#gingergreencoffee

Thank you so much! Finally getting through some of these this week, I had so many more lovely things to write than I even expected~ I hope this one turned out alright~

for @dadrunkwriting

Count Meowster turned to the door. Anders looked up from mending his old tattered coat. He hadn’t actually been wearing it lately—the elbow needed patching and the feathers were thin.

There was a knock on the door a moment later.

Anders frowned. No one knew him here. He’d only just arrived, and the tiny hovel looked something like a campsite crammed into a small room.

“Mage.”

That gravelly voice. It sounded familiar, but Anders was on edge. He couldn’t place it, and it could easily have been someone he knew as it could have been some templar who had shouted at him at any point over the years. Those voices returned often enough in his dreams.

The knock was more insistent.

Anders dropped his coat onto the cot and grabbed his staff. Count Meowster sat watching him. He cracked the door open and his eyes widened.

“...Fenris?”

(If you’d like me to write you a dragon age fic, send me a prompt from here!)

@dadrunkwriting

Pairing: Isabela/Merrill

Characters: Isabela, Merrill

Tags: pirates and archaeologists AU, what even is canon, temporary character death, fluff

Rating: Mature

Isabela does not believe in true love. She does not believe in curses, or prophecies, or whatever other bullshit this blighted temple is trying to sell her. She doesn’t. She is a hardened pirate with a heart as bloody as her conscience and that’s the simple, honest, messy reality of it. And so what if the elf who’d led her crew down to this bloody island was unconscious on the blighted altar? That was her own blighted fault for being too curious for her own bloody good and -

“Blood and ashes.” Isabela snarls, turning away from the altar and the unconscious (not dead, she hasn’t checked her pulse yet, she could be unconscious. Never mind the part of Isabela that knows exactly what a dead body looks like. Never mind that she hasn’t seen her chest moving. Never mind that she’s been watching for it.) Instead, Isabela whirls on her crew, who are standing at the base of the steps staring up and past her at the small, broken elvhen body on the altar behind her with something like loss. Isabela throws one of her daggers into the nearest wall with enough force to maker her arm hurt. It doesn’t help. “Whose blighted idea was it to come and investigate the famously cursed ruins of Seheron anyway?”

One of her crew - Roger - opens his mouth. Isabela’s next dagger goes flying past his ear. “Don’t.”

Well aware that she’s stomping, and trying to ignore the half forgotten voice of her mother at the back of her head telling her not to, Isabela looks around at the mighty, vine-ridden marble ruins of this strange, blighted, cursed fucking place. (At everything other than the unconscious - dead - elvhen apostate on the altar behind her, surrounded by strange silver mirrors.)

“I didn’t ask for this!” Isabela rails at the darkness, and her voice bounces off the beautifully arching marble rafters. “I didn’t want this.” She breathes, and her chest heaves with it, and her lungs ache, and the air is thick with the scent of the jungle and Isabela’s eyes are burning and damn it all to the blighted void. When she blinks again, tears fall unbidden, hot and stinging down her cheeks. “I didn’t ask for her.” She strides to one end of the platform and shoves a thousand year old clay vase down the steps, and feels a vicious stab of satisfaction even as the voice of the strange elf rings in her head. (“I’ve never seen anything like this!!! Oh, creators, these artefacts are priceless. Isabela, thank you!!”)

Instead Isabela marches down the steps, down into the salty water where the beach has begun to encroach upon the ruins, hacking and slashing at everything she can see as she draws two more knives from her boots. “I didn’t ask her to do this! I wasn’t looking for this! I didn’t - I didn’t - I don’t -,” Isabela stops, breathless, pressing her head against some ancient marble pillar and telling herself she isn’t sobbing. 

Not so far away, there’s the singing crash of the sea. One of the sailors speaks up, quietly, breaking the silence of the temple. “Captain-”

Isabela’s hands curl in a fistful of vines wrapping around the column, and she bites down on the inside of her cheek. “Sod it.”

Then she turns, and runs, through the salt water and up the steps, and she catches the cold (too cold, what if she’s too late?), tattooed face of the strange Dalish elf who’d commissioned Isabela and her crew for this impossible expedition. Isabela looks down at Merrill, and tries to ignore the way her tears are falling onto her cheeks, and whispers, “You’d better be right about this, kitten.”

Then she bends down, and kisses her. 

For a moment nothing happens. Merrill’s lips are cold and stiff in death, and her body doesn’t move. Isabela’s hands feel petrified in place, caught cradling her head. She feels something inside her snap, even as her body curls forward with a great, wrenching sob.

Then there’s a sound, like the inverse of a thunderclap, and every mirror around the altar flashes with the light of the sun. Isabela hears her crew shouting, feels the vibration of the altar beneath her and a lightning crack as the stone is severed from the earth and brought into the air. She feels her hair lifting off her back, and her feet drifting above the stone as if she were floating in water. She clutches Merrill’s body closer, tightly, wrapping herself around it as she squeezes her eyes shut, and the sound builds to a fever pitch.

What happens next is disjointed. There’s an explosion, but it’s silent. The altar shatters. Isabela and Merrill fall through the air towards the podium. The light goes out. Isabela curls around Merrill’s body and braces for impact.

But the impact never comes. Instead, the two of them fall softly into an impossible meadow, which rushes like the ocean down over the ruins, bursting with life. And at the centre of it all, surrounded by a soft green glow like a late summer afternoon, against Isabela’s chest Merrill gasps.

Slowly, kitten-like, she blinks up at Isabela. “Oh, hello captain. Are we hugging now?”

Isabela isn’t sure whether the sound she makes is a laugh or a sob. It doesn’t matter. She kisses her. Beneath her hands, she feels Merrill’s face burn with heat as she flushes, but when Isabela goes to pull back, Merrill wraps her arms around Isabela’s back and pulls her closer. Isabela laughs into their kiss. “Don’t ever do that again, kitten.”

Lips wet with kissing, eyes bright and cheeks flushed, Merrill grins up at Isabela in the dark between their faces. “I was right though, wasn’t I?”

(my internet was a little wonky yesterday, so I couldn’t post this, but better late than never)

“Carah,” a familiar voice called in sing-song somewhere in the hall outside her bedroom. “Carah Amell, I have something for you.”

She threw open the door. Outside it, grinning slyly and towering over her, stood Anders. Ser Pounce-a-Lot draped across his shoulders like a contented scarf, tail twitching lazily against Anders' cheek. The older mage had his hands hidden behind his back, and when Carah raised a single ginger eyebrow in question, Anders' grin widened.

“I have something for you,” he said again.

“So you said.” She felt her smile match his. “Should I be concerned? I remember what happened last time.”

“One time,” Anders said, bringing one hand to his chest as if her wariness caused him physical pain. “You play one little prank and suddenly no one trusts you.”

“My hair was blue for nearly a month, Anders.”

He tried to stifle a giggle, but failed. “You've never looked lovelier.” He cleared his throat. “But this is different. Even you wouldn't fall for that twice.”

With no more preamble, he pulled a book from behind his back. She took it from him slowly, confused. “Histories and Genealogies of… I can’t read the rest of it.”

“The Free Marches. You told me once that you wanted to find your family.” He was almost bouncing with poorly concealed glee. “I did a little digging and I found them.”

“You… found them?” Carah ran a hand over the cover carefully. It had just been wishful thinking, she and Anders and Jowan and Karl barely more than children, sitting in the library and dreaming dreams of freedom. “Anders…”

He waved off the obvious gratitude in her voice and opened the book to a marked page. “Here you are. The Amells of Kirkwall. You’re nobility, my friend.”

Carah was at a loss for words. Anders was very good at faking nonchalance, but the amount of effort he must have gone through to find this for her... 

She had to jump to be able to properly wrap her arms around his neck to hug him. Doing so dislodged Ser Pounce from his nap, and he leapt to the floor with a mrrp. Anders froze like he always did, like no one had ever hugged him before even though she knew that wasn’t true. Then his arms went around her waist with almost crushing strength. He eventually leaned over enough to put her feet back on the floor, but still they made no move to pull apart.