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Arpina is never awake so early, or before Miraak, really. It’s consistent and something that she can always count on, but today may be the exception. She’s so thankful she’s utterly brilliant at keeping those blasted hangovers away. It’s simple, really—all one would have to do is drink water between alcohol, swallow down a healing potion, and eat while drinking. It’s easily one of the most valuable pieces of information she knows, and the one she shares most widely with the people she, at the very least, tolerates.
As she sits up, though, stretching and turning her neck, pressing her fingers there as though to push the cricks out of it, she realizes that she’s not alone in her room, and—this isn’t her room. She’s certain of it, because the bag at the foot of the bed is Miraaks’ and not hers, and Miraak is sleeping on the floor—why is he sleeping on the floor? It’s not like he couldn’t have squashed her against the wall and shared the bed.
She certainly wouldn’t have minded.
Arpina glances around, then presses the heel of her palms into her eyes. Hell. How much did she have to drink last night?
Clearly a lot.
She moves to get out of the bed, then realizes that she can't—Miraak’s completely blocking the side of the floor. She doesn’t have to walk over him, and she crawls to the other end of the bed and over the chest at the foot of it. With a glance back at Miraak, soundly sleeping on the floor, she slips out of the room and into the common area of the Sleeping Giant.
“Oh,” she can’t help but say aloud. “Ew.” It’s so much worse out here.
Sleeping men litter the area. Litter is not extreme, but perfectly accurate, just by the way they’re sleeping on the floor, on the benches, and she thinks she can see a pair cozying up on a table. Is that Faendal and Sven? She shudders. Orgnar must’ve been just as drunk as them if he allowed this.
Arpina creeps over to find herself a clean goblet and water. There has to be something somewhere. When she finally does find something, she swallows a mouthful down for herself, gets one for Miraak, and then she’s quick to return to the sanctity of her room. She sighs in relief as she shuts the door behind her to block out the collective snoring, but she stops when she sees that, in her absence, Miraak’s clambered up on the bed.
She goes to the side of the bed and to the nightstand, giving Miraak’s peacefully sleeping face a very long, almost absent stare as she sets the goblet of water down.
“Stop staring at me,” Miraak mutters, and she almost knocks the goblet over.
“I was not.”
“Yes, you were.”
“Mm, yeah. I was.” She lifts his arm and nudges him with her hip as she sits at the edge of the bed.
“Arpina,” he grumbles, pressing his cheek deeper into the pillow, as though waiting for it to bury him. Still, he makes space for her.
“Miraak,” she mimics, and leans forward to tilt her head towards her. She presses her hand against his forehead, sweeping his hair back. Though he’s unwilling to admit it even under pain of death, she is well aware that he doesn’t mind it when she touches him. In fact, he even welcomes it. (Anyone else, though, and he is liable to blast their fingers off.) He’s not particularly warm. It’s not like he’s sick. “You’re just hungover.”
(It’s not like she had to touch him to figure that out, but…)
He cracks his eyes open just the slightest bit. His gaze is captivating, that almost unnatural luminescent green glowing even in the semi-darkness of an overcast day.
“You might be the only person I can tolerate,” he mumbles, giving her an amazingly judgmental look even in his state, “but not even you can bring out the best of me this early in the morning.”
“For the record,” Arpina discloses, rolling her eyes at his statement, “It’s almost noon.”
Miraak looks utterly appalled at that.
“What? You’re angry?”
“No, I'm—” he pauses and groans, then shuts his eyes and shoves his cheek back into the pillow. “Of course I’m not angry. This is my everyday face.”
“I am deeply grateful at your show of grace,” she says, unimpressed with his sarcasm.
There’s silence, and he doesn’t respond save for a quiet, “My head really hurts.”
Oh. Clearly, she didn’t share that precious tidbit of knowledge to him the night prior. She must’ve already been utterly plastered by the time he’d started drinking, then. Weird. Still, she can’t help but feel a little guilty the way he admits he has a hangover. She might’ve made fun of anyone else that’s as much a lightweight as him, but he’s the exception to that.
Though it was five thousand years in what was practically stasis, that was still a tangible five thousand years of his body not maintaining his tolerance to alcohol.
She takes the goblet for the stand. “Water,” she tells him, voice soft. “You should drink, it’ll ease it.”
Miraak lifts his head to drink awkwardly, swallowing down the water, then he drops his face back onto the pillow.
She gets up to give up the bit of space she’d taken up on the bed, but his hand closes around her wrist loosely.
“Don’t go,” he says. “Stay.”
If he was anyone else, she still would have left. She’d have liked to go down to the river perhaps, enjoy the solitude that comes with the morning of a festival eve. Maybe even take a dip, there, and enjoy that cool water flowing down from Lake Ilinalta with little risk of some peeping fellow spying on her as she bathes.
But, alas, it is Miraak asking her. Arpina stays.