Stitches slowly opens the door of The Prancing Pony, as though the task itself is difficult. Wincingly, he reaches his right hand to his left shoulder to the site of the new crater in his flesh, and tenderly rubs it to submission. After the throbbing subsides he ambles towards the bar, eyes meeting with whoever might be tending it this early in the morning. He flashes a gentle smile, but keeps his eyes down when he orders. Not his proudest moment, nor his most prideful order, to be honest. After his lips have gone still for a few moments his drink arrives for him, as after all, no one else is in a tavern at the moment. No one conscious anyway. His fingers grip the mug of the warm and dark drink, and he looks down past the rim grimly, as though he knows what he’s about to do and why he shouldn’t. He knows what he’s putting in, and what little he’s getting out of it. Still, the voices he yearns for grow quieter and quieter by the day. In the dark brown of the daunting liquid in the mug he can even try to see them, the faces of those come to pass in his life. Whether lost through death, lost through time, or just lost. He sighs deeply, these images are nothing more than a farce, an illusion he didn’t even have to wait for. These mirages in the brandy are something he conjured on his own, rather than seeing them in the late hours due to lack of sleep.
No longer hesitant as he finds himself feeling his eyelids puff and water begins to clog his vision, it’s time to forget for a bit. It hurts, it burns, it’s not wise or smart, and without the proper pacing and practice it is likely to end in a violent spew of whatever was for dinner last night. As he downs the pint of brandy, slowly sipping again and again, he holds his breath to keep his body from absorbing the smell and deciding to reject his actions. The joke’s on fate, he has the pacing and practice, and there’s no dinner to regurgitate if he didn’t. Still, it doesn’t take him long to get through the pint, at which point he leans back in the chair he had found his way to before he began to drink. He sets the tankard down before he loses track of it and has to pay for it yet again. His eyes wander to the rafters of the tavern, and the wooden panels of the roof, the gentle firelight that would be present at night now gone and given way to dreaded sunlight. As he waits for the effect to hit him, the pain in his wounds begins to subside, no longer do they tease and mock him constantly in some way. This is how he knows it’s working.
From there it doesn’t take long to go from mysterious and brooding young man to a simple but common mess of a man. Getting up and retrieving a softer pint of alcohol from the bar is blurry, if there at all in his memory. It doesn’t matter, he had done it and gotten back safely. Now swaying, his eyes take turns between sharp and aware to fading towards sleep. Then something new happens to him, which is a shame, for who knows if he will remember it when he comes to his senses. A song comes to him in the voices of children, a distant memory that his mind had entirely forgotten. A song that he and a few others used to sing, him, his brother, and the friends they had seen nearby in the houses surrounding his own. He can see it as the song comes to him, little streams in the nearby areas, and large trees speckled with red berries. A smile comes to his face as he drunkenly murmurs the song for no one to hear, waving his hand carelessly in the air to the melody, fading into the background of Bree as just another nearly unconscious reveler.
