#evilbad

Anyways, since dracs, 'crows and exterminators are military police units, wouldn't it be fucked up if there was an [x] amount of years of mandatory military service in which anyone 18 or above who meets bl/i's arbitrary requirememnts serves as a drac and if they survive they get the oportunity to either go on and become a scarecrow or (less likely) return to civilian life?

This one is Isabela/Fenris, and content warning for mention of sexual abuse.

dictator by rei ami

demons by kim petras

bad blood by nao

moneyonmymind by upsahl and absofacto

the medicine does not control me by euringer and grimes

all the things she said cover by poppy

my agenda by dorian electra

f*ggot by msi

what do they know? by msi

Fenris grimaced but complied, settling back between the Captain’s legs. He was seated on the floor, with Isabela on the mattress above him, preparing to braid his hair. She held a stoppered bottle of finely scented oil in her hand, which she insisted on applying to his scalp. The Captain’s Quarters flickered pleasantly in the low candlelight around him. 

“In Rivaini,” he reminded her, scowling only a little. “That was the deal.”

She snorted, winding his long hair around her fingers as she separated it into sections, following a long-ago ritual. “Ou aktyèlman konprann sa m ap di?”

“More or less,” he answered. His eyes half-closed against the sensation of her fingertips in his hair. The scented oil he could do without, but her confident hands against his head, even with the accompanying pulling and tugging, were surprisingly pleasant. Relaxing, even.

He spoke up again, a little drowsily. “I get a word here and there, enough to follow. With practice I will learn the rhythms of the language, the structure. Apre sa, mwen renmen tande ou pale lang nesans ou.”  

Isabela smiled. Clumsy, that last bit, but he was learning. Her eyes narrowed in concentration as she began to wind the channels of soft hair around her nimble fingers. “Sa ki te yon tan trè lontan de sa. I speak Rivaini so rarely anymore. You’d be better off practicing with the crew.”

“They are not as good at plaiting my hair,” he said, straight-faced, and Isabela laughed. Her fingers brushed against his ears when she did that, sending sparks of pleasure down his body, and he flushed invisibly in the candlelight.

“You can really learn a whole language just by listening to it? Gods, if I had that skill...” Isabela tugged his head closer, frowning suddenly at a difficult maneuver. Speaking of things she hadn’t done in awhile, it had been ages since she had anyone let her do this. It took some persistent convincing to get Fenris to allow it - only when the unruliness of his newly-grown long hair became undeniable would he consider such a thing, not without its conditions. 

Thoughtfully, she murmured in a lower voice, not expecting him to grasp most of it. “Petèt ou te kapab fè yon tradiktè pou mwen? Mwen te kapab itilize yon moun tankou sa.”

“A translator, did you say?” Fenris’s voice sounded strange, bent down into the floor like that. Or was it strange for another reason? 

He was quiet a little longer, and she made real progress on the braid, down to the nape of his neck. Then he spoke again.

“I have been a translator, you know. It was one of my duties.”

Ah. That would be why he sounded strange. “The qunari, right?” She kept her tone light, and kept working down his back. “So how did you get that lot to converse with you? Did you braid their hair?”

His shoulders shook as he chuckled, low and deep. “Not exactly.”

“Farfade bèl mwen. I’m almost done. Then we can do a little vocabulary lesson.”

She thought him entirely too quiet, as she finished the braid and tied it off with a bit of string. But when he turned back to her and looked up, he was smiling. “Will it be an anatomy lesson, by any chance?” 

Hey look, there’s a chapter two (chapter 1 is on that link). 

Isabela flung her duffle bag onto the motel bed and yawned, stretching her long arms behind her head. She’d slept a little in the car, but you just never get good sleep in the car. She had woken up feeling even more tired than she did before, which shouldn’t be possible. Fenris had to shake her by the shoulders for quite a while before he could give her the room key. 

Still yawning, she dragged her sweater over her head and draped it over the duffle bag, as casually as she could make it look, then smoothed her button-down shirt over her shorts. Her sandals she kicked off immediately, not caring that the carpet had probably not been washed in a year or two.   

Two beds, she noted. He’d asked for two beds.

Isabela shrugged off the observation and headed into the bathroom. “Shower curtain,” she called back to Fenris coming in the door, holding his wallet and no bags. “Yellowing, but no stains.”

By their old metric, in the taxonomy of motel rooms that they had developed all those years ago, this made it a medium-okay. Fine to shower in, but sleep on top of the covers. 

“About what we paid for,“ Fenris said, sounding distracted. He bypassed the bed with Isabela’s duffle and sat on the other one, the springs groaning loudly beneath him as he opened his wallet and thumbed through its contents with his back to her. 

The door didn’t have a working lock, but the bathroom was reasonably clean. Izzy examined her toenail polish against the hideous tile for awhile, before dropping her head into her hands.

A few minutes later she was re-applying her lipstick in the mirror and wondering how much of a head start they had on her boyfriend. By now he would have realized she had switched the drop locations and stolen the loot, but it would take a little longer for Marco Castillion to realize who she was with and where she was headed. The first he would have no way of knowing yet - nobody in her current life knew anything about Kirkwall, or Fenris, or any of the others. She’d made damned sure of that. 

The second… well, anyone with half a brain could figure that one out. So he’d get there sooner or later. She’d worked pretty hard to make sure he wasn’t thinking with his head, but some of his smarter goons would guess that she’d be bold enough to use his own connections to flip the jewels. They were relatively safe here on the road, where nobody was likely to identify them. The real danger was going to be in the city. 

Izzy looked thoughtfully at the lipstick in her hand. Marco gave her this, she realized. Part of a whole set of expensive cosmetics lining her own private bathroom in Miami. She meant to leave behind everything he had given her and leave only with what she could take herself. There was always one more thing to ditch, it seemed. It was always harder than you thought to leave the past behind. 

The lipstick flipped into the empty trash can with a hollow clunk.

Izzy checked herself in the mirror. She looked like shit. She looked like a babe, make no mistake, but an exhausted, strung-out babe. You could tell she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a long while. Her skin was breaking out from stress and her hair desperately needed the product she’d had to leave behind. 

You can buy whatever you need after this, she told herself, and splashed some water on her face. It’s going to be worth it. It has to be.

She tied her locs back a little more neatly and unbuttoned a few buttons on her shirt, and opened the bathroom door.

“All yours,” she said sweetly, and flopped onto the creaky motel bed next to Fenris.

He didn’t look up from his phone, just stood up and wandered in the direction of the bathroom in the ghost-white glow of the phone screen. When the door clicked behind him she rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, her pasted-on smile wiped off her face. 

Fenris had just about reached his limit, she suspected. It was one thing to drop everything and drive across the country because she asked nicely, but driving her back, with all of these hours hanging between them, he would soon be expecting some answers she was in no way prepared to give. After all these years she owed him at least that. Which was exactly why she had waited so long to ask for his help.

She had better make the most of him, if this would be the last time.

Isabela listened to the shower starting up. She’d have ages before he came out then, if he still took those long hot showers like he was trying to steam the scars off his skin. Or like he was avoiding her, they way he used to do when they were together, towards the end.

That was the thing about people. People got used up after awhile. You take what you need right down to the bone and suck the marrow dry, and they do the same to you. They’d get sick of your shit and you’d get sick of theirs and eventually you can’t stand to look at each other. Then there was one less person you could call in a pinch. 

Fenris, she had been saving. He was like the emergency credit card that she never ever used even after all the other cards were maxed out, so that it would always be there in the direst emergency. She didn’t call on him unless there was no other choice. That way she would always have him in reserve. The one person who never bailed on her. Even if she never used it, she kept his number on her speed dial. It just felt good to have it there.

Her emergency credit card, incidentally, was maxed out last week. Right before she called him.

She flipped over on the crummy double bed, and her thoughts drifted over a variety of beds she’d slept in. Motel beds like this one, with springs that jabbed you in the back.  Fancy hotel beds with remote controls to make them harder or softer. Many couches, futons, and air mattresses. Waterbeds, back when those were a thing. Canopy beds with lace comforters and too many pillows. The King-size she’d had in Miami, much too soft to get settled in, not good for much really besides rolling over and over in. None of them for very long. None of them permanent. 

The closest to that would be the shitty twin bed she’d shared with Fen in Chicago for seven weeks while they hid from their pasts, all those years ago. That one she thought of often, just before drifting off to sleep. 

When Isabela opened her eyes some time later, the room was dark. The lamp was turned off. The nightstand flickered in and out of view with the television’s glow, and beyond it was an empty bed. It took her several moments to register that, the bed being empty, and when she did she rolled over with a sense of hollow inevitability. Had Fenris bailed on her, finally?

No. He was there beside her, on top of the covers in the same bed. He sat up against the headboard, fully dressed, watching a shitty infomercial. Eating something out of a bag that he must have pulled from a vending machine while she was asleep. 

He spoke up as though she hadn’t just woken up. “This is the part where they start putting in things with skins and peels. Bananas and oranges and stuff like that. See?”

A well-manicured hand on the television screen was pushing a banana through a touch-mixer, reducing it to mush. Above her she could hear Fenris crunching on something.

“I was going to be sad for you that you were watching this,” she said into the pillow, “and then you reveal that you’ve watched it before…”

He shrugged. “I always hope these things will bore me to sleep. It never works though.”

Izzy fought the urge to turn over and look at the clock. It felt late. She had that nerve-crackling 3-in-the-morning feeling. But she felt so heavy and comfortable right now that she didn’t want to move. “You still don’t sleep?” she murmured. 

“… I guess not much has changed,” he said, with only a little hesitation.

This sounded for all the world like an invitation, and on any other night she would happily have pursued that line of thinking to its hopefully naked destination. But tonight… tonight she was bone-tired and heartsore and something about going back to sleep with him sitting up next to her felt right.

Fenris must have felt the same. His fingers gently tucked an errant loc behind her ear and then settled just behind her head. “Go on and rest,” he said, and clicked the volume down a couple notches.

She drew a little closer and hmmm’ed against his side and fell back into the best night’s sleep she had had in ages and ages.  

She dreamed about the House. About being dumped in front of it with a trash bag full of clothes, kicked out of her sixth foster home. Not minding. Just biding her time until she turned 18. Inventing new ways to get into trouble in the meantime. 

She dreamed about sharing a room with three other teenage girls with cutting scars and eating disorders. Dodging therapy sessions. Ducking into dark corners with various boys and girls. Calling it the “Kirkwall Welcome.” Same girls and boys moving on unexpectedly, without so much as goodbye.  

Making friends who stayed. The regulars, who were in the house for the long haul. Merrill, one of her three self-harming roommates. Her friend Hawke and Hawke’s brother, the too-old orphans. Hawke’s friends, who were basically everyone. The handyman Teddy Varric, who was secretly researching a book on a teenage group home and did favors for Hawke. Other employees, teachers, counselors, some of them awful, some of them kind of okay, sometimes. Better than what she’d had.

Director Elthina warning her away from the weird new boy with the silvery hair, saying he wasn’t just troubled, like the other kids - this one was dangerous. Stupidly failing to realize that of course that this would only pique her interest. 

Fenris hovering along the periphery of things, withdrawn and silent, always listening to his headphones. Hawke befriending him first, like she did everybody. But only Isabela getting the full story of how he had ended up in grown-up prison, and why his family didn’t want him back even after he got out. That came later, when she was showing him where all the dark corners were. 

Izzy and Fen, 16 and 17 years old. Up to no good. Making plans. All the world aligned against them, and only each other to depend on.

Soon after, hitting the road together in a stolen car. All their regrets still in front of them, where her dreams never bothered to go. 

In the morning, with all this history pounding in her head like a hangover, she and Fenris got back into the car and he drove her the last few hours to New York City, where she would make her escape. 

There wasn’t much left to say. If they were going to talk, they would have done it at the motel. But they hadn’t, and now they rode together in silence, broken only by the radio stations tuning in and out. 

Isabela wondered if he had managed any sleep last night. He seemed fine, if a little grim. He sipped determinedly from a cup of gas station coffee and started up chain-smoking. She tried not to stare. Mostly she looked out the window, her arms crossed over her sweater. She should have been planning her approach - the duffle bag, the plane tickets - but instead she was trying to think of what to say when they got to the city. 

They had never managed a proper good-bye before and she wasn’t sure how to make one. Chances were she would just grab her bag and run away. 

You walk along the ramparts and listen. It is before first light and you are barely here, you are barely anywhere. Everyone is asleep. 

It is the time that takes much too long to endure, where you are empty. You pace the wall and every step is another second gone by. You make lots of them. Sometimes you count. Thousands and thousands.

The revelers at the bar, even the Iron Bull, are gone. You cannot hear Leliana praying in the rookery or Dorian reading in the small hours of the night when he cannot sleep. They are all quiet now. 

There are birds sometimes. Hardy things that ride the freezing wind in and out. Their feelings are rudimentary and not-enough. Sometimes they think songs that are duets with the other part missing, which is sad. They are graceful and hungry and they circle around in the pre-dawn and are quickly gone.

You would stamp your feet against the stones just for the sound of it, to dispel the quiet, but there is not enough of you yet to be so substantial. Walking is a euphamism for what you do. You drift boneless and weightless, even your hat just an idea of a hat, a memory. There is nothing here. You are too empty even to be afraid. 

Here is the sun again, shouldering its way into the morning. It too is only an idea now, but you know it is there. From experience. It has come before and will come again, and there - the sky is brightening now, so slow, so slow. 

Later you will shudder at the thought of this moment, when you are enough to feel again. The long, slow wait.

Then. There.

You are opening your eyes. In the barn, in the medical tent. Above the blacksmithery. You are squeezing your eyes shut against the dawning light and rolling over, murmuring. You are rubbing your forehead against a splitting headache. You are sitting bolt upright and searching for your sword for your morning exercises. 

You are a dozen eyes, a hundred eyes, opening.

You are emerging from sleep and beginning another day, coming out into the light, where you are waiting. Where silently, feet kicking happily over the end of the wall and a smile creeping across your face, you are waiting. Whole again. Here again. 

previous installments : other recent fic

Fenris did not so much walk out onto the deck as float somewhere above and watch himself doing it. Very strange. Even from this point of view, it hardly seemed believable. There he was, Danarius’s pet dog being lead out of his prison by people he might have called friends. In a story, long ago, in his dreams, last week, he wasn’t sure anymore. Everything was a jumble. 

This was, he knew, exactly the kind of story he would tell himself while collared and chained. His hero friends would come to save him. His traitorous sister would change her mind and help him escape. A beautiful woman would kiss him on the lips and take him by the hand. He could not in any way believe any of this to be real. At any moment he would open his eyes in the dark again, alone.