Sometimes, Cole sees things that are not meant to be there. They are glimmers and glinting at the edge of the world that disappear from his vision, like cold breath into the starlit sky.
When he stands in the inn by his lonesome, listening to the sounds of the conversations below, he feels tugs of things from far away. It is like the moon shifting the tides, but bigger, like the spinning of planets and galaxies, heard only in books and seen through telescopes. Sometimes, when he shifts, he feels like there is another Cole there, aside from himself, shifting the same way, and the other way, and also not shifting at all. It is a strange feeling, like having a thread wrapped around his heart that is suddenly plucked like a harp string.
After a time, he notices this more often, and when he closes his eyes and tries to focus on it he wonders if this is what it's like to dream. He knows things about people in worlds he's never seen, about the man who was dead and didn't know- "You were never second, ever." He whispers into the void, and sets things spinning. There are heavenly things, dead things, bad things, but they don't happen here. They don't happen in the fade either, and when he tries to follow the thread, it is gone.
There are voices drowning out his thoughts, and they make it hard for him to win.
It's when the Inquisitor walks by that his eyes widen, and he looks at and around and through because there is more than one, more than a thousand- Inquisitors of every shape and size and color and complexion. His Inquisitor is in that line, but they are all his inquisitor. They are happy and sarcastic, sad and stoic, angry, tearful, mages and rogues and warriors of many races and genders, their love spreads like spider webs, stretching and connecting to tie on to people, forming thick cords.
He rocks back on his heels and sits down, letting it wash over him. He is Cole, always Cole, but he is one Cole on a fixed point of thousands, maybe millions of other Coles, just like him, and just as he is coming to this realization, others are too, some already know, and some are not there, the Inquisitor sent them away and they will never know, never understand the love they could have had. Other Coles have worse fates, they leave on their own and they fester and hate, they may one day become demons if they can't hold on to themselves. But most Coles, they are loved, cared about; humans and spirits and resting between. They are hand in pale, cold hand.
After this initial realization he finds himself turning through to this cryptic puzzle he's stumbled upon, following, plucking threads and listening. The elves who love Solas are always sad. The well drinkers don't sleep well at night and wonder if they made the right choice. Blackwall's threads are twisted in knots of care and betrayal and hope, there is so much hope and redemption it chokes his mouth and makes his heart swell in his chest until it hurts like a bloated stomach, full from rich food. Each Inquisitor finds guilt in themselves, though some are callous and cold and uncaring.
Most of them want to be good. And he wants them all to be good. And he wants them all to be happy.
In all these threads he cannot find the source, seeking the single line that unites them all as he twists through his own mind in his free time, trying to delve deeper and deeper despite his drowning, and even when he digs through the relationships, the betrayal, the different threads of conversation twisting into webs upon webs of hairline fractures that change the world. But ultimately he plunges through and finds himself somewhere entirely different, and he looks out and he sees, for the first time, the truth.
He smiles, safekeeping secrets behind his lips and teeth on the tip of his tongue, and he hums in understanding, finally.
He wonders if he should ask Solas if he thinks they are real, but he doesn't want him to consider the truth that everything they do will always turn out in the end to the same result. Varric might find it an interesting book, and if it wasn't so difficult to understand, it would sell. Sera would maybe think it was a good joke- if someone else told it to her.
But Cole's favorite Inquisitors are the ones that are within and without. They are all humans, but they are elves and Qunari and Dwarves and other humans too. They sit and stare and influence events unfolding before him, and he doesn't understand how, in their magic tapping of squares with letters and numbers or the buttons on strange devices in their hands they clutch so tight, but they shape Thedas singlehandedly. They laugh at Iron Bull, swear at Corypheus, cry over Cullen and Solas and Iron Bull and Dorian and him, so many of them love him he is taken aback and wishes he could only reach out and touch them.
"I'm glad you came to talk to me." He tells the inquisitor. "I like spending time with you." He can get those words out when the other things aren't in his head, and even when the Inquisitor's face doesn't soften, he can feel it beyond them, a little to the left, the gasp and smile of someone watching. He wonders if the Inquisitors, the Inquisitors beyond the Inquisitor, love him like they do other people.
He wonders, with a small shy smile alone in the dark, if they know he loves them too.