Chapter Text
Isabela was already working for Hawke when they met. It was a humid, sticky summer day, his leather armour prickled on his skin making him more grouchy than usual. Though Isabela's very existence, the air she breathed out and the swagger in her walk that cut through the air like her twin blades, made everyday a hot summer day.
"You're lanky," she commented, after the initial introductions and the handshake with lingering fingers that made it not quite just a handshake. "I like lanky."
He snorted and rolled his eyes and got defensive with that wall that kept everyone out. She just smiled at him, knowing, with a shake of her hair that set off the clinks of metal jewelry, and he couldn't stop staring at her ear, where the shining gold set off the raven black of her hair.
At the beginning he tried to stay professional, as they were colleagues. His slave conditioning called it fraternizing, something forbidden, but she was having none of it.
She was good at drawing people close, touching in the way that Fenris wasn't used to, laughing too loud and drinking too much. Separating the physical with the emotional was her forte; she told him herself that what she did was only skin deep but he couldn't quite bring himself to believe it.
Fenris thought he could teach her a thing or two about taking life seriously.
Midnight brought them to the stern of a ship due to leave in the morning, not hers, and Hawke was helping her get a ship soon and this was something she liked to do sometimes, dangling her legs off the edge waiting for the sun to sink below the horizon.
Her hand closed over his and he was certain that though she was in Hawke's bed some nights, she had never brought him here, sitting high above the water with salt breeze in her hair and the sun setting the sea on fire. This was her private past-time and she was letting him in, in her own way.
He kissed her, later, carding his fingers through her long dark hair, her profile a silhouette in the moonlight. They went back to land on the rope that tied the ship to harbour, Isabela running down on her boots and him going hand over hand with his sword strapped to his back like two thieves in the night.
"You were married," he asked one day out of the blue, both of them sitting in Hawke's office. It was something routine and boring but she sat half-reclining on the desk doing her sorting as though it was erotic.
She had the uncanny ability to make anything look and sound erotic.
Isabela didn't wear a smile on her face - it was always real when she smiled, if she wasn't in the mood for it she scowled just as well as he did - and she raised an eyebrow, "asking about me, were you?"
"It just came up," over tumblers of whiskey and late night reading lessons, Hawke answered questions as they drank enough to make reading lessons ineffective.
"I was sold by my mother at fourteen," she said, unashamed and unapologetic. "Anything else you want to know?"
Fenris looked at her in shock. She went right back to her work, though her back was straighter and her posture more unyielding.
It took another week for him to let curiosity overcome his propriety again, this time in bed.
"You're not angry?"
"About what?" She traced his collarbone with one finger, skipping over his lyrium brands.
"That you were sold," he stared up into the ceiling, not at her. "I do not remember being sold. But I expect that I must have been angry."
"I got over it," she walked her fingers up the side of his neck, where the dark skin was unmarred by his brands, and her hand came to rest over his jaw. There was a moment where he could visually pick out how she pushed the unpleasant thoughts away and her inquisitive gaze turned into merriment, "you have pretty eyes."
He wondered if it was really that easy, but her gait was effortless and light as she led him through lowtown, to a little hole in the wall restaurant that made really good paella, where everyone knew her smile, always genuine because pretending was never worth the trouble.
"How exactly do you ... get over it?"
Isabela looked at him, expression changing and replaced by one of mild concern. "You just do. It's called moving on."
Fenris didn't understand, and he figured it'd probably take him years yet, not imbued with the pirate's ability to forgive and forget, whether the wrongs were incurred by others or herself.
The night his master died by his hand, he was restless and he paced and paced in his room until the pirate wrapped her arms around him and dragged him to bed.
"If I hate him still it would mean I still care," she whispered into his ear.
Isabela dispelled whatever demons left with their hold on him that night, letting loose all the secrets to her carefree smile that she had been telling him over the years anyway, but now he was finally ready to listen and understand.
They're dead. They're gone. They have no power over you anymore. And you, my sweet, have to forgive yourself for giving them the power in the first place.
"I'm glad I met you," he said, years later, on her ship while they played raiders on the Waking Sea.
Captain Isabela kept one hand on her ship's wheel, stretching out her arm at him in either an invitation or simply a gesture that meant the world was her oyster. Probably both.
He never did get around to teaching her how to live life seriously.