Alistair eyed Oghren with some resentment. "Not even one tankard? You're drinking," he said, pointedly looking at the large mug of ale by Oghren's plate.
"Yeah, and I can handle myself around drink these days. You're still drying out; you can have one mug of small beer a day, and tea or water the rest of the time."
Alistair made a face. "No one gets drunk on small beer."
"That's kind of the point, Alistair," Oghren pointed out, sounding irritated. "Now shut up and drink your tea."
Alistair made another face, but did so, listening attentively as Oghren began talking with his group of wardens about the patrol they were leaving on the next day, heading to some new dwarven city named Kal'Hirol, and finding himself wishing he was going with them. Not that he had any great desire to be back in the Deep Roads, but... they were Grey Wardens, doing proper warden's work, and that was something he'd had only the briefest experience of in the past, during the few months between Duncan having conscripted him and the events at Ostagar. He'd liked it back then, being one of the wardens, even if he was the new kid, the junior-most, given all the nastier chores. And... he missed that. Being one of the group. Being accepted.
It wouldn't be the same now, of course. The Grey Wardens of Ferelden were led by Loghain, not Duncan; all of the men he'd known, his brothers in arms, had died at Ostagar, and he didn't know these new wardens. Looking at the men seated around the table and listening to Oghren, he found it odd to realize that in terms of time since Joining, he was actually senior to all of them, which made it doubly embarrassing how little experience of real wardening he had compared to them.
He studied them each in turn, wondering about all of them. He knew a little of what had brought each of the four here, at least. Oghren escaping the responsibility for a pregnant wife who had followed him to the Keep anyway, the little dark-haired mage having no other real choice but eventual death at the hand of templars. Edrick, big and blond and blue-eyed, and a murderer, however accidental it had been, conscripted as an alternative to being jailed. Cale, even bigger, with his blacksmith's build, short steel-grey hair, and burn-scared cheek, who'd been dying of the Blight before undergoing the joining had given him at least a few years reprieve from the spreading taint. But that just told him why they were here; it didn't tell him what they were like; how they handled themselves in battle, whether they would come to welcome him into their brotherhood in time, or if he would always be an outsider among them.
It left him feeling melancholy by the end of the meal, a sadness that lingered as he headed back upstairs to spend the evening in his rooms. He could have remained downstairs, he knew, but he felt like such an intruder on the close friendships of the other wardens. Like he didn't fit in. Anyway, it wasn't that fun to be around people who were having fun and relaxing and drinking when he wasn't allowed to. Well, there wasn't really anything stopping him from the 'having fun and relaxing' part, not really, except not being allowed to drink kept him from really relaxing when others were, and that didn't exactly leave him in any mood to have fun, either. Better just to go to his room and read for a while or something. Not that there was all that much to do, alone in his rooms. He still only had the one book, and it wasn't exactly a gripping read.
He reached Loghain's quarters to find he wasn't the only one who'd decided on an evening in; Loghain was seated in his usual chair in the sitting room, a book open on his lap and a hair of half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose. He glanced up over top of them as Alistair entered the room, then returned his attention to the book in his lap, not saying a thing and seemingly ignoring Alistair's presence after identifying who it was.
Alistair could feel himself tensing as he walked by him and made his way to his room, what little pleasant mood he'd been feeling beforehand – which was almost none, anyway – evaporating in the face of his hatred of Loghain. His hands were actually shaking a little as he opened the door to his room, so strong was the feeling. He wanted nothing more than to return to the sitting room and attack the man, but he wasn't stupid enough to try it. He'd already had it amply demonstrated to him that he was far too out of shape and out of practice to even lay a finger on Loghain, no matter how much he might wish to. And given that Loghain was the Warden-Commander... stomach churning sourly, he forced himself to find the book of Grey Warden regulations, and flip through it until he found the section dealing with things like insubordination. He knew what kind of punishment he could have expected as a templar for doing something as unwise as attacking one of his superiors... and unsurprisingly, the punishment he could earn in the Grey Wardens was much the same, if anything a little worse. He forced himself to read and re-read the section several times before putting the book back down on his desk and retreating to his bedroom.
There wasn't really anything there for him to do here. He lay down on his bed for a while, arms wrapped around himself, and found himself wishing he was still back in Kirkwall, or any of the places he'd drifted through before there, with at least a few coins in hand and a tankard of ale, or a glass of wine, or even something stronger. Able to drink enough to forget, at least for a while, what a mess he'd made of his life. Able to forget that he'd walked away from Solona when she needed him. Able to forget that she'd died without him. He rolled over and pressed his face into his pillow, but the expected tears didn't come. He felt only emptiness, and guilt, and the deep shame that was what most made him wish he could seek the oblivion of too much drink.
He rolled over again after a while, and sat up, hunched over on the edge of the bed, his head buried in his hands. He wasn't back in Kirkwall. He wasn't elsewhere. He was here. And much as he might have tried to delude himself otherwise on the way here, escape wasn't a realistic option. He was stuck here; he was going to have to learn to live with it, no matter how much he might wish otherwise.
He got up, after a while, and opened the chest at the foot of the bed. His almost-empty backpack was where he'd left it after taking out the clothing it had held, the canvas-covered shield underneath it. He lifted out the backpack first, easing himself down to sit on the floor by the chest, and beginning digging through the detritus inside of it. Most of it just trash; a half-empty bottle of oil and a whetstone that he no longer possessed a blade to sharpen with. A shaving brush with well-worn bristles and his old razor, and a lump of slowly hardening soap in a fold of leather, none as good as the shaving things he'd been supplied with here. A holey sock missing its mate and lumpy with his own bad attempts at darning.
Lumpier than he'd have expected, actually, and he slid his hand into it, remembering only as his fingertips touched something smooth and cold in the toe why he'd hung onto it. He upended it, carefully withdrawing his hand, staring at the treasure it had hidden; a small statuette, carved of bone or perhaps tusk, he wasn't sure which, in the shape of a robed woman. Old work; Alamarri or Avvar, and crudely but beautifully made, the face suggested by just a few fine cuts in the smooth oval of face. The robe had a faint pattern, almost worn away from years of handling – his, and those who'd owned it before him – only remaining visible because of some darker substance that had been rubbed into the fine grooves, leaving a faint stain that lingered even where the grooves themselves had been worn away. One of a number of little gifts Solona had given him, in their months together, and the only one he'd kept, the others being sold or traded one by one, for passage across the sea, for money to rent a room and pay for food and drink. Mostly drink. Only this one was left now, kept because it reminded him of her; the robed woman he had loved. Whom he still loved, even though she was dead and gone.
He sat and stared at the little figure held in his cupped hands for a long time, then set it down beside his knee, and kept looking through the pack. Not much else of value in there, beyond the old cracked and re-glued amulet of his mother's that he could have sworn he'd thrown away. He put that down by the statuette as well, eventually tossing the now-empty backpack back into the chest, a pile of things to one side of him that was stuff to discard, and just a few items to keep on the other.
He leaned one arm on the edge of the chest, reaching in to gently set fingertips to the covered shield. Duncan's shield; another gift from Solona. The one thing he'd known he could never part with, no matter how desperate for money he was. His face twisted in a sour expression. What would Duncan think of him, if he could see him now? Not very blighted much, he was sadly sure. A deserter, a drunk, someone who had run rather than remaining to confront his highest responsibility. A failure.
He closed the trunk, leaving the shield where it was, picking up the handful of things he meant to keep, moving around the room and putting them away. The amulet went onto the small table beside the bed; the little statue he took out to his study, and stood it on the sill of the window by his desk, where he could see it every time he looked up from his work. He returned and fetched the remaining things, wrapping them all up in the worn-thin and much-patched old nightshirt that had been one of the things remaining in the pack, and left the bundle by the door to his room to take out and get rid of the next day.
It was dark now, not late, but late enough, and he changed into his nightshirt, new as almost everything he owned now was new, and crawled into bed, lying there staring at the faint gleam of the amulet on the table nearby. After a while he sat up and moved it, dropping it into the shallow drawer underneath the table top. With it out of sight, he was finally able to sleep.