Author's note: This is a response to a kinkmeme prompt that got stuck in my head: "For some reason or another, Cullen is unable to take any more lyrium and goes into a serious withdrawal and somebody helps him through it. " Spoilers ahead for the end of DA2. Rated M for adult content, eventually.

For the third day in a row, Cullen stood on the edge of the high wall around Lowtown and contemplated jumping. He set one booted foot on the stone lip, twisting his heel and listening to the gravel crunch under his toe. A practiced flick sent rocks and grit skittering to the ground to toss up a puff of dust far below. For a moment he almost felt at peace as he imagined his own body tumbling through the nothingness, weightless.

Then, as it always did, the headache came back.

Cullen had fought a great many battles in his service as a templar. He had suffered almost every injury imaginable; a broken wrist from overextending his weapon, a shattered collarbone from the crush of a shield with brutal force behind it, latticeworks of electrical burns across his body from a particularly vicious apostate. And of course, there had been the demons, Uldred's monsters who had done far worse and burned him in places you couldn't see, and would never heal. None of it compared to the pain and anguish of lyrium withdrawal, of slowly losing your mind and your soul to the black hole left behind by that magical dust. None of it compared to knowing it was only a matter of time before you were nothing but a desiccated husk of a man inside of your gorgeous, shining armor.

Not that he even had any armor left. He'd sold it weeks ago to buy food and shelter. Soon enough that money would be gone too, and he'd be begging on the streets like so many of his former brothers.

He toed another stone over the edge and wished that he wasn't such a bloody coward.

The Circles were breaking all over Thedas, the Chantry locked in the ecstatic throes of revolution. Kirkwall's templars were scattered and forgotten like so much dust in the wind, like the entrails of a ritual sacrifice left to rot on the killing stone. Those that could buy passage to Val Royeaux would find at least temporary asylum before the storm reached them. Those that could afford lyrium to support their habit had the luxury to disappear and erase the truth of their past. Everyone else - and there were so many, good men and bad - was left to go mad and die a shadow, unseen and unheard by anyone.

Some of the men had come from rich families, had support and a safe haven and endless gold to keep themselves sane. Not so with Cullen. He was nothing but a chantry mouse, a sheltered little boy who had been kicked out of his only home with no knowledge of the world at large. He had no name, no family, no kinship but the brotherhood that had gone up in shuddering magical flames in one fateful moment. And he certainly had no money.

Ser Cullen of Nobody, sentenced to die because he couldn't afford to live.

A sudden shock of pain lanced across his temple and he fell to his knees with a moan. The world flashed and swam before his eyes, the towers and soaring banners bending in sickening ways around an impossible new gravity. He felt himself lurch toward the edge with a rush of vertigo, and only stopped himself from tumbling over it by throwing himself backwards onto his tailbone with a nauseating crunch. He winced and bit down against the jarring pain, boots scrambling over stone to push him back from the sheer drop. He panted, hot and cold shocks running through his veins as he realized how close he had come to ending his life.

He closed his eyes and pressed his palms against them until he only see searing white behind his eyelids. The staggering pain in his head slowly subsided, retreating to its normal dull pulsing while his ragged breathing slowed and became regular again. When he opened his eyes, he was relieved to see the world was all right again, the towers pointing upward as they should and the banners trailing nobly towards the sun.

And then he turned his head and saw her.

His breath caught in his throat and he stared, unwilling to even blink for fear that she might disappear. He knew it was another hallucination, knew it because she was gone, because all of Ferelden knew she was gone and this could not possibly be real. And yet, there she was, sitting cross-legged in her apprentice robes and looking at him with that queer little grin, her head tilted in that way that always reminded him of a bird. Her hair was raven black and still long, gathered at the nape of her neck just like he remembered it. Her amber eyes were as bright and alive as they had been the day he first saw her - so young, so long ago.

(Never did she come to his dreams as she was when he last saw her, her lovely hair cropped and her eyes clouded with sadness and pain and all the years she had grown in so short a time. The thick, armored Warden robes were so impossibly heavy on her small frame. The robes and everything else.)

"You're dead," he finally said, his voice flat.

"And you're talking to yourself," she shot back, annoyance flickering across her features. "Now can we please stop pointing out each other's shortcomings?"

He opened and shut his mouth a few times. He had to admit she had him there.

"My madness has taken less pleasing forms," he mused. "Maybe it wouldn't hurt to indulge this one for a while."

She smiled and shook her head slightly. "Flatterer," she teased. "You always were too nice to be a templar."

"And you were too sweet to be a dangerous killing machine."

A shadow passed over her face and he instantly regretted saying it. "Well, we both know I changed."

He looked away, running one thumb nervously over the rough line of his jaw. "Yeah. I did too."

They sat in silence for a while, each regarding the other with a strange combination of affection and wariness. When he spoke, the noise disturbed a pair of nearby pigeons who leapt away in a heavy beating of wings.

"Amell..." She closed her eyes against the way he said her name, soft as a prayer. "Are you a hallucination, or a vision? The fevered fantasy of a dying man, or... could it be that the Maker has really given me a few last moments with you?"

She chewed her lip for a long time before answering. "I don't know," she said apologetically. "Does it really matter?"

He shook his head wordlessly. It didn't matter. He would take this, like he never did when those monsters showed her to him, tempted him with promises of a life he would never have. He had resisted and resisted and resisted no matter what they did to him because he was a good man, a better man, and he had made promises that he intended to keep. But by the Maker, he had nothing left and he would take this.

She felt so real when he closed his arms around her that he nearly wept in relief and joy. Her thin shoulders trembled under his touch and he felt that she, too, was struggling with the overwhelming feelings of rightness in this embrace. One of her hands, still unscarred and soft as a lily, ran down the side of his face as she looked at him with heartbreaking tenderness.

"You don't have to die, Cullen," she said so faintly it was almost like the wind. "There is a way out."

He buried his nose in her hair. "All I want is this. It's all I've ever wanted."

She took him by the shoulders and pushed him back so she could look him in the eyes. Tears were running down her cheeks, and he felt himself caught in the amber depths of her eyes like a fly caught in honey. "I wish I could give it to you," she whispered. "But I've used my time and now I'm gone." She wiped her cheek with one hand and steeled her gaze. "You are not. You still have a chance in this world and I'm not just going to watch you throw it away."

Cullen grimaced. "I don't have a choice. The lyrium -"

"You do have a choice." She gave him one last, lingering look, and he noticed that she was beginning to fade. "You have the same choice I did."

He cried out and tried to grab hold of her, tried to pull her back into his arms, but she was gone, leaving only the cold and dark of the setting sun.