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He lies down, not sure why. He won’t sleep. He never sleeps. Still his loft is very dark and very warm and he wonders if it might not be good to lay down and pretend. He has a body, does he not? Maybe it needs to rest. He can try.
He lies in the darkness and listens to the noise of the tavern, watching as the flicker of two-story-down torches is occasionally obscured. The flames dance on the ceiling, but the shadows are comfortable in his little corner. His hat falls off when he turns on his side. Is this comfortable? He rolls onto his stomach, but immediately regrets it. If something happened, he would need to defend himself. Can’t defend himself when he’s face-down. Duh. Stupid.
How do they do it? He thinks he might be able to drift into the fade and let his body stay behind to rest, but that leaves it vulnerable, doesn’t it? He can count 67 people sleeping in Skyhold right at this moment, and he marvels at their courage. Is he supposed to just leave his physical self behind, to be done with as anyone pleases? And it’s not that he doesn’t trust the people here, he feels safer here than he does in even the fade, but suddenly he understands the need for a locked bedroom door.
He sits up.
Sitting means resting, too. He can sit and feel a bit safer. Back to the wall, legs crossed, head resting on a crate, hat still on the ground. He closes his eyes and listens for cries of help, but all is good and all is quiet. The Inquisitor is awake, he notices. In their bedroom, in their bed. Worried about the entire world all at once. He considers briefly that he might go up there and talk to them, relate to them about being two people not able to sleep, but suddenly the Skyhold tower seems very, very far away, and the thought of getting up and going there is just too much. He wonders why.
Sera is sleeping. Sera is dreaming. Her dreams are good but they are about to turn sour when she opens the dark door to face her dead mother, and then there’s going to be hordes of spiders and salamanders and two decapitated heads yelling about her sins, and it’s going to be horrible. Sera is closer than the inquisitor is. She’s just one story below him. He could go there and push her tankard to the ground, make a noise so she wakes up, and then when she falls asleep again she won’t have the nightmare. That would help. That… wouldn’t it? She feels so far away. Varric told him that bad dreams aren’t dangerous, and that most people don’t remember them at all. Maybe… Maybe when she wakes up, if she does remember, he can make her forget. That sounds like a better plan. He doesn’t want to move, and he’s starting to realize why.
The left side of his ribcage is starting to ache a bit, so he repositions a potato sack to support it, and now he’s starting to feel the difference between comfortable and not. Sera is sleeping. The Iron Bull is about to sleep, because he found a warm woman who wants to hold him, and it’s always easier to sleep with someone else. He can feel Krem, who was called the wrong name for most of his life, crawl into the fade on drunken legs and disappear in there. He won’t dream.
Josephine won’t dream. And Cullen won’t dream. And Leliana won’t sleep, so she won’t dream. The people go out like the lights in Skyhold, flickering slowly into a world of warmth and comfort, and now the shadows in his little corner feel like a blanket around him. He pulls his legs up and leans against the potato sack. As a last measure to shut the flickering torches out, he puts his hat on and pulls it down over his eyes.
Cole drifts off for the first time in his new life. He doesn’t sleep long, and he doesn’t sleep deep, and when he wakes up he can’t remember anything from it.