aaaaahhh True Love kiss for merribela please?!! ;-;
(If you’d like me to write you a dragon age fic, send me a prompt from here!)
Characters: Isabela, Merrill
Tags: pirates and archaeologists AU, what even is canon, temporary character death, fluff
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?”
Isabela denies it for the rest of their natural lives. Merrill knows.
