A/N: This is not my headcanon but I had to write it. The feels. You probably understand.


There were so many memories, tangling together like threads of silk. At first the sounds were deafening, the colours too bright, the emotions sweeping through him enough to drive him to his knees. This was his history too, he thought, his own memories among the noise of the past.

These were the scenes he saw first, of course. Standing on her balcony, she on tiptoe before him, coy and inviting. The kiss – ironically the first they had shared outside the Fade, now replaying within it. He remembered with no small pain the softness of her lips, the taste of her, how she had sighed into his neck when they had finally broken apart.

He remembered the joy and fear he had felt when she had whispered words of love into his ear, the overwhelming sensations of her wrapped around him, how it had been to look into her eyes and know that, for the moment, she was his. She was so beautiful, and she had a pure heart, and he would never forget how it felt to be loved by her.

And yet the regret would always be with him. The guilt, the shame of being the one to break that heart.

This was the memory that pressed forward now. She lay alone in the bed they had shared, music and laughter from a party in the main hall permeating the room but unable to drown the sound of her tears.

"Why, Solas? How could you?"

Even now, he was still unable to answer her.

He tortured himself with her tears, the remnants of her ghosting through the halls lost and sad. This was what his weakness had wrought, he thought, and it was only right that he see it. The hurt he had caused surrounded her like a darkness for far too long.

Yet time moved on in memories, and she was still there; she stayed when others did not. Skyhold was her home, he supposed, now that she had no clan to return to. She was still as beautiful as in her youth, her eyes less tired but more worn, streaks of pale silver just beginning to show in her hair.

Not everybody had left her. He watched as she walked the gardens with her old Commander, inhaling hard as he saw how the man brushed his hand along her hip as they talked. The way she leaned into the big man, her face turned up to his like a flower seeking the sun.

Solas listened to the familiar soft sounds, the gentle gasps and sighs of a woman surrendering herself to desire. Only the name she was chanting was different, this time, and it pained his heart even while he knew he had no right to feel it. This is, after all, what she had deserved, and what he deserved to know.

And when his eyes finally opened, focusing on the ruins of the castle around him, they were wet with the tears that he had held inside for a hundred years.