(no subject)

[lastgunslinger]

Call it whatever you like.

A long bath, today. Black jeans. White shirt of soft lambswool, with white embroidery. Even his boots look well cared-for.

Call it intuition, for Roland Deschain has ever listened to the small voice inside.

He is sitting in his chair, smoking, and remembering his room in the Dreaming: a window of stained glass with a sky so blue it must be dream, an impossibly green-leafed

(world)

tree, and two trellises of twined roses.

He fingers the silver cross and silver medal around his neck, unconsciously.

Comments

[honest-johns.livejournal.com]

A knock at the door. Not especially loud, but somehow still urgent.

[lastgunslinger]

Roland blinks once, twice.

"It's open."

[honest-johns.livejournal.com]

Alain opens the door.

He's white-faced still, and tense.

For a moment, he can't think what to say.

[lastgunslinger]

Roland stubs out his cigarette and stands.

Low, calm: "Say on, Al. Whatever it is, say on."

He feels his heart speed up.

[honest-johns.livejournal.com]

Alain swallows. Then, low-voiced, "Your mother's here. After."

No need to say after what. This is one thing for which there is forever only before and after.

[lastgunslinger]

Roland pales.

He turns to the window, steadying himself by planting his palms on the table in front of him.

Echoes from the past, now that Alain is standing where Joe was standing:

"I have to go down. Is it not so?"

"The dead are Bound. You can't avoid her. And she talks like you."

A long, shaky breath. Roland lifts his head to look out at the lake.

[honest-johns.livejournal.com]

He gives Roland a moment. It's all he can do, and it hurts to feel so helpless. It hurts.

Softly, "Bert's with her."

A flash of memory from his first hours in the bar -- the weight of Cuthbert's arm around his shoulders and Roland's face as he knew it at twenty-four, his eyes dark smudges staring from a white face, and a ragged gasp -- and then it's gone.

[lastgunslinger]

He doesn't know he's saying it.

"All small boys born to the High Speech must face the dark alone."

[honest-johns.livejournal.com]

Say true. Say sorry.

He wants to contradict it. To say We're here or One from many or We are yours, sure as you are ours, and we roll on as we do.

But he can't. Because, at the heart of it, every one of them faces the dark alone, and a gunslinger does not have the luxury of flinching from that.

All he can do is move forward -- steps that feel heavy as great iron weights -- and put a hand gently on Roland's shoulder.

[lastgunslinger]

And Roland's head bows lower, then.

Face the dark alone. Yes. But there are lights in here, and Alain is there.

And Cuthbert is downstairs with his mother.

And it was his mother who sang him to sleep, in his childhood that always feels like it happened to someone else, under the soft, colored light of the stained glass windows in his room when he was a very small boy indeed.

Darkness, and light.

A deep, slow breath; and Roland straightens -- experimentally -- and turns around to face Alain.

He is composed. Serene, even.

And with a small, sad smile

(the lost lane-end into heaven)

as though he is remembering something from a time in a waste land of one sort or another, he says, "I must go down. It is so."

[honest-johns.livejournal.com]

Alain nods, silently, and returns the smile. Barely a twitch of the lips, but it stays in his eyes, soft and sad.

He squeezes Roland's shoulder, and then lets his hand drop.

He'll go down with him, of course. No question of it, and no thought otherwise. They all stand alone before the darkness, but it is a small mercy and grace to do it shoulder-to-shoulder.

[lastgunslinger]

He goes to the door, and makes to head out -- but pauses.

His hand, consciously now, goes to his throat, and the twin weights he carries there.

Down and across, his thumb traces; and around.

A smoke-cracked, dust-hoarse voice: The only things that matter are what a man can do an' a man can't do. I couldn't change that place, not get meself unbound any quicker. What I could do was take it as it was an' make a life there.

It is then that he feels the weight at his left hip, and though he knows what it is -- he is a gunslinger; how could he not? -- he looks down anyhow, and closes his eyes.

His hands go to the buckle, and Roland Deschain takes off his gunbelt, folds it, and lays it on the foot of the bed.

Then, without looking at Alain, he leaves Room 99.

[honest-johns.livejournal.com]

Alain is still, for a moment, looking at his friend's back. Straight and stiff -- unbowed, at whatever cost.

The gun on the bed, behind him, is an almost palpable presence. The gun of his father. Roland's hip looks narrow and bare without it.

Alain realizes, as he does periodically, how very much Roland looks like Steven Deschain, these days. Older, even, and more weathered, and without the handlebar mustache, but...

There is a knot of pain, in his chest, like a fist clenched to aching.

He breathes out, and follows (http://www.livejournal.com/community/milliways_bar/5094141.html), closing the door behind him.