Work Text:
Isabela tossed her mug back, swallowed the watery, faintly vinegar-flavored ale in a long thirsty chug, clapped it down on the table with a disconsolate frown, and sighed, much more heavily than a free-spirited free-wheeling pirate like herself ever should, in her opinion.
But then again, that was exactly the point — she wasn't particularly free-wheeling at the moment. In point of fact, she was practically housebound, and desperately bored. It had been just shy of six weeks since they limped out into the sun after that catastrophic disaster of an expedition, and in all that time Hawke hadn't taken a single job, picked a single fight, or even voluntarily left her uncle's dismal Lowtown shack, that any of them knew of. Which meant she hadn't dragged Isabela into any fun of any kind, and had refused to let Isabela drag her into any either. The rest of their motley crew were no better, taking Hawke's lead as usual and retreating into a sort of mournful group hibernation, and thus providing Isabela with little distraction beyond the occasional much-too-subdued game of Wicked Grace.
Isabela had, of course, picked a few fights and chased a few treasures on her own, but somehow they all seemed to lack that spark that she'd grown used to in the last year or so. She would turn and find no flashing blade at her back, make a joke and look for a lopsided smirk that wasn't there, even hear someone mention mages and feel oddly discomfited by the lack of an immediate stupid argument. Ultimately, no matter how daring the escapes or shiny the loot, it all just left her frustrated and unsatisfied, and eventually she'd given up and taken to spending her evenings in the Hanged Man waiting for Hawke to get over herself so things could get back to normal again.
"Rough crowd in here tonight?" she asked Norah as the barmaid floated up to her table with another pint. There wasn't much hope in her voice. The tavern was full and boisterous, but tomorrow was a rest day and the atmosphere was cheerful and gregarious, no violent undercurrent or real odds of a bar brawl.
Norah ignored her completely, eyes trained on the back wall.
"Norah? Hello, the Fade's not for the waking," she said, waving her empty mug.
Norah frowned at her, and, with an utterly unprecedented lack of any frustration, contempt, annoyance or in fact any kind of bite to her voice whatsoever, nodded at the stairway and asked, "Should that be happening, do you think?"
If Isabela didn't know better, in fact, she'd have called the note in Norah's voice concern, and she looked toward the back of the tavern without thinking —
— and saw the familiar, broad, wool-covered back of none other than Hawke, arms hanging loose from her bare shoulders as she staggered alongside a thin, cream-skinned, red-haired man. Which was infuriating, both on account of Hawke not bothering to tell Isabela she was in the Hanged Man bloody finally, and, worse, on account of Isabela somehow not noticing on her own. It would have been worth quite a bit of yelling, even, were it not for the fact that Hawke was less walking up the stairs than being dragged, clearly too drunk to be moving properly under her own power.
Isabela's eyes narrowed. "Close my tab, Norah," she said over her shoulder, as she strode across the tavern and followed them up.
Burdened by Hawke's considerable size and weight, the man hadn't made it more than a foot past the first landing when Isabela caught up to him, wrapping her arm around his shoulders on top of Hawke's, though she let her own curl rather tighter around his neck.
"Well, hello, Hawke," she said, with cheerful menace. "Introduce me to your friend!"
"Bela!" Hawke rolled her head sideways and grinned broadly, words slurring off her tongue. "This is... this is... what's your name?"
"Uh... Matthew," said the man, swallowing against Isabela's wrist, eyeing her with confusion and a faint hint of bluster.
"Matthew!" agreed Hawke. "He's my new friend. He has a business prov -- a business prose -- a job for me!"
"Oh a business proposition, was it?" Isabela caught Matthew's eyes and held them, watched them grow shifty with a poor liar's twitch. "Is that what you came up here for?"
"Well. Yes. I have a... well there's some.... uh. Spiders, that I need killed, and your friend here said --"
"She said 'let's go up to your room and get naked'? Or is that bulge in your pants just for show?"
"Did I say that?" asked Hawke, words falling slow and thick as her brow furrowed in tight concentration. "That doesn't sound like something I would say."
"She, I, that is…" Matthew glanced between Hawke and Isabela. "Well, she did say that she wanted to… get to know me better, if you know what I mean. I mean, I did want the, um, spiders killed, but if she wanted to, I mean, I wasn't going to object if she —"
"Wait," said Hawke, lifting her free hand in a completely incoherent gesture that was probably meant to be her usual commanding palm-out call for silence. She peered at Matthew. "Wait," she repeated, fuzzy confusion all over her face, careful attention on not slurring her words, "Were you going to try to have sex with me?"
She rocked clumsily sideways, off his shoulders, and wobbled for a moment before pulling herself upright. She swiped one hand in a loose grabbing motion about six inches from the knife at her hip, knocked herself off balance, and slumped against the wall. "Ow," she said plaintively.
"You just lean there for a bit, sweet thing," said Isabela with her best reassuring charm. "I'll handle this."
Matthew was trying to pull out of her grip, now, his expression turning fearful. Isabela let him loose, but only long enough to spin him and slam him against the opposite wall, her arm across his throat, the tip of one dagger tickling his bellybutton through his shirt.
"Look, I— I know what you're thinking, but your friend was totally into it downstairs!"
"Oh, I believe you," said Isabela. "Hawke's a terrible flirt. It's honestly not one of her better qualities. I'm sure she said all sorts of sweet teasing things about your pretty hair and funny dimples. But she didn't say yes, did she? And you weren't going to ask."
"I — look, I'm sorry, I swear, I —"
"I believe you about that too. People can be sorry about all sorts of things with a knife against their skin. But are you going to be sorry later, I wonder."
She flicked her knife downward, scoring shallow through the fabric of his pants and making him scream.
"Well, no I don't," she amended, as she turned him, still howling and trying to ball himself around his wounded prick, and shoved him down the stairs.
She flicked her dagger back into place and looked up at Hawke, who stared back at her blearily. "Did you just hurt my new friend?"
"Yes, Hawke."
Hawke blinked. "Did he deserve it?"
Hawke looked strangely small, there, against the dirty, half-rotted wall of the Hanged Man, hunched in on herself, eyes bruised from weeks of sleepless nights, no armor or sword to hide the recent thinness of her neck, the unusually prominent jut of her collarbone under her loosely-laced tunic. She was unfamiliar, this woman looking up at Isabela, confused but trusting; almost unrecognizable as the fearless laughing force of nature who'd cut down Hayder like a bale of straw almost a year ago.
"Yes," she said, as she wrapped Hawke's arm over shoulders and began to lead her to her own room. "Yes, he did."
Hawke, for once, seemed to accept that, and simply leaned into Isabela and let her carry her.
It was slow going — a month and a half of poor eating notwithstanding, Hawke was basically near six feet of usually-amubulatory concrete — but they made enough progress that Hawke apparently noticed where they were going.
"Bela?"
"Yes, sweet thing?"
"Are you going to try to have sex with me?"
"Not tonight, Hawke."
"Oh." Hawke rolled that around for a minute. "Good. I don't think I'd be very good at it."
Isabela chuckled, and Hawke sighed a bit, but said nothing else as Isabela led her to her room, seated her on her bed, pulled her boots and knife off her, and rolled her onto her side.
"Try and get some rest, sweet thing." She pulled her own boots off and propped her bare feet up on her desk, pulling out Varric's latest draft of Hard in Hightown and a well of red ink. "I'll be here if you need anything."
Hawke made some kind of indistinct murmur at that, and Isabela left her to it, digging her way through pulse-pounding action and lurid romance with a mercilessly critical editor's eye, keeping half an ear on Hawke's satisfying failure to vomit or stop breathing, and listening to the incessant murmur of the Hanged Man dying down as night wore on into morning.
She was twenty chapters in and could have sworn Hawke had been asleep for hours when the houseguest in question startled her half out of her chair with a low rumble.
"You shouldn't have stopped him."
Heart still pounding a little too fast, not quite processing the actual words (which had come with far more clarity and diction than she would have thought possible four hours earlier), Isabela pushed the manuscript away and looked over at Hawke. "What?"
"I said you shouldn't have stopped him. What if all those farm boys were right? He might have drilled the sidewise out of me. I'd have woken up tomorrow with a sudden appreciation for cock. I could get married. Make my mother happy, for once."
"That's not funny, Hawke."
"It wasn't meant to be."
Isabela stared at her. "'Thank you for saving me, Isabela. You're a wonderful friend, Isabela. I don't know what I'd do without you, Isabela'."
"Who saves Bethany?" said Hawke flatly. "Why do I get to walk away from a drunk I staggered blindly into into while she's chained to templars all the caution in the world can't keep her safe from?"
"Hawke…"
"Maybe Carver's the lucky one after all. If nothing else, I'm sure the Wardens didn't let him die of the Taint. A quick clean knife in the dark sounds a lot better than 'life' as a Tranquil, don't you think? Not that I could give it to him, of course," she added, nothing bitter in her voice, no, of course Isabela wouldn't be so lucky as to hear bitterness, anger, guilt, anything at all other than the dull brutal nonchalance that Hawke wielded like a bludgeon. "Got him through Ostagar, got him out of Lothering, got him into this templar-infested asspit of the Void and then just let him follow me right back out, and then when he needed me most I couldn't even give him what he asked. Had to get all flaily and desperate and drag him halfway across the Deep Roads like there was actually anything I could do to help, like I hadn't already failed him beyond any hope, like making it worse to salve my own pride was a better solution. What do you think the Wardens would have done to him if they made it to the surface? Must be pretty dire for Anders to get his knickers in such a twist. Probably should have beaten it out of him before I sentenced my baby brother to it. Fairly negligent all around, really."
"… go to sleep, Hawke."
It was quiet, and so, so lost, and didn't sound anything like Hawke at all, and Isabela wasn't even sure she'd heard it at first when Hawke whispered, hollowly,
"… I can't."
Isabela got up, walked across her small room, and settled down on the bed next to Hawke.
"It's funny," said Hawke quietly, without any trace of humor whatsoever. "We were never rich, you don't end up with money when you're running every six months. If Carver got his own bed and only Bethany and I had to share, it was the height of luxury. In Lothering we actually had bunks, and Carver had a whole room to himself, it was like nothing we'd ever seen. But after Father died... even just sharing a bunk, Beth could tell I was awake. I don't know how she knew but she always did, and it bothered her, kept her up too. She'd use her magic to put me to sleep. I hated it. Her taking care of me, it was all wrong, backwards and cruel and horrible, but it was the only way she'd get any sleep, and she was still a kid, still mastering her magic, I couldn't let her —"
Hawke fell silent, and when she spoke again, her voice was fey and dangerous.
"You come over here for a reason, Bela? Thought you weren't going to try to have sex with me tonight."
"I'm not, Hawke," said Isabela firmly. "A, you're still drunk. Two, you're crazy lately anyway. C, you'd hate me later."
Hawke moved, finally, rolling onto her back and propping herself up on her elbows, eyes sparking darker and wilder grey than the stormclouds that claimed the Siren.
"Come on, Bela, you read trashy novels, you know how this works. The brave knight saves the fair maiden's virtue and gets to claim it as his own. Take your rightful reward, brave Ser Knight."
Isabela shot her a look that she really hoped was even half as flat as Hawke's voice had been ten minutes prior. "If anyone in this room remotely qualifies as a brave knight, Hawke, it sure as shipwrecks isn't me."
Hawke just stared back, waiting. Like her patience, her half-mocking invitation, the fierce, near-painful intensity of her expression was all it would take to seduce her.
Balls, it probably was. Isabela gave herself a mental shake, and thought of Hawke, pacing in the dark, sliding into Carver's bedroll and wrapping her arms around his shivering, weakening shoulders until they both fell into restless sleep; Hawke uneasy at the foot of Sundermount, waking Isabela to take watch and then laying down between her siblings to curl protectively around her sister; Hawke, that night they'd been stuck in the raider cave with the underwater entrance and she'd plopped to the stone behind Isabela, spine to spine, until the closed-in walls faded beneath the soothing sound of the sea.
She put a hand against Hawke's sternum and pressed gently. "Lie down, Hawke."
Hawke let herself be moved, tossing her arms out beside her carelessly as her shoulders bounced down onto the mattress with a disdainful air. "Getting pushy, Bela?" she mocked. "I hope you're not still thinking I'll let you be on top."
It was hard and cutting, coolly disdainful, and she sounded, for the second time that night, completely, unnervingly unlike herself. Isabela ignored it.
With a few practiced motions, she unsheathed her daggers and plucked off her earrings, and slipped into the bed beside the mercenary. Feeling far more than a little awkward and steadfastly refusing to think about what she was doing at all, she wrapped one arm around Hawke's stomach and laid her head down on her shoulder.
"Um. Bela," started Hawke, that mildly patronizing tone still lingering in her voice.
"Shut up and sleep, Hawke," said Isabela.
Hawke, remarkably, didn't say anything to that. Isabela didn't lift her head to try to catch her expression. Hawke smelled like too much alcohol and not enough sleep, and she was bony under Isabela's cheek and shoulders, and Isabela couldn't really think of a less comfortable or welcoming place to lie down, but Hawke didn't speak, so Isabela didn't move.
After a long, quiet moment, Hawke lifted her arms. Even drunk, underfed and insomniac, she was still apparently strong enough to lift Isabela with minimal effort, and she silently and gently rearranged them to press Isabela closer to her side, move her a little further down, wrap her own arm around Isabela, and suddenly it actually wasn't that uncomfortable at all, really. Hawke's other arm came up briefly, as though to clasp her hands, pull Isabela tighter, but she stalled out and dropped it back to the mattress halfway there, leaving only the first wrapped loosely around Isabela's hip, a faint weight easily shrugged off should Isabela choose to.
But oddly, even after Hawke's breathing slowly evened out beneath her, Isabela didn't.