Drunk at Midnight

Night has fallen over Alexandria, but no stars or moon shines down upon it at the moment. Clouds obscure everything, leaving the world gone dark. This is no less true in the gardens, though there are lights here and there to keep it from becoming too dark. Still, for some reason they seem oddly hushed tonight.

A dark-haired man in black armor sits on one of the benches in the park. A bottle of whiskey in one hand and a massive sword leaning against the bench that he occupies. He's staring at the statue across the way with a distant expression, his body lax and hunched slightly as he lifts the bottle to his lips and drinks the burning liquid down. The smell of it permeates him.

It's getting late, and Dolan is finishing the last of his errands for the day, a pack over his back with several wrapped parcels inside. He crosses the bridge and into the gardens, but pauses when the smell of strong drink reaches his nostrils. It's one thing to pass drunken bums on the docks - he has seen any number of those - but quite another to find one here. Doubtless the guard will find them soon enough, but -

He looks closer, searching for its source, and realizes that he knows the inebriated man. He diverts his steps until he is standing in front of Aragos. "Hey."

Aragos is drunk. Usually the hard-drinking man is in a bar working to get there, but it's clear from the shine in his eyes and the way he lists a bit back and forth that he's actually made it this time. He blinks at Dolan, not really recognizing the man and then a slow smile slips across his lips. "Hey there." He tips his head in a sort of salute and manages another drink. "What 'cha doin' this-a way?"

"On my way home." Dolan drops to a squat in front of the bench on which Aragos sits, giving the man his space, but close enough to hear him without fully standing up or looming over him. "You look like that's where you should be headed."

"Don't got one." The man says slowly, trying to focus his eyes on Dolan. He succeeds a bit, but largely it doesn't seem to matter to him. "Got nowhere to be." Aragos half laughs, but it's an empty, hollow-sounding noise. Not really laughter at all.

"You don't have a place to stay? Where have you been sleeping?" Suddenly quieter, Dolan rests his arms on his knees, the pack sliding off his shoulder to rest next to him.

That... is a question, and questions are difficult. He starts to shrug and then furrows his brow. "Here. There. I've ah... Cot in the temple." Aragos rolls his purple eyes to the side. "They don't like me drinking though do they? Coming in at all hours." His voice trails off slowly.

Now Dolan is concerned, if he wasn't before. "Maybe they've got a point. Papa always used to say that the problem with drowning your sorrows is that they know how to swim." His gaze is fixed, fully focused on Aragos, and when it's fully focused on one thing, it's just a little unsettling whether he wants it to be or not. "Maybe it'll help more to talk about it."

Being drunk is something of a sheild from unsettling stares, yet even so Aragos shifts uncomfortably in his seat. Bottle swishing back and forth. "I like that." He murmurs quietly. "They know how to swim."

Another dark, hollow laugh and he sighs, lowering the bottle so that it clinks gently against the bench. "No help for it. What's your name again? Doesn't matter. There's no helping it." His purple eyes are staring off at the statue again, and they're almost angry.

"Dolan." The name is supplied almost gently, but there's something still expectant in his stare. "What's done is done. What you have to decide now is what you're going to do about it. That's something else Papa used to say, and I found out that it's true. You can give up, or keep going."

"Dolan." Aragos repeats the name and nods. Yet it's the rest of what Dolan says that makes Aragos' facade crack. It splinters into a thousand pieces and a hard tear streaks down his face. He wipes it away immediately, shaking his head and looking at that blasted statue as if it has answers that he _needs_. "I wanna give up. Vardama knows I tried. She wants me alive for some twice-blasted reason. Wants to punish me maybe. Grind me up until nothing's left." He seethes and tightens his fist around the bottle, but it's a false anger. An emotion - any emotion that's not tears.

He looks at Dolan suddenly, his purple eyes wide and angry. "What's done is NEVER done. It lives on. It holds in the mind and heart and tears you apart every day. Every. Damn. Day."

Dolan's gaze drops to the cobblestones. He knows _all_ those feels. Anyone who's got regrets does. But - the Knight still wants him, and it sounds like the Harpist still wants the man before him. "There's something She wants you to do. Like the Knight wanted me to do. What lives on, to where you can't do that?"

"EH!?" Aragos snorts. "What more can She want from me? What more do I have to give?" He looks at the statue and suddenly flings his mostly-empty bottle at it. It... does not hit the statue. It clatters instead to the ground somehow mostly intact and rolls toward the statue slowly.

"I just..." Another tear escapes him and he blinks dumbly at the bottle. It broken would have soothed his rage, but it being whole only makes him feel hollow and unsatisfied. He closes his purple eyes. "I want to... sleep." He'd almost said something else.

Dolan lets out a slow breath, his eyes dropping a little, then following the bottle as it sails through the air. "You mean you want to die." The words are heavy with sympathy. "But you didn't," he replies, gently. "Won't you tell me why?"

Aragos lets a wry expression cross his face and nods. Agrees with what he hadn't said, but had meant. "'cause they're dead." He says it simply, but there's a world of hurt in the words. A world of pain that rests in his eyes and on his shoulders. It beats him down into the shell of a man that sits on a bench wishing that alcohol would wash it away. Even if only for a night. "If Vardama had any mercy it'd be me, but instead they are."

He looks at Dolan, meets the dark eye and the amber one without care. The oddness of it is something that doesn't sink in. "You've a bonny lass don't you? A real firecracker." He remembers now. "Imagine your world without her. Imagine her dead in your arms and you're the one that did it."

That's not a nice thought, for sure. _Bad enough that ... no._ Dolan shakes himself mentally and refocuses on the man before him. "You didn't mean to do it, did you." It's not a question. "If you die now - her death serves no purpose, and neither does yours," he murmurs finally. "Maybe Vardama wants you to make her death worth it."

Truth. It's a hard truth, and not one that Aragos is keen to hear. He shakes his head and snorts at Dolan. "You tell me Dolan." He gives the other man a hard look. "What could make her death worth it? What could be worth losing my wife and son?"

"Don't know," Dolan tilts his head, and casts one more glance to the rolling bottle. "But you drinking your life away, or following them into death, sure as all the green garden hells won't make their deaths mean anything at all." His gaze lifts, and regards Aragos steadily again, remembering someone giving him this talk not so very long ago. "It's just another tragedy. When you meet them in the Gray Halls, what will you have done? What would they have wanted you to do?"

Slowly and unsteadily Aragos rises to his feet. He closes his eyes briefly once he makes it there and then he steadies himself. "Maybe yer right. Maybe I'm supposed to be doin' somethin." His words are lightly slurred. He moves forward deliberately, his steps careful as he makes his way toward his bottle. "Can't say as that I rightly know what they'd want. A better man than I."

He half-lifts his metal clad boot and rests it on the bottle. Body poised to destroy it and yet he doesn't. "Someone who doesn't destroy everything he touches." He toes the bottle away and it rolls to the foot of the statue. Safe. He turns away and starts to amble into the dark.

Dolan rises when Aragos does, much more steadily, but just watches somberly the man at war with himself. He says nothing, does nothing, merely watches the man as he ambles off into the dark. He waits until the man is gone, and walks over to the bottle. Picks it up, examines it, and stuffs it absently into his pack before turning back towards the south, and the temple district.

-End