He straightened his robes a little defensively. For a long time he'd clung tightly to the thought he'd only let down Hawke, that he only really owed her, but Varric and Merrill and Bethany had shattered that months and months ago. Not like he's sure he feels like acknowledging that and being any sort of vulnerable when she's ranting at him and dismissing him.

"You looked the other way for myself, Hawke, and Merrill," he says evenly. "Because to you we were people. The rest? You weren't helping them. You were handing them back. I understand," Anders says, raising a hand to forestall a likely interruption, "now, that you could not have kept your position and also aided them. But no one who should have been helping those who were suffering in this very building were. And they were about to all die. You know this. Anyone who stops and thinks for a half-second would know this. How would you have saved any of them, Aveline? Would you have?"

He hadn't done the right thing. He knows it. But he's too proud to easily concede anything to a vast majority of people.