(Untitled)

[sir_samuel]

It was damned good whiskey.

It was the single thought that could pass through Vimes alcohol soaked mind at the moment. More accurately, it was the single thought Vimes would allow to pass through his mind. Back home, before, back when he had done this sort of thing, it had never been whiskey this good. I wasn't an alcoholic, he had told someone

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[polly_okeefe]

Tired. Overfull. Sober, but giddy on too much sugar, food and conversation. That seemed to define me, Polly O'Keefe, at parties these days. I'd taken my glass of champagne at midnight, but had only taken a sip. The taste wasn't what I'd expected. Maybe I could grow to like it, but remembering Max, I wasn't sure if it was a taste I wanted to acquire. Ever.

One look at the rec room as the party ended disabused me of any notion I had to clean things up. I'd leave it at least until morning, and hoped that the Island would take care of the rest. Instead, my bed beckoned.

As I got my coat, I noticed the shape leaning against the wall, and heard the slosh of a bottle. I don't know why I stopped and stepped cautiously forward instead of hurrying on my way. The smell hit me, and the memory of Max, drunk. 'I... need an affirmation.' She gulped. 'An affirmation of life.' I felt the urge to run, but I didn't.

"Sir?" I said, keeping a few steps back. "Are... you okay?"

[sir_samuel]

His alcohol-induced forgetfulness and the heavy darkness outside the Compound made these not the best circumstances for recognizing faces, but Vimes was almost sure he knew the girl. She was the one with the pre-school whatever, he thought, couldn't remember her name for the life of him, but Sybil had mentioned that it might be time for Young Sam-

Sybil and Young Sam. Now there was a direction he sure as hell didn't want his thoughts going right now.

"Fine," he answered, the single syllable not quite slurring. "Gettin' some air."

[polly_okeefe]

His response filled me with a new kind of dread. I suddenly realized where I was, and it was _cold_ out here. And alcohol made a body more susceptible to hypothermia, not less, as far too many people believed.

But I didn't know this man. I knew he was Sam Vimes, head of the Island Police Department. I'd seen him briefly as they took my statement during the sword incident last Thanksgiving, but we hadn't talked. So, this was a man in high authority, who probably didn't know me from Adam. I had no means to ask, beg or cajole him inside, to someplace safe.

But walking away was a worse response. I couldn't do that.

"Um, yeah." I swallowed. "It's a... cold night." Then I took a shot in the dark. "It's a hard night sometimes," I said. "The end of a year, makes you reflect... on the past. Whether or not you want to."

I held my breath.

[sir_samuel]

"Isn't that the idea?" Vimes asked. He had shot for mock-rhetorical, but all he had sounded was morose, his words slurring together just slightly on the edges.
"Y'got this whole year gone, and suddenly you're supposed t'sit down and think about it all. An' the rest of the past, too. And the future. Now, you tell me we're sup'osed to do all that and not go a little crazy?"

He peered up at her over the top of his bottle. "Do I know you?"

[neptune_noir]

Keith had left the party to do something of a patrol, since someone probably should and he wasn't going to pull anyone away from the party to do it. He wouldn't put it past the place to dump some new arrival here on the one day basically no one was around to say hi.

Then there was making sure all the drunk folks got home correctly.

And speaking of...

Keith stopped above Vimes and hooked his thumbs into his belt and just stood silently for a moment.

[sir_samuel]

The drunkenness had come as a relief, at first. He had opened the whiskey bottle with a sort of determination. He would calm the hell down and be damned well fine, he was sure. That had given way quickly enough to the more familiar desperation, but he had not yet reached that bottom-of-the-barrel moment of shame.

Keith took care of that pretty well.

He didn't try to stand up, having had plenty of experience (and on both sides of the conversation) as to how well that tended to work. "Sheriff," he said. "Glad t'see someone else's doing their job."

[neptune_noir]

Keith looked up, blew out a large breath that turned to mist as soon as it left his lungs. Then he looked back down at Vimes.

"Okay," he said, "so that folks don't see their IPD chief like this, you're sleeping this off in the office, where there's a bed." He bent to offer a hand up.

"It'll also stop you getting hypothermia, but I'm a lot less fussed about that, to be perfectly honest."

[sir_samuel]

" 'ppreciate the concern, Mars," Vimes said darkly as he took Keith's hand. The cold hit him as he got to his feet, cutting through him more sharply than it had before. It was a sort of return to reality, despite how unsteady he was on his feet. "Jus' stepped out for a second."

[m_pinocchio]

He should be home in bed, but on a night like this it's easy to get meditative, especially with a few drinks in him, and the party isn't good for meditation. So he's wandering, looking up and thinking, mostly thinking about Eostre dancing in her pink satin dress and the hole in the night where she should have been, and he's so lost in it that he almost trips over the man in the shadow of the wall.

"Jesus," he coughs, staring down. "Man, I'm sorry, I was spacing." He looks closer, at the man and at the bottle. The idea of a drunk Sam Vimes is somehow incongruous.

"You okay?"

[sir_samuel]

"Bloody hells, will you look where you're- Damnit." He wasn't doing much with the bottle anymore. He had just enough sense left to set the whiskey aside, but the damage had already been done.

When he realized it was Mike, he wished to any god that would listen that he could have been anywhere else right then. He raked a hand through his hair and snorted. "Nah. But I'm guessin' I will be."

[m_pinocchio]

"Uh-huh," he says, eyebrow raising slightly as he drops into a crouch, gaze caught by the light glinting off the bottle. Even in that instant he can see how much of it's gone.

Drinking alone is rarely a mark of 'okay'.

"Hitting it kinda hard, aren't you?"

[sir_samuel]

"Long night," Vimes said with a humorless smile. "And damn good whiskey. Y'don't get stuff like this at home." He looked down at the bottle. "S'been a while."

[dishabille_mal]

Maladicta had insisted, sometime after the 'ball drop', as people seemed to call it but which she thought was rather ominous given the shape of the world on which they presently resided, that she and Angua were going on patrol.

In their party dresses.

"So," she was saying, "so apparently I need a made of honor, too, which... these things are awfully more complicated'n I think I realized. But anyway, I figure that'll be you. Right?"

[loaded_wolf]

"Really?" Angua looked rather excited to be asked to be anything of honor, but upon further thought she couldn't help a bit of suspicion. "Wait, what do I have to do? Cleaning?"

She didn't know much about weddings at all, but maid didn't sound very promising. Even if she was an honored one.

[sir_samuel]

Vimes couldn't quite hear what they were talking about, but the women's familiar voices cut through the silence. He froze, and swore, and might have kicked something if there had been something to kick. He was an idiot, he was a damned pathetic idiot, and even with as much he had had to drink, he knew that he was gonna be told just that if they found him.

Damn it.

He managed to pull himself precariously to his feet, and even left the bottle on the ground beside him. Maybe they wouldn't notice him in the dark.

Like you have that kinda luck, Vimesy.

[dishabille_mal]

"No- ...I don't think so," she amended, frowning, "but no. You were a special dress and stand on my side of the altar thing while the whole things gets done. It's what your best mate's supposed to do. Well, or family, I think Rupert's going to be William's best mate. Man." And even drunk, Maladicta was hyper aware of the dark and so she stopped short, eyes narrowing and looked over into the shadow of the compound.

"Whozzit."

[kingshit_lloyd]

The new year found Lloyd pleasantly drunk, walking with a slightly uneven gait in no particular direction. Snow was gathering nicely and the air was sharp and fresh, so he figured he'd try to walk and clear his head a little before heading home. Lloyd stopped and squinted for a second, noticing a shadowed form -- man and bottle, a timeless classic. He raised his eyebrows as he recognized the guy.

"Chief, you're plastered," Lloyd remarked, not very diplomatically and with a mild slur, which may have been slightly hypocritical of him, but there was drunk and there was drunk. And there was drunk and on the way to catching pneumonia, which Mister Sam Not-De-Niro Vimes here seemed to be going for.

Not to mention, wasn't the head of police supposed to set an example or some shit? Lloyd didn't give much of a damn, but somebody might.

[sir_samuel]

Vimes laughed. There was no joy in it, that much was patently clear. There was nothing very funny about the Lloyd's exclamation, but sometimes you had to laugh 'cause that was all there was left to do. In that drunken moment, the ex-con sounded to Vimes like no one more than Fred Colon, stating the unhelpfully obvious, as always.

"That so?" he said, and took another drink from the bottle. "And here I hadn't noticed.

[kingshit_lloyd]

Well, not plastered beyond sarcasm, at least. Good to know.

Getting drunk could be a hell of a good time, but there was nothing fun about what Vimes was doing. Seemed to be right the opposite. Lloyd wasn't normally the type to look for oblivion at the bottom of a bottle like so many guys did, but sometimes shit got too heavy, and you did what you had to do. There had been that one time - just the once - back in Vegas, when everything had begun to fall apart piece by piece, and Lloyd had suddenly become bleakly aware that he was on a rapidly sinking ship, and that there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. He'd gotten drunk good and proper back then.

Hadn't helped much.

"Yeah, how 'bout we get you inside before you don't notice turnin' into a copper-shaped ice sculpture?" Lloyd offered, feeling himself getting more sober by the minute, just from looking at the guy.

[sir_samuel]

It took a helluva lot of drinking for Vimes to lose his sarcasm. He'd done it before, too, sometimes when he'd had even more to drink than he had tonight. As rotten as his night was, there had been ones worse, when even that humor of despair had left him.

He stood up, markedly unsteady on his feet, but made no other move to go instead. Vimes scowled at Lloyd. "Wouldn' a copper-shaped ice thingy do you more good?"