“You know, Rook, there’s one thing I’ve learned about fear: it’s a lousy storyteller. It’ll twist the facts, leave out the important details, and blow the ending way out of proportion.” “Don’t burn yourself on the pyre just because Solas handed you the kindling.” “You’re a very useless time traveler, you know. Are you even investing in your future? This would be prime time to snag some real estate. You could avoid all the regions that turn into bloodbaths later on.” “I believe leadership is a curse to bear for the right cause,” he said softly, with a weight that spoke of long-buried pain. “Some might relish the power that comes with it, but power cannot fill the voids left by the choices leadership demands. It carves pieces out of you; pieces you may never recover. And when you try to fit yourself back together, you may find that the shape has changed entirely.” But forgiveness wasn’t such a straightforward road, was it? Some days, the ground turned to mud beneath your feet, slick from your own tears, and you slipped backward. Some days, a tree of doubt and regret came crashing down, blocking the path forward, and you had to find a way around it before you could keep going. Every blame and accusation hit harder when it came from yourself. Other people’s words could be shaken off, walked away from. Maybe, in time, even forgotten. But your own thoughts followed you everywhere, whispering, condemning, reminding you, at every turn, of all the ways you failed when it mattered most.

Strange, how his mind turned circles around consent. One moment it was a bargain, the next a sacred vow, a meeting point where trust clasped trust. Solas was a monster. Solas had broken her in ways she hadn’t even finished discovering. And Solas had also been human enough to save her from the same fate she was now wishing on him, back when he didn’t even know her name. Both things could be true at once.

[...] and she couldn’t help wondering if even shit plans were worth trying when they offered the faintest chance at a happy ending. Maybe he was her great nemesis, the challenge that would define her life, while to him she was just dirt under his boots. Being unloved was one thing. Being unremarkable was unbearable. Hope fluttered in her chest like a candle’s last gasp. She pinched the wick between her fingers, letting the sting remind her why dreams were dangerous. It would hurt, of course, to mourn something that had never truly existed, yet had been raised onto a pedestal of her own making. Looking back, she would cradle his sudden distance with a bitter sort of reverence: that even as he raised the knife meant for her back, he did it with the sorrow of someone cutting into his own flesh. The difference between them was laughable – him, poised and divine, playing at pity while turning his face away to soften the blow; her, trembling, dangling from a blade’s edge above the dark he wished on her. A pawn discarded after use, and a king pretending to care.