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Chapter Text

The third time the assassins arrive through her window, Fenris happens to be there.

Frankly, and as much as she hates to admit it, he's the only reason she survives that one. He's lounging by the sill as she folds a new bit of jewelry into her hair, nothing saucy, only a little knot of gold—and then the next thing she knows he's a blur of silver light and brilliant crimson spraying across her perfectly-stained floorboards. She's got her own dagger in hand by the time the second one comes over the sill into Fenris's fist; the third she gets herself, a neat little bite right beneath the second rib that sends him sprawling with a gasp across her floor.

"Isabela," Fenris says, just too low, but she ignores him to circle the man bleeding out at her feet, dropping one knee ungently between his shoulder blades.

The man lets out a long, low groan, and Isabela bends closer, her gold wristcuff flashing in the afternoon sunlight. "You aren't going to make me ask who sent you, are you? That would be terribly predictable."

His spittle lands just to the left of Fenris's bare foot, spotted red. "Thieving snake!" She lets a little more weight shift to his back and he groans again; then he says, "Roscuro wishes his—ugh—investment returned."

Of all the— "It's been returned. Several times over, as a matter of fact."

"You owe us, Isabela!"

"Mm. I don't think so." The blade flashes again and with a short exhale, he slumps and does not move again. She rises, swipes ineffectively at the blood darkening the knee of her boot; Fenris stands in the Hanged Man's narrow hall already, glancing both directions before pulling the door closed. "Empty?"

"So far as I can see. Isabela—"

"Well, then that's that." He's still watching her. She can feel it. "I suppose someone will have to let the guard know. Aveline will be positively thrilled, I'm sure."

"Do not—"

"Or another word starting with 'p' anyway, probably pissed—"

"Isabela."

She could pull away from his grip around her wrist. She knows it and he does too, but instead she doesn't, and when he tugs she lets herself be turned. "You're going to want me to talk about this, aren't you?"

"There are three dead men on your floor."

"Hardly the first time that's happened."

"Is that so?"

"Well." She does pull away this time, spins to sit on her low, worn bed, one foot crossed irritably over the other. "He only sent two last time."

Fenris watches her warily for a long moment, then bends to rifle through the pockets of the corpse nearest his feet. For once Isabela feels little urge to join him; something about Fenris being here has made this realer than she'd like, and she doesn't think he'll let her forget it this time. He emerges eventually with a folded letter already smeared with blood, which he hands to her without ceremony.

"What, Varric's lessons not enough for special occasions?"

"Not with any speed." He's not looming, exactly, but it's near enough to make her push off the bed to bring them closer to height. "Read the letter, Isabela."

"I know what it says," Isabela tells him, though her fingers are already tearing the tattered envelope apart. "'Dear pirate whore, please give us more money or else.' After the third or fourth one, you learn raiders are fairly predictable about these things."

"Do they often send assassins to kill you in the middle of the day?"

Isabela closes her eyes, crumpling the letter in her hand. "Well, not really. But that's because Roscuro sent these men."

"And who is Roscuro?"

"A ghost," she snaps, and she can see the moment Fenris's eyes shutter. "And it's not that I don't appreciate the concern, sweet, because I really do, but I can handle this one, all right? I'm a big girl, and I've dealt with him before."

"Of course," Fenris says, slow and careful, but the line of his jaw tells her he will not let this go.

—

Aveline, of course, is the one who brings it up again just when Isabela's sure everyone's forgotten it. In the middle of a really superb hand of Wicked Grace, too, which is just insult atop injury—and she asks loud enough to stop the game altogether, Miss Whatever-Happened-With-Those-Assassins Aveline Bloody Vallen.

"They died," Isabela purrs, which ought to be the end of it, but once the guard-captain's set a bone Hawke can't leave the meat on it, and soon enough the whole table's got her perfectly private assassins dragged out in full glory to be worried over. Fenris doesn't even say anything to stop them, just looks at her with that eyebrow lifted and that inscrutable look that tells her nothing and everything at once, and when Varric starts pressing her on the details Isabela lets out an annoyed sigh and crosses her arms.

"But what are you going to do?" Merrill asks, chin propped on her hands.

"Oh, I don't know. Does anything need to be done?"

"Aren't you the least worried they might try again?"

"Didn't work very well for them the first few times, did it?"

As soon as the words are out of her mouth Isabela knows she's torn it. Hawke's inhale hangs sharp in Varric's suite, and even Anders looks distinctly appalled; when Fenris sits back with his frown etched even deeper she throws her hands in the air. "Look, I've got it managed, I swear."

Aveline scowls. "The same way you managed the Arishok? With the city burning behind you?"

"Nothing like that. This is personal."

"Then all the more reason to nip this in the bud."

That's too easy, and despite the assortment of concern spread around her Isabela can't help the leer. "If that's all you're nipping, I think—"

"Isabela." Hawke, her round eyes rounder in worry, and Isabela's mirth falls away. She hates it when Hawke worries, hates it more when Hawke worries about her. "Are you sure you shouldn't—I mean, don't you think you should have told us? Told me?"

She blows out an explosive breath. "Considering the last time I did that you managed to get yourself skewered, no, not really."

"Isabela, I—"

"Hawke," Fenris says, and for once Isabela can't even mind that he's stepping in, because she knows as well as he does Hawke listens to him. Anything to stop this interrogation from people she likes too much to kill. "Isabela is correct. The situation is under control. Let it go."

"But—"

"Enough."

"All right," she says at last, though her dark brow's still creased with unhappiness, and she lays her nearly-forgotten cards face-up on Varric's worn, knotted table. "But if you need my help, it's yours. You know that, right?"

"I know," Isabela sighs, and looks away from the Angel of Death.

She doesn't have a hand to show. Not yet.

—

Six weeks. Six weeks it takes to charter a ship and a crew she can reasonably trust. Once she wouldn't have thought twice about the sailors with whom she rubbed shoulders—and occasionally more—along Kirkwall's docks, but six years in the same port and she's had her standards ruined. Even worse, she has friends waiting for her to return, as if that's a thing to be expected now that she's come back once already, and somehow she can't bring herself to pull the same old cutthroats she used to, once upon a time.

She snorts. There's a joke in there somewhere, reliability ruining reputations, but before she can quite work it out a long shadow falls over the water next to her own to chase the thought entirely from her head. She leans over the rope stretched between pylons, flicks a pebble into the waves until their silhouettes are entirely gone beneath the rippling water. "Aren't you a little lost, sweet thing?"

"No," Fenris says evenly.

"Are you sure? You look lost."

"I came to find you."

Damn the man and blast him. "Why would you do a thing like that? Or—don't tell me. Maybe we should discuss your eyes again. Necklace."

"Hawke thinks you're preparing to leave the city again."

"I didn't ask her to worry."

"She does all the same. With reason, as it seems."

Isabela snorts and tips her head back, letting a clean breeze from the dusk-lit sea wash through her hair. She's tired of Hawke worrying—tired too of Aveline's looks, and Anders's pointed questions, and Fenris's sideways glances every time she dances too near the edge of a knife. She's kept herself alive all these years on her own perfectly well, light on her feet and blade in her hand, ready to cut and run at the first glance of a storm on the horizon. The last thing she needs is this—dead weight, people looking over her shoulder to second-guess her every move, ready to throw their arms around her neck like drowning sailors the moment things go pear-shaped.

She can't live like this. She can't survive this, and abruptly she's so angry she wants to scream.

"I didn't ask for this, you know," she snaps, and drags in a breath. "In fact, I went to a lot of very expensive trouble to avoid exactly this situation. With coin and blood and shady arrangements in dark corners and everything. This wasn't meant to happen!"

"I believe you," Fenris says, as if he is surprised she might think otherwise, and when she glances over her shoulder his affront shows stark on his face. "As does Hawke."

"Well, that seems like piss-poor decision-making on your part."

His mouth thins; his hand comes to rest on her shoulder, a fleeting touch more suited to a skittish animal than a grown elf, but for at least that moment it's a solid connection where she had not expected one, and it's enough to ground her when he says, mouth just twitching wry, "In Hawke's company, I have learned this to mean friendship."

Damn it. She doesn't want to laugh, not now, but she can't quite keep the smirk back as his hand falls away again. "Suppose I can't argue with you there."

"I imagine you would find a way if you wished." He shakes his head at his own smile, steps closer. "I came for a reason, Isabela."

"So much for philanthropy."

"How much do you trust your crew?"

Isabela smoothes a hand over her bandanna, glancing reflexively to the tall spare shadow of her chartered ship across the pier, sails furled and spars lashed against the burgeoning night. "Enough to get me where I'm going."

"As I thought." He hesitates and his eyes drop for only an instant; then they return to hers, harder, and Fenris lifts his chin. "Let me come with you."

What? "Why?"

His shoulders shift, embarrassment and defiance and prickly charm all mixed together, and a rush of something stupidly warm surges in Isabela's chest. "Friendship," he says at last.

The worst reason she can imagine, and Isabela throws her arm over his shoulder before she can stop herself. "I'll never be one to keep a soul from the sea," she tells him, though just to make sure she's still herself she leans the minutest bit too close at the end. "Though just so you know, the captain's cabin does require a… personal invitation."

Fenris rolls his eyes, but he doesn't push her away—and despite the unimpressive light thrown by the evening's first torches on the city's walls, she can see his smirk.

—

Fenris, who is many things, is not a sailor. Isabela knows this before they board, knows too his experience with ships has been limited to a terrified stowaway near ten years in the past. This does not change her demand that all hands find use on her ship, and within the day of Kirkwall disappearing to the white wash of wake-water behind them she has Fenris at the quartermaster's hip as she makes her rounds. Thalia's a tall, dark-skinned woman Isabela would swear to have Qunari blood were it not for the lack of horns, but she's quiet and dependable and takes no shit from the rest of the crew, and for that reason alone Isabela likes her.

Regardless, Fenris does not complain, and when Isabela stumbles across him practicing knots with the bosun on the third day of the journey she's annoyed at her own surprise. Not that she'd expected him to complain so soon, but not that she'd expected this either, Fenris looking so at-ease on her ship, and she—

Balls. She doesn't know. "Well?"

"Well," Fenris says, and lifts for her inspection a length of wood with a sailor's hitch knotted twice around the middle. "Your man felt I should learn this."

"He's right," Isabela says, leaning on the rail, and the bosun rises with a respectful nod at her dismissal. "Now show me you can do this in half the time with rain lashing across your face, the ship tossing like the wind under your feet, and every bit of you colder than a witch's tit."

He doesn't laugh, though she can see the amusement in his eyes. "Give me the storm, Captain, and I will endeavor to oblige."

Oh, but she likes the sound of that. Especially in his voice, with that black eyebrow lifted just so, talking of storms. "Careful, sailor, or I'll take you in for insubordination."

He does laugh that time, and Isabela grins as she leans both elbows on the rail. Already the outermost edges of Kirkwall have vanished behind them, even the roads turning away from the shore to leave the world nothing but sea and sky, marked at their edge with a thin strip of distant pines. The ship rolls under her feet with every wave and she loves it, draws in a breath of salt and wet wood and rope and sweat and freedom, though she'd never admit it, and when she lets herself exhale it's through a dangerous lightness in her chest that makes her eyes burn.

She's missed this. Oh, she's missed it so much.

But she can't let herself dwell, not now, not with people around, anyway, and before she can quite succumb to the water's call she turns on her heel, the rail worn and smooth at the small of her back, and watches Fenris instead. His long, dexterous fingers twist in and out of the ropes, rare hesitation on the over-under the only fault, and the clear morning sunlight catches occasionally in the lyrium that runs over each knuckle. Good hands. Strong hands. They look better on her ship than she'd thought.

"You're staring," Fenris says. He doesn't sound as though he disapproves.

She doesn't either. "I like what I see."

His eyes flick up to hers, a flash of surprise before he folds it out of view. "Your boatswain, I think, would disagree."

"That's why I outrank him, sweet thing."

"Isabela."

"Captain," she says, because she is, and because she likes it. "I wasn't talking about the knots, you know."

"I know. Captain."

There's something in the word that stops her. Something new, and touched with more than friendship can easily explain. "Tell me how you like sailing so far."

Fenris rolls his shoulders, narrower without the armor, and looks back to the water behind her, the churn of their wake's froth dying away into the smoother roll of the sea. The sun glints on his hair to wash it even whiter; then he glances at her again, those damnable eyes too sharp. "The sailing itself goes well enough. However, I would prefer it if…" He tugs restlessly at the end of the knot, then makes a gesture between them. "It would be better without the danger to you."

Startled, she says, "Oh." Then she laughs, too bright, and adds, "That's stupid. We're always in danger."

"Not alone, however. Hawke was concerned."

"Hawke's concerned, you're concerned, everyone's concerned. If you don't watch yourself I'll start thinking there's a heart hidden under those delicious leathers somewhere, caring about me."

He ought to shrug it off. He has for years, after all, despite her recurrent and frankly inventive offers; instead Fenris only inclines his head, still with that look, and abruptly she thinks that if she were to ask for a kiss or a smolder or anything, right now, for the first time in their long friendship it might be more than a joke.

"Yes," Fenris says, "I was concerned."

There are a thousand things on her tongue. The most attractive option is to simply move closer right now, to drape her arm over his shoulder and see where the wind takes them. She's considered it before—in excruciating detail, in fact—and this seems like the best chance she's ever had to find out exactly how far down those tattoos reach. All she has to do is step forward. One step.

She doesn't move. Fenris's eyebrow quirks upward; a faint, dry smile twitches at the corner of his mouth. Then the bosun calls from below and the moment breaks, soft as a gull lifting off the white caps of the sea.

"Captain," he adds, low, and is gone.

She stands there for a long while, after. The bit of wood with his knots lies forgotten on the closed lid of a barrel; with every sway of the ship it rolls an inch one way and then back the other, the long woven ends of the rope just brushing the deck.

"Right," she says at last, impatient at her own confusion, and slaps both palms on the rail. Flirting she knows well, but Fenris's eyes… "What the shit was that?"

The sea offers no answer, at least not one she can recognize, but somehow she suspects it's laughing at her.

—

Regardless, Isabela is not one to worry when there are other things to be done, and soon enough she puts the conversation from her mind. She has a ship. For now, at least, but it's hers, and her crew and her waters, and for the next several days she contents herself with the wild salt winds of the sea. The sailing goes smooth enough, the waters calm and the sky fair, and when there are only three nights between her and Rivain she leaves the mess behind and goes instead to the bow. Fenris watches her go—she can feel it, the weight of his eyes warm and heavy on the back of her neck—but she does not wait for him and he does not follow, and when she gains the prow she curls both hands over the cool stained railing and breathes as deep as her lungs will let her.

She remembers these stars. A dozen years since she's seen them—more, maybe, with the shift of those memories, and the way the world was always larger to eyes not used to open sky.

How old had she been then? Fifteen, perhaps, sixteen on the outside. Old enough to know there were some things that were gone once they were lost—old enough to watch a man die at her feet and feel fierce joy at his dying. She'd taken blood for the first time beneath these stars, held a dagger, gave herself her own name. She'd learned how to shift her feet with the rock of a wave instead of forcing her weight through it, that some things were easier to flee than fight.

Fifteen, sixteen. Old enough to pull her weight on a ship. Old enough to know where she belonged.

Some fish breaches the water portside, distant in the darkness and with small-enough spray she feels no alarm. Nothing to fear in these waters—not for her, anyway, who learned them before all others—and Isabela tips her head back to better see the stars. The Bear she finds first, and the Seven Cups just southward; a trice's tracing with her fingertips and she can touch the Archer, his bow bent back far as it goes while he sights the quarry he'll never catch.

Roscuro had taught her that one.

Isabela spits into the sea, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. "Pig," she says into the darkness, the sound almost lost beneath the slicing hush of her prow splitting the waves beneath her feet. His fault she'd had to throw herself in with Devon, his fault she'd lost the ship in the first place, his fault she'd found herself in debt up to her eyes—

"Liar," she adds more quietly, and doesn't mean Roscuro this time.

But the choices are long made, and the debts long paid out, and if she's learned nothing else from Hawke over the years she's discovered sometimes there's nowhere left to run. She's faced the bloody Arishok with nothing between his army and her daggers but Hawke's word; she can kill one man with no more strength than gold's weight. She can. She has.

The galley door opens behind her in a long thin strip of yellow light. Isabela doesn't turn as her crew spills outwards with laughter and quiet conversation; the watch will change soon enough and the world will settle again, and she's too familiar with the way her ship sighs with the wind to think she needs to break the nightspell now.

She lifts her head, closes her eyes into the wind. The breeze picks up into her hair, across her thighs; a sail snaps; a man calls out in a low voice as a rope creaks beneath its tightening. The fish breaches at her left again with a shallow splash; the hull groans, deep and slow, as a turn at the tiller sends them truer north. She draws in a deeper breath, thick with salt, her eyes stinging—

"Captain," says Thalia, and Isabela opens her eyes.

"Go ahead," she says without turning.

"The watch is changed."

"Noted."

Thalia doesn't move. Isabela can see her out of the corner of her gaze, tall and dark and patient, her black hair braided and tied low on her neck. Her arms are crossed over her chest, softer without her staff in hand, gentler, as if Isabela has not seen her crack open a man's skull with one blow. "How was dinner?" Isabela asks after a moment, carelessly.

"Cook served sea bass. You know that she loves the brown sauce."

"With the—"

"Pickles," they say together, and she can feel Thalia smile. "I take it there wasn't much improving on perfection."

"No, Captain," Thalia says, and now Isabela can hear the point. "It seems one of the new ones is not fond of fish."

"Was there trouble?"

A breath of laughter, broad shoulders shifting. "None. Only, Escra saw he would not eat it."

She snorts. "Any man who can't handle a little heckling doesn't belong on my ship."

"It was not much, Captain. He took it well. He said that he would be happy to show Escra how to catch a fish with his bare hands, were he given line long enough to reel the man in again after."

Isabela doesn't try to stop her chuckle. "Escra couldn't catch a fish if it presented itself to him tail-first."

"Escra knows. He laughed also, and said in the end that he was glad the captain had a friend aboard."

Her laughter falls away, goes silent. She looks over her shoulder at last because she must know—but there's nothing there, no mockery, no unsubtle question in Thalia's dark, serious eyes. Only understanding. "Is that," she murmurs, half to herself, "what they're saying?"

"It was only dinner, Captain," Thalia tells her, calm, respectful. She touches her temple in salute and withdraws into the dark.

Is that what they're saying? She turns again to the prow, her gaze lost somewhere between the edge of sea and starlit sky. Even her crew, convinced by coincidence that their landbound captain has tethered herself to more than the dead weights of Void-taken decency and honour; that now she's gone and bloody found herself a group of friends. Not that she hadn't known herself already, Hawke and Aveline and Merrill and Varric too close to be anything else, but at least here, with Fenris, she had hoped—

She doesn't want to fuck him, and she doesn't know why.

Family, she knows Hawke would say, and worse there's a small irritating part of her that knows Hawke would be right, that it'd be the sort of thing where she'd still want to talk to him the next morning whether or not the sex had been good. It'd be different with him, and it's not that Fenris isn't attractive—because he is—and it's not that she doesn't want to have sex with him—because she does—but for once in her life she doesn't think she'd be satisfied with just one night, one itch to be scratched, one memory, no more. She doesn't understand, and she—

"Enough," Isabela snaps, the word cracking into the night like the lash of an unbound rope. She's the bloody Queen of the Eastern Seas. She's not afraid of anything, least of all her own self.

She won't be soft, either, not when her life's on the line and her crew's looking to her for more than their coin at the end of the journey. Not now. Not with Roscuro just past the horizon and a history older than her name trying to drag her down beneath the waves again. So—later, when she has a little more time, when she can laugh if it goes awry, when she has the freedom to chase a ship as far from him as she can get. Just in case.

(Fifteen, sixteen. Young enough she could still cry; old enough to know her heart, even when she wished she didn't.)

Later, she tells herself, and hates that it sounds like a promise.

Chapter Text

"What do you mean, he's gone?"

The clerk swallows hard enough she can see it, his spectacles dangling precariously at the end of his nose. Understandable, really, considering she's got the knobbed hilt of her dagger tucked neatly against his jugular, but somehow the idea of Roscuro not kindly waiting for her to threaten him into submission had never quite occurred to her during the planning stages of this venture.

Of course, it doesn't help she can feel Fenris rolling his eyes behind her. "Well…when will he be back?"

The man swallows again, looks to Fenris for mercy, finds none. "Four, ah. Four days, messere."

"Four days? Where did he go, bollocking Par Vollen?"

"Jader," the clerk says, appropriately alarmed at the not-so-subtle dig of her hilt a little further into his throat. "But he'll return soon, I swear!"

Not much for it, then. Isabela steps back, sheaths her dagger, runs a palm over its worn wrappings. "Then take a message. Tell him—" she draws in a breath, "tell him Isabela's come to make good on Luis's debt."

"Debt?"

With a grimace, Isabela pulls a small bag from her belt and tosses it to the clerk's desk. Not much gold inside, not enough to really matter—but enough to snare Roscuro's interest, she knows. Enough to keep the guard away while they speak, if no longer than that.

The clerk thumbs a bit of gold with wide eyes, says, half-panicked, "You will return?"

"With all the rest," Isabela sighs, and when she leaves, Fenris follows silently behind her.

—

Four days, as it happens, weighs rather longer than days usually do when one has nothing to do but wait. The first day Isabela spends on her ship with her log—poorly-spelled, she's sure, but it's hardly like Aveline's here to mark it with red ink. Not that she'd mind the big girl being here for once; as dangerous as Isabela knows she can be, she's got nothing on Aveline in righteous indignation for inducing sheer pants-pissing fear. But if Aveline were here Hawke would be too, and probably Varric, nosy, and Aveline would have questions and Varric would have his pen, and Hawke would be fluttering in concern enough to drown her with the guilt. No, better like this—better with Fenris only, who understands best of them all that reopening the past can do more harm than good.

She ought to tell him the truth. She owes him that.

Isabela pinches her nose, tosses the logbook with a sigh to her quilt-covered bed. Later. Soon.

Later.

—

The second day she spends with Thalia and her carpenter Rupert, scrutinizing her ship inch by inch for every rust-ridden nail they can replace within the next few days. She's a lovely ship, if not her own, and they've still half a journey before her return to her master. She's shipshape, as Isabela expects, but they find a few small repairs they can make before they take to open sea again, and at the end of the afternoon she leaves Thalia and Rupert poring over order forms, heads bent close together black and straw-yellow in their perusal.

She drags in a breath, turns her face into the wind off the sea. She can see Fenris on the stern deck made smaller with distance, his shirt gone, his tattoos gleaming as he goes through exercises she doesn't know, sword in hand, step by step.

—

The third day she spends alone. Not intentionally, not at first; she sets out somewhere near midmorning for supplies and finds herself wandering the docks instead, the sea too much a comfort in its steady instability, especially when so much of her own bloody self has caught in hidden whirlpools just off the shore. The shadows thrown by the rope-wrapped pylons grow longer; the sky grows redder with sunset; the tide begins to ebb, waves lapping lower and lower on the docks with every passing wind. This isn't her. This isn't her, this confusion over Fenris and the worry over Roscuro, and she resents her own dithering even as she stalks up the gangplank to her ship and throws open the door to her mess.

"Fenris," she says, impatient with the world, and watches as he lifts an eyebrow, lays down his cards, and comes to meet her. To their credit, her crew continues mostly uninterrupted; there are a few knowing smirks that chafe like unwaxed rope, but Isabela is not Aveline to blush and stammer at the knowledge of watching eyes, and instead she hooks a hand in his collar and pulls him onto the deck proper in the evening breeze, where she can think a bit more clearly.

"I'm going into the city tomorrow," she says at last, her hands on her hips. "Come with me."

He glances her out of the corner of one green eye, the hint of amusement at his mouth. "Should I consider that an order, Captain?"

"Consider it whatever you like."

"An invitation, then."

She laughs; she can't help it. She's never seen him so open; she's never thought— "How smooth you've become over the years, you rotten elf. It's as if I'm rubbing off on you."

"Your influence has taught me more than I expected."

"Is that a compliment or not? Because if not, I take offense."

He inclines his head. "Consider it whatever you like."

"Fair enough," she says, and crosses her arms. "Dismissed, sailor."

"Until tomorrow," he says, lifting a brow, and adds, "Isabela."

—

There's a bar in Rivain she hasn't been to in ten years. Magpie's Crook, it's called, and it's filled to the brim with baubles and treasures and bits of old maps and interesting things people brought from their adventures but couldn't keep, couldn't carry with them. One corner has the first lock of hair a lover ever gave her, a bit of braid tied prettily with blue ribbon and fixed to the jamb with a broken dagger. She hadn't wanted to keep it, of course—she's never been one to carry that sort of thing with her—but she couldn't quite manage to toss it overboard either, not with the odd delight that had swelled in her every time she looked at it, and then they'd docked here and she'd thought—

Well. Better here than altogether forgotten, she'd decided.

She's oddly glad to see it still pinned above the back door when they enter, the ribbon a little faded, the braid a little dusty, and the memory of the man it'd belonged to gone almost as soft with years. Tall. Narrow shoulders, black skin—hands hesitant as sparrows, unsure where to touch her without direction. Isabela abruptly grins—she'd taught him well enough, she remembers, and others, too, and somehow she hopes that despite the years they'd taken what they learned to their next lover, if only once or twice. Too little time to waste on fools. Too little time to waste altogether, and she studiously ignores Fenris standing quietly at her back, watching the sailors laugh and call to each other around stacks of lovely, glittering, worthless trinkets.

The bartender lifts an eyebrow, and Isabela shakes herself roughly. Bloody bar, making her nostalgic—bloody country, the streets too thick with spices and the trees tall and slender and gold-green with sunlight, too close for memory and too sharp to touch. She orders a drink, downs it quick as she can—then she takes Fenris by the arm and says, "Have you ever seen a Rivaini marketplace?"

"No," he tells her, holding her gaze.

"Then come with me," she orders him, not letting go of his arm, not looking back to the little braid held in place by the pieces of a broken knife.

The sunlight strikes them like a wall when they emerge, but Isabela doesn't hesitate; she knows these streets like the tide-drawn winds, the cinnamon and ginger caught in the flap of a flag, the merchant's grin across the way made brilliant by gold-capped teeth. She knows these streets. She knows—

Bright silks, draped purple and blue and gold and green across the tentpoles, cardamom so heavy in the air she can hardly breathe. Shopkeepers shout across the narrow streets at each other, at their customers, at anyone who will listen and more who don't; wooden trays gleam with polished gems and stones, with silk so sheer a breath might tear it, with blades set to thick jeweled hilts, with fruit so red a touch might make it bleed. Ten years and she's caught like an eel netted; she looses Fenris's arm without meaning to, her feet carrying her forward into the press of people. Even the blue silk in her hair and at her waist, bought in a marketplace very like this one long ago, pales compared to the sheer richness of smell and sound and crushed color.

Gold, here—intricately carved necklaces, torques made of twisted wire and polished to a high shine, emeralds as large as her thumb dripping from every loop. A vegetable stand, unsnapped beans piled high in brilliant green; nuts soaked with sweet glaze and rubbed salt in bins beside, fine nets over them to keep back the flies; a gaggle of barefooted, gap-toothed children grinning and sneaking pinches time the merchant looks away. A woman tying back her long braided hair with red-embroidered satin presides over an array of hilted daggers, Antivan dirks lined neatly beside Fereldan knives, a Rivaini cutlass hung suspended from thick leather ties knotted to the tent's sturdy joists behind her. The woman smiles at Isabela's look, the glinting gold dragons at her ears unrepressed by the tent's blue shadow; Isabela shudders, her heart aching, and draws nearer.

She knows this language. Knows it better than the common tongue, better than the flick of a grin as she slides her thumb along a katar with a devilish black-woven hilt and an edge keener than a cry. Her coin, measured out against Rivaini cunning; behind her the children shriek with laughter when they are discovered, and the merchant's curses chase them all the way down the street. Even the noise of distant fountains is too familiar, and she closes her eyes, breathing in, her nose burning with heavy spice, her eyes burning—

"Serah," the woman says, throaty and low, and Isabela blows out a breath like a sigh, sinking into the game like an anchor has dragged her down by her ankles. Fifteen silver, a sovereign, a black-lined hilt made of leather and inset gold—stamped with the sigil of a ship at sea, birds driving ahead to break the wind.

She doesn't know how much she pays, honestly. More than she should have with her mother's blood in her veins, more than any respectable Rivaini with the language of gold and salt on her tongue. But she wants the little knife, more than she usually wants most things, and doesn't care that she's overpaid when the merchant bows and smiles and the dragons glint again, Isabela's coin already secreted away in the layers of her coat.

After that she drifts, aimless as driftwood in a pool, her knife in her hand, her coin returned to her pocket and away from dangerous impulses. They don't know her here, not as they once did—but she knows them, knows every curve unchanged in the clay-brick houses, the seers in their brilliant silk veils, coins dangling from every hem to make an endless song with their passing; the Qunari walking tall and grey and masked among them, purpose-driven, skin shining with sweat. She steps aside as the children dart back again, still laughing, their hair plastered even darker against their heads after some trip to one of the fountains in the square.

A man offers her a palmful of sapphires stained darker than the sea; a woman in dancing satin flips the edge of her scarf around her arm, laughing as Isabela laughs, letting herself be tugged into a momentary two-step at the woman's outspread carpet.

Her accompanist turns his zither to something brighter, meant for festivals, and without quite meaning to Isabela takes her hand and bends and turns and finds her slender cool hand ready to be taken again when she reaches—and her feet know this, stars and skies and Maker's blood. Ten years and she still hasn't forgotten how it feels to dance for the love of it, the zither humming songs old as her heart, her pulse racing, bright eyes and a secret smile there to meet her with every clasping reach. In and out like serpents twisting—she'd watched her mother dance this dance once, no older than five or six herself, peering through the sheer-draped linen to the men and women spinning under the lights within—a scarf pulled from the woman's waist to tie them, Isabela at one end and her gold-wrapped wrist at the other.

She's panting now, the watchers clapping now as they whirl, booted feet stamping alongside woven slippers, her hair come loose from the cloth, laughter breaking out of her hard as a wave on stone, unwilling, impossible to check. The zither laughs with her, the man playing it cheering them both on; he drives it hard to the end and they twist against each other, pulling in on the scarf step by sure step until they are come to rest at last, back to back, heads turned over their shoulders until their noses nearly touch, the scarf wrapped around both their waists to keep them there.

The zither thrums to a triumphant stop; the crowd bursts into applause. Isabela can hardly breathe through the humming in her skin, the bite of coriander scenting the woman's hair—and in the sea of dark braids and dark faces and glinting gold she finds one just a touch paler, hair a shock of white, slender tattoos winding down through skin as familiar as her own.

Fenris is smiling. Not at the dancers, or at the scene of approval, just—at her, openly, something faint and proud and wondering in his eyes that she has never seen before. She drags in a breath as the woman starts to turn; then she's untangling herself from the scarf with clumsy fingers, laughing again with more fluster than she's known in a decade, waving away the woman's invitation for another, not even remembering to check her belt for her new dagger until she's off the carpet and through the crowd that still thanks her as she goes.

She stops in front of Fenris. She's not embarrassed. She's not, even when her fingers muddle the knot of her headscarf as she adjusts it back into place again, even when Fenris's smile grows smaller, and fonder, no hint of shame in the showing of it. Between the cardamom and the brilliant silks, the sight's practically intoxicating.

"Enjoy the show?" she asks. Brazen Isabela, brash Isabela—

"Yes. I didn't realize you knew such dances."

"Authority on all my personal goings-on now, are you? Despite appearances, I do have secrets, sweet thing."

Fenris chuckles, warm and low, and without warning he reaches up to tug the knot of her bandanna more squarely behind her hair. His palm is cool, striped warmer where the lyrium runs, and Isabela can't quite make herself move; and then she doesn't wish to, because instead of withdrawing his fingers brush just barely over the inscribed coins at her ear, over the softer skin just behind it light enough to bring a chill to her skin. It's not a feeling she's unfamiliar with after all this time, but the look in Fenris's eyes as he tips his head, just enough to swing his hair in his face…

She's not afraid. She's many things, bold and reckless among them, but she is not afraid, and it's only a moment's work to hook her fingers in Fenris's shirt and drag him to the mouth of the nearest alley. Just enough privacy for his preference; just enough shadow and close angles for hers, a startling oasis two steps out of the jeweled river of her homeland.

She knows what she wants.

The zither starts up again behind them; the crowd begins to clap in time to the dancer's jingling steps, their laughter rolling in waves over the constant washing clamor of the marketplace. Isabela leans back against the cool clay wall behind her, intentionally letting her eyes hood over as she tugs him that much closer. Fenris doesn't even offer token resistance; he moves forward with her pull until his chest is against her own, his knees along the leather of her boots, his palms flush to the wall on either side of her head.

"Well," she says, more for the sound of it than anything. She's still breathing hard from the dance; every inhale reminds her of exactly how solid Fenris can be, and when he lifts his eyes to hers, the remarkable intensity of them reminds her of exactly why she's teased him so long. "Should I say it took you long enough?"

One of his hands slides along her hair; his weight shifts against her, closer. "This, from you."

She laughs in outright delight. "What can I say? It turns out you're too pretty to love and leave. Not right away, anyhow."

"I am flattered."

"I'm a flatterer," Isabela points out, draping her arms over his shoulders, her fingers linked in open air. The pressure is enough to bring him even nearer; his nose slides against her own, his eyelashes brushing against her cheek as he blinks, his mouth less than a breath from hers.

It's been a long time since she's had a friend and a lover at once. It's always gone too complicated too quickly, one of them after more than the other, but—Fenris has known her ten years. He's watched her run for her life and come back again, has watched her flirt and needle Aveline and laugh while taking men's lives. He knows her in a way few people do, and she knows him, and still somehow they've managed to find their ways here, to a lovely dim alley in Rivain, her jewelry warm with his heat, his eyes fixed on her like she's just handed him the map to every slaver hold north of the Minanter.

She doesn't care what comes after. She's wanted him long enough, still wants him now; if she keeps wanting him, even afterwards, so be it.

Besides, it turns out she's rather fond of him looking at her like this.

She's grinning as she kisses him. Can't help it, really, anticipation flipping lazily in her belly, Fenris's fingers still cool and gentle on the curve of her neck as they stand on the edge of a place not half so much the home she feels against his lips. His mouth is unsure, unpracticed; still, he doesn't pull away, and when she sighs and smiles and slants her mouth against his properly he's a quick-enough study to delight her. His hand slips a little farther into her hair; she grins again, biting at his full lower lip, and his low noise of encouragement has her back for a second nip as soon as she can catch her breath.

"Ooh," she gasps when his teeth graze over her jaw, and again when his tongue finds the hollow of her throat. "You've gotten bold, haven't you?"

His voice is unsteady, hitching as her fingers draw up and down his ears. "After all these years in your company? I could hardly avoid it."

"Good—oh, yes, good. Remind me to thank past me for her foresight."

He breathes something in Tevene, his mouth returning to hers, and Isabela lets her arms tighten around his neck. His shoulders shift as he moves his hands to cup her face; she likes the easy strength of them, likes more the odd humming of the lyrium through her skin as she palms her way down his exposed arms. His fingers slide behind her ears; she shivers pleasantly at their coolness against the heat of his mouth.

She's always enjoyed a good duck into an alley. Something about the weight of a warm body pressed flush over her own, both intimately aware of every movement, the glorious grit of the wall against the backs of her shoulders. To add to that Fenris's caught breaths, the low noises in the backs of his throat as she does something particularly noteworthy with her tongue, the way she can feel his muscled thigh maneuvering between her knees—

Well, it's bloody ideal, honestly.

In the distance, the zither slows, then stops, then begins again. Fenris's kisses turn quiet; Isabela lets them, lets the lovely curl of anticipation in her stomach settle into something calmer. She plants one last kiss on his chin as he pulls away, utterly unable to keep the smirk from her face, and Fenris snorts.

"Do not look so satisfied." As proud as he can be with a flush across his cheeks, his breath coming too hard. A good look on him. A fantastic look, really. She can hardly wait to see it again.

"What, didn't enjoy it?"

"I said no such thing."

"You were eager," she says, leaning her head back against the cool wall, toying with his collar as her own heart at last begins to slow. She doesn't shift herself away from his hand, and he doesn't drop it from her neck. It's a good weight. Grounding, like the first step on solid earth after a decade lost at sea.

"I may have considered this more than once."

"Ten years!" she exclaims, laughing, and slides her hands down his chest and up it again. "It's not like you weren't invited before. Should've had the bloody assassins after me a lot sooner if I'd've known you'd come with them."

His thumb slides along her neck. "I was not my own before. And after, I was…uncertain."

"Uncertain." She loops her arms around his neck, pulls him forward in the shadow of the alley until they're pressed together again, until his forehead rests against her own. "If there's one thing you ought to know about me, sweet thing, it's that I never turn down a chance to bed a brooding man with a jaw like marble."

"Cold insolence and a smolder. I remember."

She hums, pressing her lips to the corner of his mouth, enjoying the way his shoulders move in and out of the heavy Rivaini sunlight as he leans closer. "All for my very own. I can hardly wait."

His eyes flick away, then back; she doesn't know what's in her own face, but she's fairly certain she's showing more of her cards than she should. She doesn't care.

He says, "Isabela."

It's time. She's kept him drifting long enough.

Isabela closes her eyes, opens them again. "Come with me," she says at last. "I need to tell you about Roscuro."

—

And she does, over a traditional Rivaini dinner in the back room of the Magpie's Crook, both of them cross-legged on bright pillows around a table decorated with even brighter foods. She catches him watching her a time or two, learning what is meant to be dipped in sauce and what is not, but mostly he only listens, green eyes fixed on her face as she tells him of her husband's primary investor and the ships he lent Luis, one in particular stolen after her husband's death with a hold packed full with spices and her own hand leading Captain Everton to its pier. She tells him of the rumors that flew afterwards, and the first letter delivered two years later with polite questions; the next, months later, with veiled command; the next few spread over the following years, further between, each shorter with open threat.

The cost of the cargo or a replacement ship, he'd demanded. And if she could provide neither—her head on a pike instead.

"He grew impatient," Fenris says at last, leaning back on one hand. "And came for you."

"And came for me," Isabela sighs. "Or tried to kill me, anyway. Very impolite."

"You can't repay him?"

"Doesn't matter if I could. With the 'interest' he's demanding he could buy four ships over, and even if I had the coin I wouldn't give it to him. Roscuro—" she breaks herself off, rolls a fat purple plum between her thumb and forefinger. "It doesn't matter. He's not a man capable of being satisfied, is the point."

She doesn't have to meet his eyes to know Fenris understands. They've got enough shared history between them to recognize the bruises and scars between the words, and when Fenris nods and touches the hilt of his sword laid flat behind him she's overcome with a bitter sort of gratitude that the one member of their group of friends who might understand what she means would understand her need to kill, too. She won't pay Roscuro. Not him, not for this.

She won't die for him, either.

"Will he try to kill you?" Fenris asks.

"Probably. Once he realizes I won't give him what he wants."

"He will not succeed."

Isabela laughs. "I rather hope not. I'd have come a long way for a last breath if he did."

"Isabela," Fenris says, and even though he does not reach for her he might as well have taken her face between his hands for how intently he looks at her. "I will not allow it."

"Oh," she says, the word silly in her mouth for how surprised she is, but she can't quite think straight through the emotion swelling in her throat. "In that case—I'm glad you're here, Fenris."

"So am I," he says, sighing, but when they rise at the end of the meal, his hand brushes over her back, just once, and the warmth of it lingers for a long time.

Chapter Text

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 roads of Rivain are quiet in the dawn hours, the city made better for afternoons and deeper dusks, but here and there servants sweep the avenues, 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.