Fenris/Isabela road trip AU, pt. 2
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.
That was certainly their area of expertise, running away.
