It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses. ~Colette

He forces himself onward as though he were a horse and not an elf, dirty and disheveled like a madman.

He runs as though mercenaries bearing the marks of the Tevinter Imperium are on his heels.

He weeps silently as though he has lost everything he has known and loved.

And in a sense, he has. He misses the quirks of Kirkwall. His companions' good-willed banter strikes blows to him every time he closes his eyes. He misses the feeling of knowing that the next danger he would face would be at the side of the Champion, the surety that he would solve any and all problems with a sword.

He misses Garrett Hawke.

If his heart hollows at the absence of the relative coziness he had enjoyed in his demolished scrap of a mansion, then it shatters into a thousand crystalline shards of jagged, raw pain at the absence of Hawke. Despite his persistence in letting his bestial instincts govern the empty vessel that he has become, his last memories of Hawke come to mind, uncaring of the anguish burdening themselves.

The Gallows. Templars, and mages. The realization that they were on the wrong side of battle, fighting for—in spite of every speck of hate he had voiced towards them—the magi. The blood, the battle fury. Orsino and Meredith, dead. A sense of victory kindling ashes of weariness.

The sudden awareness that Hawke does not take his usual lead of the group, lingering towards the back. The dawning horror. His knees buckling. Running to his side. Seeing the wound Hawke had attempted to cover. Hawke is silent. He is screaming.

There had been a spark in his eye, the kind of look that Hawke had when he was about to say something amazing, something life-changing. But then the mote of light faded, his hand going limp in his grip. A look of peace replaces the quiet suffering on Hawke's face. The only words of love and wisdom that passes through his lips is that of a bloody sigh.

He screams, over, and over, and over. As though by keeping that one bit alive, he would still be alive when he opens his eyes.

Hawke. Hawke. Hawke.

And when that doesn't work, he switches to Garrett. He even tries Champion. He tries all the endearments he can think of, in every language he knows, and then some. He tries "beloved".

It is the last word he has spoken in a long, long time.