If they weren't lovers, if they weren't old friends, Anders would still be the least likely person to feel pity for Nathaniel right now, or to think less of him. What Nathaniel has described is the same thing any mage feels when pressed by well-prepared Templars. Templars who've got magebane, or who know the arcane techniques to block a mage from touching the Fade. There's no shame in being overpowered by such foes. In all Anders' stories of his many escapes from the Circle, he has never once expressed shame at his eventual recapture.

There is nothing to be pitied in such a defeat.

Fighting back is an option, usually a futile one. There's the chance of catching the point of your staff (if it's a sharp one, or steel-ornamented) in a crevice between plates of armor, at the armpit perhaps. A very unlikely chance. The best option is to run. If you run, you're not a coward, and if you're caught, you're not a loser. The odds are stacked against you from the beginning. All this stands between Anders and the possibility of pity. The analogy's too close: phylacteries, the microchips; Templars, the Masked.

"I know the feeling." The rueful understatement is as close as Anders will come to unpacking all that for Nathaniel. Anything more specific would sound wrong, somehow, as if detracting from the seriousness of Nathaniel's situation or the very real violation he's suffered today. "I was just as helpless. I hate that I couldn't keep them off you, and I hate what they did to you. It may take some time, and some doing, but we'll make them pay."

This is a promise, filled with cold certainty. Coming from the man who blew up the Kirkwall Chantry, it means something.