and you like all your fingers where they are. She’s working with Hawke in some Maker-forsaken sewer or cave or whatever they’re calling filthy holes in the fabric of Kirkwall these days when Hawke turns to her, eyes sharp like the burst of the summer sea, and says, “I think we’ve been at it long enough, don’t you?”
She knows Hawke and she knows herself and she knows them, and so by extension Isabela knows Hawke isn’t talking about the wire she’s securing like a lover’s corset laces or the oil spill just waiting to ignite. “I suppose so,” she says, twirling the end of the wire, pretending her heart isn’t pounding out a tarantella loud enough for the Antivan Circus to recruit her on the spot for an act. “Pay attention and we’ll be done in a flash, sweet thing.”
“Good, because you could contain all the attention I’ve got left in my little toenail.”
“When you set it up wrong when I’m not around and you burn all that hair and those eyebrows off and lose my favorite earrings and I’ve got to bail your arse out of some Orlesian prison on the rocks I’m going to throttle you.”
“Into next week?” Hawke smiles like a knife. Isabela wants to hold it to her throat.
“Into your bloody fifty-first nameday,” she answers, not even looking up. When she’s done, Isabela smiles at her tripwire and touches her muddied fingers to her lips, slipping one last sidelong glance along the length of the oil and tightrope-taut wire; “Make mummy proud,” she whispers, and then she’s tugging Hawke away to a safe distance where they can hear it—the footfalls, the tension reeled tight, and then the explosion like a crushing pulse of thunder stacking up high to shake the heavens and the earth.
That’s when she pulls Hawke out into the moon-shadows and around a deserted Lowtown corner and lets her press her up against the wall, all mouths and skin and heat. That’s when Isabela well and truly loses what little she had left of her mind after she marched back into the Viscount’s Keep months ago and stared down fate and consequence with her jaw set and her chin tilted up in challenge. Because it wasn’t then she lost it; it’s here, now, with sulfur on the wind and Hawke’s mouth on hers, it’s the torchlight burning ten paces away and rippling in the softness of their skin. It’s here, with her name on Hawke’s tongue and the part of Hawke that has carved out an existence for Isabela inside her own flesh and blood; it’s here, because this is all she’s ever really wanted. Familiar weight, familiar breath. Fixed stars in a foreign sky. And she still doesn’t know what to do with it.
—
All right, all right, just—get your tongue back in your mouth and listen to me, Hawke. I’m going to show you—no, no, I know your game, pudding, and I’m going to win it later but for now you keep your hands where I can see them. All right. Ready? I’m going to teach you how to set a tripwire so that in the event I am captured by pirates or Qunari or a small army of busty Orlesian bards—do try not to laugh like that, you great slag, it’s unbecoming—anyway you’ll kill the lot of them before they ever see you coming and I won’t lose my head and my breakfast worrying. But in the event that I run off with some fit Antivans with knives as shapely as their You Know Whats, do not come for me. In fact, please endeavor to follow my example.
Now. The first thing you need to do is start with empty hands. You are me at seventeen. You are me on the Llomerryn docks at midsummer and the stars are not your own. You’ve got nothing, no one. You’ve only your own eyes and the cords of your muscles to trust. You are born not of a mother and a father, but of betrayal and sea salt and the bones of the red earth, and you have to find your place even when the world fights you every step of the way. Learn your destination. Learn your enemy. Learn your blood.
—
She’s never been a woman for deconstruction. The way Isabela sees it, things just happen and people are people and if you take a slight detour down the highway of their lives, more’s the better for you; of course, that was all before Marian Hawke broke the code of her juicy exposé and rearranged her entire alphabet into something like verse, and ever since then, ever since she woke up one morning six years ago and Hawke was still there and she still didn’t know how to use a bloody hairbrush, Isabela’s been analyzing everything.
Like all the things other people know how to do and she doesn’t. Making a good cup of cocoa, or ironing clothes, or getting a pie crust into the pan without ripping it eight times and cursing fluently in three languages. How to console the bereaved. The word perfunctory. What prunes are even for. Ordinary, everyday toast-and-tea miracles she never learned, things she secretly yearns for and secretly thinks must be terribly important. She can navigate a frigate through a hundred-year storm, she can kill half an enclave of slavers before most people even roll over in their beds in the morning, she can recite Rivaini poetry until her blood beats around the words, and she knows exactly what to wear with orange, but she can’t mend stockings, can’t say the things that really matter until they’ve gone bad and moldy and she has to throw them out so they don’t spoil her, too.
Mostly, she tells herself it doesn’t matter; mostly, she stamps out her envy under her boot like a cigar, tells herself she doesn’t need it and thinks herself a philanthropist and a hypocrite in rapid succession, but she’s really a liar of the worst sort: the one who believes the things she says.
“Maybe,” says Aveline, because Aveline is the sort of steel-toed, perpetually constipated comfort a woman turns to in times of great emotional upheaval and also drunkenness, “just maybe you’re overthinking this.”
“Maybe you’re a cock,” Isabela says, her tongue lapping purposefully at the rim of the whiskey bottle they’re sharing as she eyes Aveline, who smacks her wrist and frowns her stoniest frown.
“You are, you soppy tramp, I can’t even believe we’re having this conversation. It’s been—what, six years now? And you’re honestly asking me this question?”
“You’re just not answering because you don’t know. Tight-arse. Soggy blanket.”
Aveline makes a sound a little like an irritated moose and settles against Isabela, all warm skin and warm breath. “This is going to sound stupid. I’m going to sound like I’ve got, like I’ve got ants in my bits.”
“I always think you sound like you’ve got ants in your bits.”
“Andraste will fix me a place right at her side for this.”
“And she’ll give me the one right between her legs so we’ll never be apart, big girl,” she laughs, and Aveline, who’s never been very good at ignoring Isabela at all and who Isabela secretly loves the way people love those friends who are very sensible and boulder-like and beautiful in their stiff-necked, fiery glory, laughs with her.
“This is—Maker, this is going to sound stupid, and it’s not very helpful, but the best thing I can tell you is that it’s a matter of never doubting it. The only reason you’d ever doubt it is because you had to—because you had to wonder, because you have to know, but you already do. And it’s not a big epiphany, not really, it’s something that just sort of creeps up on you like wrinkles or springtime blooms. You look outside one day, and you realize everything is green and all the tulips are up. It isn’t surprising but it is. You’re at breakfast, and the sun is in their eyes in a very particular way or they’ve done something stupid or they smile and their voice when they say goodbye—there it is. You question it because you have to, and the knowledge you’ve already got hits you so fast, just, there’s so much, and you just take it and run."
“And what if I don’t know how to run with it?"
“Then you learn,” Aveline says, head so level a dwarf could use it as a balancing beam, her eyes wild and beautiful on Isabela. “Because it’s nothing more and nothing less than two pairs of eyes staring out at the same horizon.”
The scary thing is, Isabela thinks she almost knows what that means. “I could balance a dozen eggs on your head,” she tells Aveline, falling into her lap, laughing, laughing, because there is no analyzing whiskey and warmth and the maps of freckled constellations on your friend’s skin.
—
The next thing you’ll need is some good twine, preferably fishing wire because no one ever sees it in the dark, just like no one will see you if you know how to stitch yourself to the shadows, darkness into darkness. You’ve got to keep a steady hand, Hawke, I know it’s hard for you being so near me and so close to my luscious womanly sensibilities right now and what-all, and—oh dear me, there goes my knife, I’ll just have to lean over—haha—stop—dirty, dirty girl—no, but you have to learn. Listen to me. You are the best thing you’ve got and it’s going to be damn near impossible to remember that sometimes, but it’s the only thing that’ll get you through. You know what your hands are doing and the rest of them never will. Survival, endurance—it has meaning, but only what you can give it. Only the things you know in the dark and you alone, when they don’t see you.
—
“That plate-armor thing is really not a good look for you, you know,” she’s telling Hawke, down in a truly filthy Kirkwall tunnel while she hangs back and watches her set the tripwire. “Makes you look like you belong in Dulci de Launcet’s boudoir.”
“You’re just saying that because it hides my bountiful bosom.”
“No, I’m saying that because it makes you look like the Knight-Captain when something’s died in his pants.”
Hawke’s shoulders go extremely rigid; for a moment, Isabela considers suggesting she take up residence as a part-time Gallows statue. “These men are so lucky, no doubt charging their way down here this instant for the time of their lives,” she says, dead-calm. “They’ll get to see you die.”
“Oh, don’t be that way. Remember the last time we were down in one of these holes? Because I do.”
“It got very sexual. Is it about to get very sexual again?”
Isabela runs an eye and a fingernail down Hawke’s work, shows her how to tighten the knot just gently enough that it’s softer, invisible, like it belongs there with the moss and undergrowth. “I had a crick in my neck for six days after that, you know.”
“You tart. You told me it was worth every twinge.”
“And it was, believe me, my timbers are still shivering, but I think I’d rather do it proper this time and throw you across my bed like we both know you want.”
“Well, well, look at this. Déjà vu. We must stop meeting like this, Captain, I’m going to ruin your reputation, and—oh! You know how I worry, you know how I pine! Whatever will I do if I besmirch the good name of Captain Isabela, Lady of My Loins? I’ll have to be killed in the name of love.”
“Caught having it off in a dark alley near the scene of a cataclysmic explosion,” Isabela murmurs in her ear, all honey, “it could be extremely damaging. Fortunately, I’m the rebellious, disheveled sort with no social graces who doesn’t care a lick for reputation and I’m willing to take a tumble for you, Hawke, literally and figuratively. Your virtue is safe with me, my dear, depraved little slag.”
They’re out of sight by the time the first one trips and the whole thing caves in with the rumble of a scorching hurricane, up the stairs and into Lowtown and onto Isabela’s mattress, and when Isabela looks at her then in the firelight, naked and sparkling for her, she thinks the same thing she always thinks these days. She thinks, Now. Now’s the right time. I should say it. If I know it, I should say it.
But she’s got something in her throat and then she’s got a mouthful of Hawke, and thinking becomes rapidly less important; Hawke has her by the hips, Hawke has her by the heart, and their bodies slot together like glass tumblers and spark and she thinks it, thinks it again and again on the flicker of her breath, but she still doesn’t say it. She doesn’t say it.
Hawke says it because it’s easy for her in a way it’ll never be for Isabela, because it’s just second nature for her like breathing, like forgiveness. Right as rain and violets in spring. After, when Isabela curls around her like a nautilus and falls in love all over again with the rhythm of their blood, the rhythm of their breath, she just thinks, Next time. Next time and next time, tomorrow and tomorrow.
—
See this, here? This is the tension. And this is important, so pay attention, I mean it. You want to wind it tight enough that it’ll catch and they won’t even notice the explosion until it hits, but you want it loose enough that it looks like it belongs even to the wisest, oldest eyes. You need quick hands; you need quicker feet. You need to know exactly what you want, exactly what is good and right and yours, and you need to grab onto it like a prisoner clings to a lock of sky. Like a wolf howls at the moon. Like your own piece of forever.
—
“Bugger fuck,” Isabela swears, which is quite a feat, really, in between the heaving gulps of breath and the pounding of their feet down the docks. Her chest feels like there’s an elephant on fire sitting right on it and she can feel the strain stretching heavy down her legs, her heart in her throat and her throat burning hot-cold and cold-hot in the chilly spring night, and by the time they’ve finally lost them she’s practically drowning on air, hands on her knees in the darkest alley Lowtown has to offer.
Beside her, Hawke is a nightbird in the dark, all angles, black hair falling into her face as she learns to breathe again. The brittle blade of her jaw cuts a smooth line from ear to chin to nose; Isabela can feel more than hear her heart beating out of time with her own. Her hands reach for Isabela’s hips and pull her close, fisting in the fabric when she presses their foreheads together. Connection. Familiarity. Ignition.
“We just outran at least a dozen angry and armed dwarves,” she rasps. Her eyes are as blue as the summertime sea, the sudden suggestion of storms, flashing wicked like violence in the veil of her hair. She looks ruffled and wild and absolutely insane, and Isabela falls a little more love with her, there, digs herself a deeper hole. “We are bloody geniuses.”
“Certified, Maker-sent,” she agrees. Her chest rises with Hawke’s and she catches her around the waist, tired with joy. “Who knew we could run that fast. Who knew dwarves could run that fast.”
“Statues. We need statues,” Hawke breathes, her lips a thread’s breadth from Isabela’s, explosive, yearning. “I’m going to petition Meredith. Anonymously, of course. She can’t refuse, you know, the gorgeous old tosspot. She’s half in love with me.”
“She can and she will and you just made that entire cavern implode. Andraste’s nipples. Maker’s arse. You, you mad, brilliant tart.”
“Did you like it? I did it just for you, apple stuffing.”
“Did I like it,” she mutters, pulling Hawke closer for the thrill of skin and sweat and the faint smell of sulfur and smoke. “Hawke, I’d give up gold for you. Mostly. I’d give it up once a year, at least, but you know. Sentiment, and all, more important than action et cetera et cetera.”
Hawke drags their mouths together, tea and cider, soft and hazy like worship. “I had the best teacher,” she says. “Isabela.”
“Hawke.”
This is when she should say it. Now. Just a tiny string of words like a charm, a singsong peal of letters, a small, three-word burst to wrench the whole world off its axis. She swallows.
“I would kill for you, you know. Actually—haha, funny story about that. About seventeen times, more like,” Hawke tells her, grinning moon-bright. Isabela’s jaw is rusted shut. “I’d die, even. Anything.”
What are you even supposed to say to something like that? Me too? It’s never enough. It’s never what she really means, and all the words run out, and it isn’t fair, that Hawke can do that like it’s milk and honey when she’s trying so hard to do the same.
Isabela kisses her instead, and then there’s nothing but the poetry of their lips and hands and skin on skin, the crescendo of blood and gravity that binds them to each other like thread split from the same spool. It’s easy to know what to do with this but it’s bloody impossible to fathom Hawke’s voice, Hawke’s eyes, Hawke’s forgiveness and patience and love, and even if she’s learning to understand the theory, the logic, even if she’s even learned to let herself want it and take it and shape it, it still feels like a rough, difficult accent that doesn’t fit her tongue. Isabela can do Antivan, Orlesian, passable Nevarran. This one is all consonants. This one, she feels in her blood like rhythm. There’s no translation for that, no approximation of clicks and vowels and sleepy syllables that will ever say what you really mean.
She wonders what it feels like when Hawke says it. If it’s like surrender, or music, or the implosion of an enormous cavern every time it falls out of her mouth. Isabela kisses her and kisses her, Isabela holds on and breathes and hopes she knows, anyway. Hopes she hears it screaming in her bones.
—
And here you go. This is the best part. This is the one you’ve been waiting for since the day your hands ached for something of your own. You set it, like this. You run, like this. You get just far enough away that you can hear the crash, and the roar, and the immutable cascade of fire and fury. You smell the smoke, you feel your heart in your mouth, and you make it out alive. You make it out alive because I’ll dig you up and kill you if you don’t. You make it out alive because this is what you do it for, this is what you learned it for, all those starless nothing-nights spent fishing for your meaning, all your words hungry as thieves and stacked up like ball lightning, like rebels for a revolution, like a tangled storm of flesh and blood and sound.
Because this is what we are for.
This is what we are for.
—
In the end, there’s no explosion, no bright white lights. In the end, she says it like it’s an accident, because it is.
They’re sitting on the floor of her room at The Hanged Man and she’s daubing perfume on Hawke’s pulse point, right at her jugular, trying on a few silks and fingering a necklace of definitely real diamonds courtesy of Duke Prosper de Montfort’s tragically unguarded master bedroom, all his obnoxiously Orlesian treasures smuggled back to Kirkwall mostly in their knickers. They drink pale pink rosé from teacups, and Isabela, her hair swept up in a braided chignon by Hawke’s quick fingers and punctuated with a small red carnation, looks out across this little ocean of theirs and smiles.
“You’re such a girl,” she says, wiggling her toes on Hawke’s knee. “A regular prize sea bass. I bet no one’s ever said that to you before.”
“No one ever told me I could blow men up before you, either,” Hawke says. Her cheeks are pink; Isabela wants to kiss them, so she does. “And no one ever told me I could suck the silver off a set of flatware. That’s important.”
“I would know.”
“You would,” Hawke giggles, and sighs, and presses herself into Isabela, smelling like iris and vanilla. “We are learned women, us. We deserve medals. Where are our medals?”
“I’m sure Meredith will put in to have them forged any day now, if she takes you up on that offer of yours,” she says, making a very vulgar gesture with her fingers and tongue. She pours more wine, plants a very wet and extremely squeaky kiss on Hawke’s cheek and presses her nose into her neck, easy, warm, saying, “I love you to my back teeth.”
And there it is—there it is. There’s the tripwire, the blood in her ears, the footfalls, the detonation. Quiet as spring leaves, soft as a secret, a question she only ever asked because she never really had to ask it at all. It’s a sudden rose at dawn. It’s the river of summer stars at twilight. It’s her fingers and toes and Hawke’s fingers and toes, the smell of carnations, chipped teacups, warm skin and hands and mouths. This is where she wanted to be.
She takes a breath and lets it shock through her and dissolve, feeling wild and naked with sudden exposure, sudden release. All her bits are still intact and she’s not even wearing her lucky red knickers and she said it. She said it. Accidental, irrevocable, the flood rushing in, and maybe that’s all love is ever really about. A river overflowing, knowledge like a dam breaking, a shared horizon that’s yours to watch and shape and chase.
“You might have said,” Hawke tells her, taking her hands and kneading the palms with her thumbs, reeling her in, “even though, you know. I already knew.”
“For Andraste’s—I know you did, Hawke,” she says, every part of her yearning, straining toward Hawke’s palm on her knuckles. “But—you know. I haven’t not been in love with you for a long time now. It’s absolutely pathetic.”
“We are pathetic,” Hawke nods. She wraps herself around Isabela, just the way they belong. “Pathetically gorgeous. Pathetically amazing. Pathetically in love.”
“You make my insides itch,” Isabela confesses. Her nose slots perfectly against Hawke’s.
“You make my girl bits heave,” Hawke says, “and I love you.”
Isabela kisses her, wrapped up in the shelter of Hawke’s arms, in the fathomless spark of potential they make between them. The tangible, the intangible—she can manage both, and here, now, this chain of shared blood and shared breath and forgiveness and desire is a stray star in the sky about to shatter the earth like a fault line waiting to break. It’s better than any trap, stronger than any poison.
“I love you,” she says, just for the shape it makes in her mouth. Outside, the stars rise in fixed, familiar motion; inside, the floor is as good a place as any.
—
And so you burn it, girl. You burn it to the ground.