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He’s been developing quite the taste for fresh fruit, which is just about the only reasonable explanation for why he’s still lingering under the scorching Rivaini sun, sweating through what he thought was a lightweight linen shirt but is turning out to be nothing but a lie told by a passing merchant. He is from Ferelden, he was not made to withstand this much sun. Or the sea. Or the sticky type of sweat that, he has discovered, is the result of both the sun and the sea, and any amount of walking one does within close proximity to the sun, and the sea.
There is a light tap on his shoulder and just as he’s turned towards whoever it is that wants something of him, a fist connects with his face, and he stumbles back, trips over his own feet and finds himself staring up at the cloudless sky, the sun scorching his eyes. His ears ring, and he’s pretty sure there was a jewelled ring on the fist that didn’t quite break his nose though it was a near thing.
A shadow blocks the sun and he has to blink a few times to try and make sense of what is happening.
A hand extends towards him, and yeah, there’s a ring or five and they all sparkle like the stars still dancing at the edges of his vision.
“I thought it was you,” a sweet, honeyed voice he would recognise anywhere says, as he takes the proffered hand.
“You thought?” he huffs. “What if it wasn’t?”
She shrugs.
“Just another Tuesday.”
Anders barks a laugh and for a split second it feels like nothing at all has ever gone sideways and that he’s back in Kirkwall, cheerfully bantering with an old friend. Though Isabela would loathe the notion of being considered old anything.
She looks radiant, as ever, and her collection of gold has only grown since he last saw her. She looks right at home with the glimmering sea behind her and the bustling streets around them.
“What,” she says after a beat, grabs Anders’ chin and yanks his beard, “in the void is this?”
“A disguise,” he explains.
“Well, it’s shit.”
Anders would love to argue but cannot. It is shit. He hates it, and he knows it makes him look like a lunatic vagrant. It serves a purpose, certainly, but there’s only so much a vain man can take before he starts to avoid any reflective surfaces. Which, in a place as filled with shiny things, is turning out to be a bit difficult.
“Come on,” she says, and yanks at him again.
“I’m not a dog,” he exclaims, exasperated. “Where?”
She gives him the type of look that could mean absolutely anything, from oh you will be murdered with knives to you’re in for the type of shag you’ve only ever dreamed of in some very confusing circumstances. Not that it has ever turned out to mean either. The latter, more so than the former, but that was years ago.
Isabela leads him through the crowds, though thankfully not by the beard. She doesn’t hold on to him in any way, in fact, and very clearly just trusts for him to follow. Which he does, and he will not be reflecting on that much, thank you.
It’s not a long walk and they end up climbing up a short flight of stairs up to an apartment that overlooks the harbour. It’s nice and cool inside, even with every window open.
“That one’s mine,” Isabela purrs and points at a ship with bright white sails and gilded bannisters. There’s a small crew milling about on deck, and Anders wonders if they’re in the business for anything illegal. Knowing Isabela, it could be anything from the smuggling of priceless relics to simply parading about in the seas, with her glorious figure posed on deck, against the horizon as seagulls flit by and the setting sun casts an orange glow on her already golden–
“It’s nice,” Anders says, and then he’s suddenly sat on a bed with a pirate queen straddling his lap, and a knife at his throat.
They stare at one another, Isabela with a smirk and Anders with a frown. She scoots a little closer and raises a perfect brow. Anders sighs.
”What are we doing?” he asks, unfazed. Isabela’s intimidation tactics have always boiled down to either being overtly sexy and-slash-or pointing at things with a knife. She’s going all in.
“Shaving that monstrosity,” she says, lying, at least maybe a little.
“And this is how they do it in Rivain, is it?”
Her smirk takes an even more lascivious undertone, and she wriggles. The bastard.
“They do a lot of things like this in Rivain,” she says, not lying, even a little.
A silence falls between them, broken only by the sound of crashing waves and screeching seagulls in the near distance.
“Ugh, fine,” she finally huffs and climbs off his lap. “You are getting rid of that thing, though. I can’t take you seriously.”
“Did you ever?” he asks, rubbing his chin and neck and feeling for any broken skin. He heals the bruise on his face while he’s at it, without thinking, and startles at the sudden surge of magic he hasn’t felt since he decided to abstain, and Justice stopped talking to him.
He must glow blue and lose himself for a bit, because when he opens his eyes, Isabela is looking at him in a strange mixture of disgust and intrigue, her arms crossed and the dagger still in one hand. She uses it to point at him.
“So he wasn’t lying! Damn, I owe him a sovereign.”
Anders shakes his head and rubs a temple.
“What?”
“Fenris. Ran into him some months ago, and he said he found you in a cave, and that you broke up with magic.”
The blasted elf. Of course he’d run to the first person he knew just to spread lies about Anders. Not that anything Isabela said is a lie, as such, but it’s the principle of the thing.
She rummages around a little and somehow comes up with a razor, some soap, and a mirror, which she then tosses on the bed next to Anders. She gestures at them with her dagger and gives him judgemental eyebrows. Why are all his friends so insistent on speaking with their eyebrows?
Are they his friends, still?
“So, what happened?” she asks after a while, when he’s begun obediently ridding himself of the facial hair he hates. It will make hiding in plain sight a touch more difficult. Oh no.
He gives her a sideways glance.
“I started a war,” he says, flippantly, and it makes her cackle.
“Yeah, that was a good one.”
She’s using the dagger to pick at her fingernails, now, and approaches him slowly, before draping herself over the foot of the bed.
“You know I mean what happened after,” she says, a blade pointing at him, again. Sex and daggers.
He shrugs, pretending he’s too engrossed in scraping off a particularly stubborn bit just under his cheekbone. Looking in the mirror, he decides he really has missed his cheekbones, and his jawline. He’s not exactly as striking as he was a decade or two ago, but for a fugitive apostate, he does clean up nicely.
She runs her fingers along the edge of her blade, maintaining intense eye contact. Waiting.
“I ran,” he says, with a shrug.
The way she’s caressing the dagger borders on obscene. He has to admit he feels a little intimidated. Very intimidated. Dammit.
“I didn’t have a plan,” he tells his reflection, digging out his upper lip from under the scraggly hair, “exactly.”
“Which is why the elf found you in a cave.”
There’s a gleeful glint in her eye and an amused curl to her lips.
He puts down the razor and the mirror and levels her with a look he hopes makes him look at least a little cross, although the strange half beard he now has might water it down a little.
“He did not find me in a cave, he found me outside one,” he explains, very quickly realising it does not make him sound any better.
“And then he fed you, watered you, and made you take a nap.”
Anders opens his mouth to say something, but no snarky response comes out. Instead, he picks up the razor again and very pointedly does not look at Isabela.
“Fine,” he admits, eventually. “But I made sure we didn’t freeze in that stupid cave.”
Isabela snorts.
“And he had wine,” he adds.
She waits.
“And he was gone when I woke up.”
She’s cackling, unashamed, and he just knows she’ll tell the story to everyone they know, and they will also cackle at him.
“Aww, so it was the world’s most disappointing one night stand?”
Anders points the razor at her.
“No. Absolutely not, no.”
Isabela just shrugs and continues inspecting her nails, making a show of not paying him any mind. Anders rolls his eyes at his reflection.
“I got to keep the bedroll, at least,” he concedes. “It’s better than waking up half-naked and confused behind a bookshelf, to a templar yelling at you, after the girl you were with ran off during the night.”
“The Circle is such a sad place,” she sighs, “no wonder you turned out crazy.”
He gives a go at communicating with his brows, though he isn’t sure he’s successful.
“There were other factors, to be fair.”
“It was mostly the Circle, though, wasn’t it.”
“It– Yes, yeah, it was.”
“So, technically, the Chantry started a war.”
Anders nicks his chin in his excitement.
“Yes!” he exclaims, “thank you.”
They both end up giggling at that, and the conversation flows easier then, as Anders finishes ridding himself of his beard.
Isabela brings out a bottle of rum, which sounds like a colossally stupid idea until they’re about a third of the way through the bottle, at which point it’s the best idea anyone has had in months. He thinks so, at least.
“So, what now?” she asks him, taking a nice long swig.
“I don’t know,” he says as she passes him the bottle. “I don’t really have a plan.”
Isabela has ended up fully reclining on the bed, one leg thrown over Anders' knee, and she kicks his thigh, then makes grabby hands at the bottle.
“You don’t have a plan, you’re on the run, but you still decided to come to Rivain.”
Anders crosses his arms and leans back.
“Where I am,” Isabela continues.
It does sound ridiculous, and maybe a little pathetic, now that he hears it voiced out loud.
“I don’t know,” he says, not sure what he doesn’t know. “Seemed as good a place as any.”
She chuckles, drinks, looks at him with a loopy smirk.
“So you might as well’ve gone to, what, Starkhaven?”
They’re both quiet for a beat, and then collapse into stupid giggles again. Isabela manages to get rum up her nose, and it only makes her laugh harder, which then has Anders nearly inhaling his mouthful. The bottle ends up falling over on the bed and they both scream in terror at that, the scene turning to chaos as they try to save what’s left of the drink, and Anders makes a valiant effort at talking Isabela out of sucking rum from the bedsheets.
In all the commotion, they don’t quite hear the door open, which is why time seems to freeze completely when another very familiar voice calls out Anders’ name from the doorway.
Of course Hawke would be here; of course she would be with Isabela.
Anders sobers up in seconds and turns to look towards the door, unsure if he’s about to get another punch to the face, or maybe a dagger to the gut. Or both. Likely both.
Isabela sets the bottle on a low table by the bed and tosses her hair over a toned shoulder. She then makes a show of pointing at him like he’s Andraste reincarnated, swallows a hiccup, and grins.
“Look what I found!” she announces. “He was looking at fruit.”
It is dead-silent.
Anders and Isabela look at Hawke, though both with very different emotions. Hawke keeps looking at them both, her frown first deepening to an alarming degree, and then relaxing completely, also to an alarming degree.
Anders is sweating, and it is not because of the scorching Rivaini sun.
Hawke takes a step towards them and he startles like a spooked stray.
She goes right past him, grabs the now nearly empty bottle of rum, and drinks all of it down in one go. She slams the empty bottle back on the table and gives an exasperated sigh.
“Hi?” he finally says, stupidly.
Hawke scoffs, pulls out about a dozen daggers of varying shapes and sizes from a vexing number of places within her clothing, kicks off her shoes, and plops herself down on the bed next to him. Isabela has procured another bottle of rum and joins them, stretching out her legs over both of their laps.
She raises the bottle, and exclaims:
“To fruit!”