More than one person had told Vimes that the drink would kill him one day. This was a fact that he knew quite well if he was completely honest with himself, but he couldn't rouse up the energy to care overly much. He had woken up several times with some kind soul, some seamstress or bartender tipping him onto his side and letting him know that he could have died that night if not for their interference. Never stopped him from going off and getting drunk again. He figured if the drink didn't kill him, general bad living would, or some criminal he managed to catch, and who was he to dictate the way he died? He believed that the world was, in its infinite mysteries that he didn't care to contemplate for lack of schooling and philosophy to draw upon and for lack of religion to give him strength, essentially random. Things just happened. Usually to him. He drank to forget, after all. It was easy to forget about death so long as you drank enough. The tricky bit was that you could never drink enough to make death forget about you.

After his shift was over, he found his feet taking him along the familiar path to the pub. He sat wordlessly down into the seat that had long since been designated as his, and his usual was placed in front of him just as it always was. Nothing particularly bad had happened today, but Vimes didn't need something to happen to want to drink anymore. It was as if instead of developing a habit for drink, drink had formed a habit for him, which was fine by him. If there was liquor in the area, chances were it would end up in his hand and shortly afterwards would end up in his stomach.

Except this time, before taking his first swig, he stopped. This was not something he could remember happening in the past. He drank to forget, but now all he could see in his mind's eye was Sybil, staring sadly at him. She never complained, after all. Probably too classy to complain, he figured. But she looked disappointed, and that was always worse. Of course, he could always drink away his disappointment, but he was startled to realize that for the first time in a long time, he didn't want to forget. For the first time in a long time, he had something worth remembering. He wanted to remember Sybil Ramkin, the woman he had ceased to think of as mad, and instead had begun to think of as an endless fountain of good cheer, empathy, class and warmth that enveloped everything around her, the woman that had somehow seen something in him that no one else could, including himself. Sure, she was eccentric and he practically had to stand on tip toes to look her properly in the eye and her obsession with swamp dragons probably bordered on unhealthy, but that didn't make a damn difference in the grand scheme of things, whatever that may be.

He put down the drink and said, "I'm leaving."

"What, without drinking that?" The bartender asked, bewildered. "You? Well, you've still got to pay."

Fiddling with his coin purse quite ruined the drama of the moment, but the bit of him that wasn't longing for that drink (which was admittedly most of him) was still rather proud of himself. He walked up the winding pathway to Lady Sybil's great big manor and the door was flung open for him. "Why Captain," Sybil said, blinking at him because evidently that was how classy people showed surprise instead of gaping like Vimes usually did. "You're an hour early. Is something the matter?"

"Er. You said something before. A few times, actually - about meetings?"

"You're going to have to do better than that," Sybil said crisply.

"Ah. Yes. Meetings about, er, the drink. I was... thinking about going to one."

And then Sybil beamed at him, and her smile was just as big as the rest of her.

He never did give up the philosophy that life was ultimately a culmination of random happenings or the idea that he could die tomorrow, but he decided that maybe he did care how he went out after all.