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Red wings beat against a black sky, fanning the flames washing through Haven like flood water. The red man stood tall and crooked behind his marching soldiers; they had come to kill the mages and the heretics and the children. Cole had come to save them. Maybe he could have. Maybe if he had gotten there sooner. Maybe if he'd convinced the templars before the demon mangled their minds. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It's too late now. Haven is all rubble-buried homes and shops. The church stands empty and broken. Shreds of tents blow in the wind. Cole had only ever seen it while it was blazing and bright, only ever heard its whispers when it was too hard to focus. He had tried to strain his ears but the screaming was loudest.
"Red eyes, smoke in my lungs— I can't find the door, where is the door," Cole mutters to himself while loitering around the gate of Skyhold where the healers gather; rushing from wounded to wounded with herbs and potions, their hands aglow, pressing to swollen gashes and offering leather to bite; he stares down at one of the injured curled on a bedroll with her back to the campfire, her calloused hands around her neck. "Baking in a kiln, skin cracked like clay." The woman groans to herself, her voice crushed gravel in her throat, still so quiet. She doesn't want to be heard.
He follows trails of pain around the lays of bedding and scattered belongings. Armor with red splotches permanently stained, the kind of rust that doesn't wash. It'll never be worn again. A whittled wooden horse the size of his palm whose hooves are charred black. A girl held it once. Her hands don't hold anything now. There was too much hurting here to help them all.
Cole settles, eventually, on one patient laid on their back with hands twine on their stomach. This one doesn't think of Haven. They weren't there. They don't writhe or sob, their chest rises slow and even, they stare at the clouds without fear that they'll go dark. Cole's light feet carry him past workers who look through him and see nothing worth remembering, until he's stood just away from the quiet stranger. A healer dabs their forehead, marked red with fresh wound, using a damp cloth and asks them, "have you made any progress?"
The injured person gives a single small shake of their head. "Not the kind you want." Their black hair, which is silky in parts and matted in others, stretches and splays under them like tentacles. A boat neck blouse— torn and seeped with blood and filth now, but was once fine and the color of custard— hikes up beneath their chest so that their bandaged abdomen is easily cleaned. To the side, by a decorated but worn blade, their old skirt is kept neatly folded, though it's in too much disrepair to deserve such neatness. They wear only bloomers now; their raw knees remember dragging against raised roots and twigs. "I still recall nothing of before I was killed."
"You weren't killed," the healer gently reminds them while pressing the cloth to the scrapes along their neck. Their chin raises to let it reach every crevice, and they only flinch the first time it succeeds.
"I was,” their upper lip curls on one side as they say it.
The healer shakes his head but doesn't argue any longer— then another calls him over, so he tells them he'll be back, “just wait for me,” as if they could go anywhere, while he rushes off. They huff air from their nose and turn their head to watch the others be tended to.
It's only then that they catch the shadow stretching along the ground, tracing it across the footprint scattered dirt and up to Cole's face. Their dark eyes meet his sickly pale ones, long enough for a soldier to finish thrashing from healing pains, but it's not clear at first if they're really seeing him. They shouldn't see him— they're not meant to— but when they push their brows together like they're waiting for him to do something other than stand and watch, it becomes ever more obvious that they're not abiding by his expectations.
His boots fall in line with an existing trail until he's crouched down where the healer had been. The wide brim of his hat looms over their face; dark golden skin littered with moles and marks he can see much clearer now. They blink at him and say nothing, but their lips open in preparation to. Cole speaks first, “do you remember the flowers? They were yellow and blue,” and then their eyes go wide, darting around his gaunt face for an explanation, or hint, something to understand. So screams their mind, how does he know? “Everything else was blurry. Crooked and wrong. Like a bad portrait, or… an old one, with the paint smeared at the edges. But you remember the flowers. What were they?”
They push themselves halfway up on their elbows. For a moment, they're completely motionless. A second later, that changes. They move far too quickly for someone so injured; their hand grasps the handle of the blade at their side, the other grabs onto the collar of Cole's shirt, then they lunge forward to shove him down into the dirt and knock his hat clean off his head. His hands move down above where their knee presses into his side, maybe to shove or draw his dagger, but instead his stiff fingers linger in the air. They demand rather than ask, “who are you?” The tip of the blade points between his ribs and their hair hangs down in a curtain that only the two of them can see beneath.
The others try; heads turn at the commotion and their healer takes one step, and another, before stopping dead. He calls out, “what’s going on?” and receives no answer.
Cole exhales a tightly-held breath. His hands raise and rest slowly, his knuckles flat against the ground on either side of his head. They relax their own grip for a second before it whitens again. “I'm Cole.” He never looks away from their desperate eyes, even as the knife presses into the linen of his shirt. They won't hurt him unless he gives them a good reason. They don't want to. “You're bright. And in pain. I can help,” he hesitates, “with the pain. The brightness doesn't go away, usually.” His face scrunches in apology; theirs, in bewilderment.
“What are you talking about? Start making sense!” They wrench the fabric of his collar up and his breath catches, his hands curling into fists. They won't hurt him. The healer takes another step forward. Where are the guards? He, who'd spent days cleaning their wounds and telling them everything is going to be alright, is afraid of them. Maybe Cole is a little bit, too.
Cole asks again, “the flowers. What were they?” They go to speak but all they can manage is a shake of their head. Their shoulders quiver until they abruptly pull back from him and scramble onto their bedding, dropping the knife at their side and drawing their knees to their chest. Cole doesn't sit up. He just listens. Striped primrose. They're shaking but they don't want him to stop talking. It helps them remember, or maybe just feel like they can. “Prying fingers pulled petals and pressed them in pages,” he sighs wistfully, his overgrown straw hair falling around his face as it turns to face them. “You don't know if they were yours. But you remember each one of them.”
His words make them breathe out too hard, and then the pain rushes back in, their hands blindly grasping down at their stomach as they double over. The healer finds it in him to move his stumbling feet, and a few others join without even a glance toward Cole, crowding around them and moving their limbs every which way. From between the sway of bodies, Cole can see fresh red stains blooming across their bandage. He presses his lips together. He's not sure he helped.
Rising to his knees and tenderly placing the hat back atop his head, he considers, for a moment, making them forget. He reaches one hand out and feels the Fade warm on his fingertips, aching to reach into their head and smooth over the memory. Instead, he listens a moment longer. I want to remember. I want to know. They don't mean him, not really, but the thought sits in his chest. Maybe it's a spark of understanding that makes him reconsider. Maybe it's the worry that it'll only complicate things further. Maybe he's just selfish, and maybe he'd like to pretend they could want to remember him. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Whatever the reason, instead he simply stands and wanders toward the stairs leading to the training grounds with his head hung and fingers fidgeting together.
As the patient lies prone and their eyelids flutter, barely keeping lucid while the adrenaline seeps from their veins, they hear their caretakers murmuring. “Wasn't there a boy here? Just a moment ago? I don't think I've seen him before,” one says while she crushes herbs into a poultice, “what did he look like? I… can't remember.” Blue eyes, they respond inwardly, their jaw too tired to move. They keep musing to themselves as they drift into a sleepless rest, blue like striped primrose. Like cornflower. Like larkspur. Like forget-me-nots. Cole pauses at the base of the steps, and he smiles. Maybe he had helped after all.