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Your back is stiff, your knees ache from sitting, and your shoes - shiny and new though they may be - have been rubbing your heels raw for the last thirty-two hours. Thirty-two hours, and your week isn’t even half over. Turns out that a vault full of sovereigns can’t buy you a shorter work schedule.
What it can buy you, however, is a truly insane hotel room.
When you’d first wrested the controlling shares of your grandparents’ company back from Gamlen’s embezzling hands, the uptick in your quality of life was…dizzying. You’d never been wealthy in Lothering, and belts had only gotten tighter when your father died. After the scandal and accompanying trial rolled around, though, the same assholes who spat their food orders at you were suddenly calling you messere and rushing ahead to open doors for you, asking you if they could fetch you coffee or tea or, Maker’s balls, even wipe your ass. You hated it at first, and did everything you possibly could to avoid it. You cut your hair, wore paint on your face, spent most of your money on shitty drinks at grimy bars with a ragtag group of misfits your mother hated, all in an effort to show the pretenders you ‘weren’t one of them.’
In reality, you never stopped hating it. Not really. After your mother died you just sort of…accepted it. This was what she asked of you, and if you couldn’t keep the family together while she was alive, you’d be damned if you couldn’t at least keep the company afloat now that she was gone.
And so you find yourself in a ludicrously expensive hotel room in Par Vollen, where you toss your suit coat on the king sized bed, toe out of your shoes, and do your best to forget the last several hours of trade talks with the Arishok. You yawn, stretch, and rub the kink the plane’s window left in your shoulder because, no matter how much space they give you to stretch out, you still find some way to fall asleep with your face pressed up against the thick plastic that divides you from the sky.
Letting your arms flop to your sides again, you begin to snoop around the suite. There is a separate sitting-room-come-office, as you requested. Also to your specifications is the bag of chocolates on your nightstand - with each piece removed from and left sitting atop the bag, organized into piles by color - the inside-out pillow cases, the sticky-note on your window with the message “ANDRASTE’S TITTIE-BURGERS” scrawled upon it, and the precisely-chilled sixty-nine degree Fahrenheit room temperature (despite the fact that the Qunari used Celsius).
It turns out that growing up isn’t a pre-requisite for running your own company, and hotels will do anything when you’re paying a couple hundred sovereigns.
You pour yourself a drink from the mini bar, pull the knot from your tie, and poke your head hopefully around the corner into the next room. Nearly all of your absurd requests are just that - silly, unnecessary things that you do merely to amuse yourself, some small game you play to remind yourself of who you are when the businesswear comes off - but there was always onewhose joke gave way to a shy sliver of earnestness. Naturally it’s always this request that fails where no others do…but when you see a six string acoustic guitar leaning against the massive desk you smile, because the Qunari pulled through again.
Your phone chirps, and you pull it out of your pocket as you sidle up to the desk. You set your drink down and slide the laptop bag from your shoulder, all while reading through Varric’s offer of drinks at the hotel bar and a missed text from Merrill, recounting her most recent graduate school misadventure in Val Royeaux. Hearing from your old friends - even one who has spent the last eighteen hours on the same trip you have - always manages to bring a smile to your lips and a sad little ache to your heart.
You shoot off a response to Varric as you flop into the big chair behind the desk and vow to call Merrill during your lunch break tomorrow. For a brief moment you think that you really ought to catch up with the others as well - but then you remember the boys’ habit of dropping off the face of Thedas without warning, Aveline’s marriage and promotion, and Bethany’s perpetual cold shoulder, you decide that might be a bit too much for one lunch break.
Glancing at the time on your phone you slide your laptop from its bag and boot it up. Seconds later you’re sipping from your glass and navigating to your video chat client, pulling it up to find that the one name on it is currently set to ‘away.’
The faded smile that still remains from the text messages renews itself as a smirk, and you click it. That Isabela manages to find internet access at even the most remote locations in Thedas never ceases to amaze you. You might not know where she is from week to week - she changes places even faster than you do - but you can guarantee that neither blizzard nor hurricane norfire breathing dragon could make her miss this call. It warms the very cockles of your cold businesswoman’s heart.
When the computer rings for fifteen seconds without answer, you set your drink down and pull the guitar up over the side of the desk and into your lap. Pausing to unbutton your collar, you check the tuning - unnecessarily, it turns out - and begin picking out a melody with your fingertips. The call goes on ringing, and you find yourself hearing less and less. Your music was there for you when your father died, when Carver had his accident, and the whole time your mother was sick. When it felt like all of Kirkwall was coming down around you, the jam sessions with your misfits were the only things keeping you sane. Now, it’s one of the few things that keeps you connected to the woman you were before you won the title of CEO.
You begin to sing under your breath and toe the chair around to face the window. The call stops ringing in the background and you decide to give it another minute before you try again as you move through the verse. Somewhere around the bridge the light of the stars and the city stretching out below makes your attention drift, and your voice fades. You go on picking softly for another few seconds before your hands still over the strings. Between the song and the sights you’re thinking of the docks in Lowtown, of sitting on the edge of the pier with your legs dangling, your fingers twinned with hers–
“You know, you never did tell me what ’oh, it’s what you do to me’ refers to. As I recall, there have been quite a lot of things.”
You whip the chair around to find Isabela’s face smirking up at you from your screen. A plain canvas tent serves as her backdrop, a camp lantern her only light source, and yet she shines as golden as ever as she raises an amused eyebrow at your surprised expression. Apparently, your earlier assumption had been wrong; the ringing hadn’t ceased because she’d missedthe call, but because she’d picked it up.
“And let me say,” she goes on, seeing that your stunned silence isn’t likely to end soon. You hope the hotel light washes out the coloring in your cheeks, but somehow you doubt it. “I still find ’Hey there, Isabela’ to be one of your less inspired lyrics. The count is all wrong - my name should roll off the tongue, not clunk.”
Your dropped jaw picks up into a grin. “From what I can recall, my ability to wrap my tongue around your name wasn’t the reason you started dating me,” you say with a shrug, and rest your ankle across your knee as you go on strumming. “My ability to wrap my tongue around other things, however…”
She chuckles a pleased little chuckle, and her eyes glint in that devilish way that makes your mouth run dry. “Glad to see they haven’t stolen your sense of humor, sweet thing.”
“You’re the only one who’s ever managed to steal something from me, ‘Bela,” you say, and immediately and obnoxiously strum out a much louder, faster-paced song: “The light shines - it’s getting hot on my shoulders. I don’t mind; this time it doesn’t matter. ‘Cause your friends look good, but you look–”
“Please,” she interrupts loudly, “The day I need to be reminded that I look better than Anders and Captain Man-Hands is the day the Maker comes to Thedas.”
You laugh and palm the strings to silence them. After a short pause during which Isabela fiddles with something off screen, you say, “Speaking of stealing, did someone steal your coat? You look a little underdressed for the Frostbacks.”
“That’s because we’re not in the Frostbacks, you goose,” she answers with a smile, though her attention is still off screen. She’s been lying on her stomach, and now she pushes herself up onto her elbows and stretches forward - giving you a wonderfully close-up view of her cleavage - and reaches for something that must be sitting just behind her laptop. When her face has returned to the frame, she has her camera in her hand.
“It turns out the dragonlings reported in the mountains were less ‘dragon’ and more ‘wolf pack spotted in a blizzard,’” she continues, switching on the camera and fiddling with it. “So we came west, following rumors out of the Hissing Wastes.” Apparently finding what she wants, she turns the camera’s screen towards you. “Just look at this!”
You lean over the guitar to get a better look at what must be the largest and most uniquely patterned Varghest you’ve ever seen. “Didn’t your editor want hatchlings for this issue?”
“Sod my editor,” she says in a tone that belongs in Varric’s mouth. The similarity of it makes you chuckle as she turns the camera back towards her and fiddles with the settings. “Everyone in Thedas has been talking about this thing, but we’ll be the only ones to actually have something to run about it.”
“You must be talking to a very different everyone.”
“Oh, sweetness - disappointed that you don’t discuss the wonders of this world in your stuffy board meetings?” Her voice has that honeyed sound she only uses when she’s making fun of you. As though you needed confirmation, she looks up at you through her lashes with a smirk in her eyes - a smirk that makes you burn to have her in the flesh before you.
“Disappointed that I even have stuffy board meetings,” you say, and lean back in your seat. Your hands rest on the guitar, but you don’t play. “I’d much rather be out there with you.”
“And what, make me rub Elfroot on your third degree sunburn?” Isabela’s eyes return to her camera screen and she grins. “I’ll pass.”
You put on a kicked-puppy frown. “But I miss you.”
Something’s softened in her expression when she looks, and you melt as she takes your half-joke to heart. Meeting your eyes - as well as she can via webcam, anyway - she says, so earnestly, “I miss you too, Hawke.” Then, after a beat she adds, “Hey - speaking of my editor, we have to be back in Kirkwall next week for a check-in and some equipment maintenance. Will you be in town?”
You pick up your phone and flip to your calendar. In seconds, a whole block of meetings have disappeared from time. “I most certainly will.”
“Good.” When you look up, that devilish glint is back. “Because lately I’ve had this itch that only you can scratch.”
Your eyes glint right back. “I can’t wait.”