So, this idea popped up during class and hasn't left me alone. I found myself wondering if anybody had ever written about a drunk Arya before, and then this idea wouldn't leave me alone. I know it's very short. Maybe I'll extend it in the future. By the way, I know nothing about being drunk, so this probably isn't very accurate.
Arya knew she was drunk.
Which was strange, because she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she'd been drunk, until this evening, because counting suddenly seemed very difficult and her fingers were kind of blurry.
She knew the first time she'd been drunk was when Fäolin was still alive. They'd been... well she thought they'd been having a picnic, but she couldn't quite remember. They'd been in Ellesmèra, anyway, in the forest, just the two of them, and Fäolin had produced a bottle of faelnirv, which she'd never had before.
They'd just got to the stage when everything was hilarious when they'd run across Oromis, who took the two drunken teenage elves in stride, put up with their giggles, fed them soup, hid the faelnirv, and warned them that they'd have terrible hangovers in the morning. Of course they hadn't listened. And found out that he'd been right, but not before they managed to make a fool of themselves.
The next time had been many, many years later, with Eragon, after Wyrden had died. Of course, Murtagh had cut that short, and they'd stumbled out, still inebriated – because elves never got drunk – to try and fight him. Luckily, Arya was older and wiser, although she had been drunk in the middle of a warzone, so how wise she really was was debatable, so she knew a spell to counter the effects of the faelnirv, even if it was Wyrden's specially strong faelnirv.
Well, the next time had been after Eragon had left, and it hadn't even been her fault, because Fírnen wanted to try ale, and it had been an elvish party, so she hadn't seen the harm in a few drinks. Of course, it had turned into a few more when she got back to her rooms and was crying because Eragon had left, and Fírnen was missing Saphira, and it just seemed logical that it would all go away after she'd finished the bottle. Which it had, but only because she'd fallen asleep halfway through the next one.
"So that's, what, five?" she said in conclusion. Katrina shook her head, or tried to.
"It's definitely a smaller number," she argued. "More like, I don't know, ten?"
"No, more like two?" Katrina shrugged, her grasp of numerical logic rather fluid at this point.
"Yeah, two."
And this time, there had been a problem between the humans and the elves, and there'd been some fighting, although not any deaths, because it had mostly been a drunken brawl, and no serious injuries, apart from the blacksmith, who'd dropped an anvil on his own foot. But there was a lot of bad feeling anyway, with people muttering about elves, and Roran had been injured trying to stop it, and she'd just got a letter from Eragon, so when Katrina showed up outside her room – because she was staying Urû'baen, no, no, it was Ilirea now, wasn't it – with a bottle of wine, the only sensible, mature, responsible and adult thing to do was to invite her in and get so drunk that everything stopped mattering.
Apart from where she'd left that trade document that Nasuada had given her only that morning, because she needed something to draw on so she could explain Ellesmèra to Katrina, and if she'd spilt her inkwell all over it, well she was sure she knew a spell that would clean it up and make it legible again.
At least, she could in the morning.
She hoped.