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Bethany isn’t really this brazen, it’s just the three mugs of the Hanged Man’s sour beer egging her on, thrusting her forward to press her lips against Isabela’s.
Their teeth click, at first. Bethany has moved in too fast, too imbalanced, the beers that have gone to her head making her unsteady. She has to brace herself with a hand on Isabela’s naked thigh so as not to crash into her completely. Isabela’s skin is warm, smooth, little downy hairs tickling Bethany’s fingers. The kiss tastes sour of alcohol and a long day, it suffers from surprise on one end and lack of experience on the other, but for a few elated seconds the softness of Isabela’s lips parting under Bethany’s overpowers everything else, the wonder of sensation that is her first kiss seizing her and pulling her under in a whirl of giddiness, her own rapid heartbeat drowning out the noise of the tavern.
Then Isabela puts two gentle hands on her shoulders, pushing her away, and shame crashes into her like a tsunami.
“Oh.” Her face was already flushed from the alcohol; now it’s burning hot. “Oh, Maker, I’m sorry. I don’t know- I don’t know what I-” She scoots back in the cramped booth, pulling her arms to her chest. “I don’t know what came over me.”
What were they talking about before impulse overtook her? Bethany can’t remember. There might have been a story; Isabela’s full of stories, all varying degrees of implausible and inappropriate. Bethany likes listening to them, even the ones that force her to protest against their raunchiness and loudly interrupt so as not to let on the way they make the blood surge between her legs.
“You’re drunk,” Isabela says, cupping Bethany’s chin. She tucks a few strands of hair behind her ear and her fingers are soft, despite the callouses. She’s so close, her eyes so warm, her body just as warm. Her cleavage, the gentle curves of her breasts, has been a torture for months, has been the image elbowing itself into Bethany’s mind when she tries to go to sleep in her room at Gamlen’s house at night, coaxes her to slip a hand beneath her nightclothes and indulge the wetness there.
How strange she never considered the possibility of kissing women, touching women, before Isabela. How strange, when now that the thought is there, that thought is all her thoughts. Her gaze keeps snagging on Isabela’s buttocks moving beneath the thin fabric of her tunic, her ears are attuned to the sound of her voice. Her pulse flutters when in the mornings she follows her sister into the streets of Kirkwall on the hunt for capital, quicken further when they near the Hanged Man to pick up Isabela for the adventure du jour.
Tonight, the tavern is full, lit by torches on the wall and loud with revelry. They’re throwing one last party before departing for the Deep Roads tomorrow at noon. Bethany and Isabela sit crammed hip to hip in a booth in the back, left alone while her sister gets another round with Aveline in tow.
“I’m sorry,” Bethany says. “That was so stupid of me. I shouldn’t have done it, I shouldn’t have… Have thrown myself at you like that. I should have asked.” Tears sting in her eyes, from mortification and regret. “I’m so, so sorry.”
She knows it isn’t fair but she can’t help the way the shame is multiplied, every time her eyes have lingered on Isabela’s body, every time she’s brought herself to climax with Isabela’s name held tight between her clenched teeth. It’s unfair that her desire for a woman should bring her a shame her attraction for boys never has, but she’s been unable to keep away the thoughts of herself as on par with uncle Gamlen’s drooling lusts, as someone perverted, even though she’d never think of another woman with the same desires this way.
“You should’ve asked,” Isabela agrees, and Bethany wants to die completely, until Isabela adds: “I might have said yes.”’
Musings on how to most effectively turn a fireball on herself and disintegrate in the flames disappear, replaced by confusion.
“...Yes?” Bethany says, dumbly.
Isabela boops her lightly on the nose. There’s nothing of reprimand in her voice, her smile.
“Unless you were drunk. Which you are,” she says. “So I guess, actually, I’d have said no.” She laughs. “What I’m saying is: ask some other day, Sweetness. See what I’ll answer.”
“Oh.”
The knots of embarrassment are tied too tight to loosen immediately, but they’re joined by something entirely different, something bright and light and fluttery, when Isabela puts a hand over hers, squeezes her fingers.
“I don’t do anything with pretty girls after they’ve had too much booze not to make decisions they’ll regret in the morning,” she says, “so don’t drink too much when we’re back and celebrating all the treasure we’ll get on the expedition. Okay?”
Bethany believes the solid feeling in her chest is part of the joy she feels, the impossible, overwhelming, dumbstruck joy that seizes her muscles with the cramped, daunting view of new possibilities, that coaxes a cold sweat equally nervous and anticipatory from her skin, right until she throws up in Isabela’s lap.
2.
“...And then Jim said, ‘Dagger? I don’t even have a sheath!’” Isabela chuckles, her chest moving under Bethany’s shoulder. “We never heard from that customs official again. Such a coward.”
Bethany laughs, too, despite the story being long and meandering, impossible to follow and with a punchline as nonsensical as the rest.
For a moment it feels good to laugh, it feels good to do something so much in opposition to the oppressive gloom of the deep roads; to throw her voice, however faint, against the implacable stone walls; to be indominably alive in a place so counter to all that’s living. Then her chest contracts, and the laughter turns into a coughing fit.
“Shit,” Isabela curses, helping Bethany to sit up straighter in order to ease the flow of air through her lungs. “I should’ve known better than trying to make you laugh.”
She rubs Bethany’s shoulders in soothing motions until the cough finally subsides. Aching all through her ribcage, her throat scraped raw and with the taste of blood on her tongue, Bethany sinks back against Isabela’s chest, rests her head in the crook of her neck and takes what comfort she can in the arms that wrap tenderly around her.
It isn’t much. Isabela’s presence is salt in the wound, a constant reminder of all she’ll be forsaking. When her sister and Anders return from their scouting it will be with the Wardens. After that, her life will never be her own again. She’ll spend most of her days down here, in the Deep Roads, trapped miles underground within these labyrinths of horror. She’ll never see her mother again. She’ll never enjoy the hardwon spoils of the expedition. Never marry, never have children, never know it if she gets nieces or nephews. Never see the torch light at the Hanged Man reflected in Isabela’s eyes as she closes in to kiss her properly, never know what her skin feels like under her clothes, never have her, never know her, never love her. Every inch where their bodies touch, huddled up together in a crevice where some of the wall has crumbled, reminds her of it, makes the sting more acutely felt.
Yet the thought of her not being here brings more pain, still. Bethany closes her eyes, breathes carefully through her nose, inhales the particular smell of sweat and scented oils and leather that is Isabela’s very own, commits it to painful memory.
“It’s all right,” she rasps, “I’m fine,” but doesn’t have the energy to sound like she means it.
The darkspawn taint is eating her alive. It would kill her, if her sister hadn’t decided she’s going to be a Warden instead.
All that running from the Templars, for years and years, only to end up in a prison much worse than the one she’s been fleeing. It’s irony, she supposes. In one of Varric’s stories she’d appreciate the theme.
Isabela is quiet; Bethany’s tongue hurts when she talks. They sit together, in this trap of stone, their last minutes together slipping silently away.
Bethany has almost dozed off when Isabela says, low:
“Do you want me to help you out of it?”
She immediately knows what it means. There’s a horror in a choice made for you. There’s a terror in feeling the trap close around you, in knowing you’ll be dying piece by piece every day until your life ends. Isabela understands it, and Bethany does now, too.
The daggers on Isabela’s belt are always sharp enough to split a strand of hair. It would be quick, without much pain.
Death itself scares her less than the life she has left.
“No,” she says, anyway.
It shouldn’t be Isabela. That burden shouldn’t be hers. Craning her head back she can see the line of Isabela’s jaw from below, can see the tension, can feel it in the set of her shoulders, the shallowness of her breaths.
Isabela, who calls herself a thief but frees slaves with a shrug and a toss of her head. Isabela, with her foul mouth and her gentle eyes, with her sea shanties and her joyful battle cries.
Not Isabela. Bethany can’t weigh her down.
Her refusal meets no protest, just a nod. Isabela wets her lips and instead asks:
“Do you want me to kiss you?”
The suggestion is absurd. “You’ll catch the Blight.”
They shouldn’t even be resting as close together as they are, but Isabela has as always been undaunted in her compassion.
Now, she takes the scarf off her head, unfolds it with one hand, and gingerly places a corner over Bethany’s lips. With a raise of her brow she asks the question again, and maybe Bethany should feel pathetic for accepting this simulacrum of intimacy, this bleak shadow of what she hoped for, but when she nods, when Isabela bends down to put her lips to Bethany’s through the fabric, there’s no embarrassment, no shame.
This is the one gift Isabela has to give her in parting, and Bethany accepts it. As they break apart, their eyes meet and hold there, sharing in a last farewell. Isabela’s irises are speckled, brown on brown, like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.
Bethany reads her future there, and weeps.
3.
Kirkwall is burning, the light from the fires coating the heavy cloud cover above in dark orange, shifting closer and closer to red.
The Chantry no longer stands, the First Enchanter is dead to his own despair, the Knight Commander mobilizes in the gallows courtyard. Bethany leans her weight on her staff, catching her breath, turning away from the corpse of the twisted monstrosity that was Orsino, taking a few moments to gather herself before what comes next.
When they open the door to the Gallows, her and her sister and her sister’s companions, it will be their last stand.
Bethany finds herself calm at the prospect. If this is the end, it is one she’s chosen, she herself.
Her sister’s hand lands on her shoulder, heavy in a steel gauntlet. “You all right?” she asks. A streak of drying blood is smeared over the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are grim.
Bethany nods. “What about you?” she asks. “Do you need healing?”
“I could do with a pick-me-up,” Isabela says from behind.
Hawke (her sister took sole possession of the family name years ago) gives Bethany a pat that gently shoves her in Isabela’s direction, and moves over to Merrill a couple paces away, paler than normal but with her back determinedly straight.
“Hi,” Bethany says, face to face with Isabela for the first time in nearly seven years.
She deserted as soon as she heard of the events in Kirkwall, heard her sister’s name in every sentence, alongside words like ‘unrest,’ ‘templar terror,’ and ‘impending war.’ Her time with the Wardens has included many hours of bitter thoughts directed at her sister, hating her for the path she sent her on, never speaking her name unless in anger.
Bethany hadn’t realised her feelings had started to mellow, that acceptance had begun to permeate her soul and dampen the grief of a lost life and family, until when presented with a chance to help her sister, she jumped at it without hesitation.
Is that forgiveness? She’s not sure if it matters. She’s not sure she pinned the blame on the right head in the first place, that there was ever someone to blame at all.
“Couldn’t resist a good old uprising, huh?” Isabela says, offering her arm, a nasty burn marring her skin. The pain of it has been tensing the corners of her mouth; when Bethany calls magic into her palm and lets it flow into the blisters Isabela’s face slowly relaxes into a smile that widens when Bethany replies:
“I thought I needed some variety. Killing darkspawn gets monotonous after a while.”
“I bet. All those ogres single handed, day after day.” She yawns, exaggerated. “At this point you do it in your sleep, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes. You know me so well.”
Her few encounters with ogres have been waking nightmares, would be even if they didn’t call up memories of Carver’s last moments, his brutal slaughter before her eyes. To make light of it - she’s not sure how Isabela does it, but somehow it makes her feel better, coming from her, when she’s sure anyone else would have her in a rage.
It could be because behind the cocky brilliance of Isabela’s smile is a solemn understanding. Isabela has ogres of her own haunting her steps. She understands that laughing at them isn’t to make light of the fear, but to unmask it, drag it out into the light where shadows can’t distort its shape, make it bigger than it is.
“You look good,” Isabela says.
“You, too.”
She does, despite the grime of hours of battle. Isabela takes to fighting like a kitten to a ball of yarn, her face is alight with the joy of it, there’s a little tremor of excitement in her voice, a bounciness in her legs. Bethany hasn’t allowed herself to think of her for so long, and now that she’s here, right before her, the sheer, lively force of her presence is overwhelming, intoxicating.
The Maker has been kind to her in this. To see Isabela once more in her element is a mercy she hadn’t dared to pray for.
Her sister whistles, a shrill call to action. The others gather: Fenris glowing with the lyrium snaking along his arms and legs, Aveline with her shield like a wall, Varric and Sebastian. Where Anders is, Bethany isn’t sure. Her sister dodged the question.
Isabela grins. “Ready?”
“As much as anyone can be.”
A second’s hesitation, barely visible before disappearing into the confidence dominating Isabela’s expression. “Kiss for luck?”
Bethany laughs.
“I don’t much believe in luck anymore,” she says, but still she wraps her arms around Isabela’s waist, pulls her in close, lets herself be dipped in an embrace as Isabela seizes her lips in a kiss that is deep and filled with hunger: for a fight, for survival, for her.
“If I survive this,” Isabela says when she comes up for air, “I’m getting a ship, with no one talking me out of it this time.” She winks. “And I’m making you first mate.”
Bethany’s still flushed, her heart beating in a fury against her chest. How long since she felt alive like this? How many years since hope presented as an option?
An image: sunspots dancing over Isabela's arms as she leans over the railing with droplets of water sprinkled through her hair like diamond dust, a fortune of open air and sky stretching endlessly around her.
“But I don’t know anything about sailing,” Bethany says, in protest at the small, wild creature of want in her chest that starts tearing at its bonds again, long having been subdued.
“Who cares?” Isabela’s speckled eyes are filled with visions of the future, with ferocity and hope. “I’m a firm believer of learning on the job.”
With a shuddering creak, the Gallows gates open. From the towering edge of possibility, they throw themselves into battle together.