in a minute there is time

modern fen has an undercut now its law 

17 - Isabela/Fenris - shy kiss

There were too many rooms in the mansion.

(”I think that’s part of mansioning, Fenris. If it had an ordinary number it’d just be a house, and you’d have nowhere to store the wine.”)

Too many rooms, each with their own set of draperies and picture frames and corpses in their corners. Aveline despaired. Hawke laughed that lunatic laugh of hers—the one that dragged them all from their beds to hunt spiders that were never worth the reward, until she laughed again. Merrill, on a rare and unsettling visit, once sighed over having a whole room for cobwebs, and Varric kept his thoughts to himself. 

Isabela smiled at him, and trailed her fingers through the dust.

”Do you even use these rooms, though?” she’d asked him, sketching hearts and waves and cheerful obscenities with her index finger as she sat in a window seat, evening light turning thick and gold as it filtered through warped glass and grime. “That’s the real question.”

“That’s not the point,” he told her, squinting to make out letters as she worked, and catching the edge of her smile.

“Oh, I know.” Isabela shrugged, wiping her work away with an absent hand. “I’m just saying that there are uses.” She chuckled, soft and delighted with herself. “I can write them down, if you like.”

Panic. Sweat-sick and cold and half gone as he sees that her laughter does turn harsh. She tilts her head, reaching out a smudged hand and pulling back, sighing.

“I’m a git,” she declared.

“You are—” it was Fenris’s turn to shrug. “Singular. I—”

“—yes?”

“—it would be interesting,” Fenris said, wishing for wine and time. “To see what you wrote down. Most men would call it an incentive for literacy.”

Her eyes widened. Fenris felt his hands fist. Sweat gathered in the small of his back. And she was laughing. Again. Loud and hard enough that the window seat creaked beneath her and she had to flatten one hand against the glass.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “It’s just—this would all be terribly attractive, sweet, except that I can’t bloody spell. You’d either be correcting me, or I’d be teaching you bad habits. Mood ruined.” 

“Then you’ll have to confine your suggestions to speech,” Fenris said. “I don’t see that stopping you.”

Isabela drew herself up straight, legs hanging down over the side of the window seat, boot heels drumming. There was a tiny pause as she reached out again. The space between one breath and the next, held longer than either expected. She swallowed. He caught her hand.

Her palm tasted of dust.