lastgunslinger

It's hard to say how long it is before Alain reaches the clearing at the end of the path.

Roland is kneeling at Alain's side. And gently, with love, he closes Alain's eyes for the last time.

A deep, shuddering sigh, and he bites his lower lip -- you are a gunslinger of Gilead --

(and then there were two)

-- and looks up at Cuthbert. The question has to be asked. He's afraid he knows the answer.

"We have time to bury him, do you think?"

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Still sobbing quietly, Cuthbert raises Alain's hand and kisses it, then lays it on Alain's chest.

Dimly, Roland's words penetrate his haze of grief, and he looks up.

"We can't just leave him like this. We have to--"

He never finishes that sentence, because at that moment the sharp report of a gun echoes through the hills and pain blossoms in Bert's left shoulder, tearing a cry that's more than half surprise out of him.

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The sudden rifle crack pulls Joe forward again, swivelling Roland's eyes up to the cliffs that had cast Alain in fatal shadow; he squints one of them against the sun rising at their backs.

A man in rags, with face painted blue, crouching with a rifle. Roland's hand--

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-- slaps leather and sends the barbarian to Na'ar.

He blinks once, twice. Cuthbert.

He kneels beside Cuthbert, helps him to his feet. "Come on -- "

They run back to the cave, leaving Alain Johns, son of Burning Chris, behind.

Say sorry.

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Joe slides back as the danger passes, barely aware he did anything. He tries to slide all the way back, through the door he vaguely feels behind him. It's blocked. He slams himself mentally against the locked door as Roland hurriedly dresses Cuthbert's wound.

As the two young men hurry back towards camp, Roland looks over his shoulder and through his eyes Joe sees -Oh FUCK- That it has closed.

Roland, meanwhile, speaks over his shoulder:

"I'm going to rouse the men. Go back to our tent. Get my father's horn."

Cuthbert nods, and they split at the fork, here above the bluff. Roland charges into the tiny camp where his army, the last army of Gilead, waits--shaves, washes, pisses. It's too damn early to fight a war.

He says simply, "They've come."

A murmur passes through the tiny group. The leader of the enlisted men, the nongunslingers, Aaron son of David, kneels. "Our lives for you, Roland son of Stephen. For the line of Eld and the Affiliation." He is perhaps three years older than his dinh, a sergeant when this war began. Now... general of an army of eleven.

Roland blinks backs tears--Joe can feel how they prick his eyes--at the simple love and faith the world still holds, even in these dark days. "Rise, bondsman. In love. They'll reap hell before they make an end of Gilead."

A ragged cheer rises at this, and weapons are seized--rusted rifles and slings and bows and sword. They began to march towards the passes, and nearby, on the hill facing the plain--on Jericho Hill proper--the sound of a horn rises pure and sweet. "Hile, you men of Gilead!" roars Roland. "To Cuthbert! To Cuthbert and the Horn o'Deschain!" The march becomes a run, and a red day, a sword day, dawns over Jericho Hill.

And behind the eyes of Roland Deschain, Joe Manco goes to war at last.

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Cuthbert stands alone on the hill, the Horn O' Deschain raised to his lips. And as he watches Roland lead the men toward him, fierce pride suddenly swells in his heart.

If this is the end of Gilead, they'll make it one worth remembering, if there's anyone left to remember it.

He's still looking down at them in pride and love when his right leg explodes in pain, and he looks down to see a dark hole and a spreading patch of blood just above his knee.

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Roland leads the charge. They run. See how they run -- these last few guardians of love and light against the black and the dark.

It's a silver sound, the Horn of Eld. Silver -- and White. Sweet to Roland's ears. More than sweet. Filled with life.

And slowly, as they run, men get picked off. Not Roland, no, and not the men who are closest behind him. The last ones. Good men. Men Roland knew, of old, when he was younger, and not so hard. Not yet a leader of men.

But now as he approaches Cuthbert, he is all war leader, and he faces Cuthbert Allgood now, standing straight and tall, deadly authority radiating from him.

"Hile."

And now he looks at Bert, Bert's wounds, and his facade cracks for a moment -- but then comes back together.

There's not time to fall apart.

The world is moving on.

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Cuthbert's face is twisted into a bright, painful grin, his breathing heavy, his eyes slightly wild and still damp with tears he never got the chance to finish shedding for Alain.

But he stands tall and straight, and raises his gun in salute to his friend and brother and dinh.

"Hile."

As they face the approaching horde, the direness of their situation sinks in. They are hopelessly outnumbered. But they stand fast, firing into the blue-faced throng and crying out for Gilead, for the Tower, for their fathers and fallen friends.

Bert no longer has any conception of the passage of time. Maybe they stand there firing for minutes, maybe for hours. The old, familiar lust of battle has fallen over him, and the only thing that brings him out of it is the sudden awareness of a new surge of pain.

He looks down, and sees blood spreading across the fabric of his shirt, just below his ribcage.

It's then that the laughter starts. Incredibly, irreverently, impossibly, Cuthbert Allgood looks his rapidly-approaching death in the face and begins to laugh.

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Roland hears Bert's laughter.

It sounds like the horn.

And he turns to Cuthbert, expectation in his voice -- "The horn -- "

Meaning to ask for it.

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Some dim part of Cuthbert is aware that the correct answer to what Roland's just said is not a new eruption of snickering. That's all that comes out at first, though.

Then he shakes his head, stepping--staggering--backwards, and holding the horn just out of Roland's reach, almost teasingly. "Oh, no, my friend. I blow it sweeter than you ever did. You can have it back when I'm dead. Neglect not to pluck it up, for it's your property."

It's possible he might say more, if not for the sudden interruption of two more bullets. One takes him in the upper right arm. The other blazes its way past the side of his head, and half the world suddenly goes dark.

There's a brief flare of anger--bastards, I needed that eye--but then a fresh surge of laughter takes him. When it finally passes, he fixes Roland with his one good eye, grinning from ear to ear.

"Roland! We've been betrayed, we're outnumbered, and our backs are to sea--we've got 'em right where we want 'em! Shall we charge?"

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Roland looks at Cuthbert, at his men, at their situation --

-- and nods.

Time to stand true.

"Aye! Aye, very well." He raises his voice -- another silver sound. "Ye of the castle, to me! Gunslingers, to me! To me, I say!"

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--And for just a moment, all traces of laughter fall from Cuthbert's face.

"As for gunslingers, Roland--I am here. And we are the last."

He never thought he'd be there, at the end. Part of him has always been certain that he would fall, probably through his own stupidity, and leave Roland and Alain to go on.

It's turned out the other way around, and in different circumstances, this might make him weep. Now, it just makes him laugh again.

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The end. This is the end.

The end.

He looks at Cuthbert, and for one spare moment twenty-four years of memories flood through him -- birth to death, now. And he embraces Cuthbert. The other gunslinger is trembling, and Roland holds him close. This is how he will remember Cuthbert Allgood.

Cuthbert is still laughing.

My dear, he almost says. But no time for that. No time for goodbyes. Time is up.

He pulls back, looks at the other men -- a spare handful against a horde.

"All right." His voice sounds hoarse, even to him. "We're going into them. And will accept no quarter."

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And in between pain and laughter that split Cuthbert's mind, there is still a core of fierce pride and love for Roland.

"Nope." His voice is almost cheerful. "No quarter. Absolutely none."

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He hears Cuthbert, and it's so hard to keep a smile from his face.

So he doesn't.

It's grim, and ugly, and right.

"We will not accept their surrender if offered."

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For some reason that Cuthbert is glad he will never be asked to explain, this strikes Cuthbert as the funniest thing Roland has ever said, and he practically doubles over with laughter.

"Under no circumstances!" he gasps out finally. "Not even should all two thousand lay down their arms."

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And he turns to Cuthbert this last time, friend to friend, gunslinger to gunslinger, brother to brother. That smile is still there, knowing, lethal, and somehow beautiful.

Magnificent.

His voice is strong and sure. "Then blow that fucking horn."

And there it is -- the sound of a lifetime, of a dozen lifetimes, a sound that is the heart of all the Way of Eld is and will ever be, and he loves it, and he loves Cuthbert for sounding it -- and Roland draws himself up.

"And now, my friends -- " He doesn't look around, but ahead. Forward. "Hile!"

Their answering cry -- and there's the red haze descending upon him. One last time, then, he thinks, descending into battle fury as though into a lover's embrace. Let it be so.

He raises his voice -- the last time. "To me! Forward!" And always --

"For the Tower!"

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Cuthbert thrusts his hands skyward, revolver clutched in one, Eld's Horn in the other. The motion makes him stumble and reel, and for one terrifying moment he thinks he will fall, that it will end for him now and Roland will have to face this last charge alone.

And then the ground is firm beneath his feet again as he screams out the final words of his life.

"The Tower!"

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He runs. Cuthbert is at his side. And it is right.

"No prisoners!"

Roland is screaming.

"NO PRISONERS!"

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They charge, magnificently, doomed, into a horde of barbarians and vandals and murderers and oathbreakers with their faces painted blue and the red light of Discordia in their eyes. They shout defiance and rage at the world's moving on, and Joe Manco shouts with them, inside of him, drowned in the battle fury, unable to tell himself from Roland, if he rages because the fire has taken Susan or the Dark preyed on Mina. All he knows is the hatred of Discordia, of the thieves of light and laughter, and the guns never stop working in their hands.

The gun and the bow and the lance--for a hundred years they'll tell the story of the swathe two gunslingers and ten ordinary men cut through an army of two thousand.

But they die. They die shouting defiance. They die shielded behind the strange statues that cover the hill, the grim blue-black stone faces. They die heroes. They die.

Roland turns to Cuthbert, raising the horn to his lips one last time, here in the lee of one of those ancient, broken faces.

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sai-interloper.livejournal.com

And one rises up from amongst the others, lips twisted into an unearthly snarl.

Eyes glittering and he laughs, draws the bowstring so high and fine against his cheek it rebounds and draws blood as the arrow whistles forward, screaming the last - born by the wind of your ka, you may say, he thinks, and titters.

It hits Cuthbert in the eye with a sickening wet noise.

Walter howls his triumph to the sky.

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And there is one more bright flare of pain, and then--

--Then, the thing that tells Cuthbert he's finally dying is that suddenly, he can see.

He's been shot in both eyes, and he should be blind--but suddenly, he can see everything with perfect clarity.

Everything--the strange broken statues, the dead men lying where they fell--and the woman walking toward him with her hand outstretched.

She's beautiful. And he knows her.

For one moment, he's angry. For one moment, he wants to scream at her.

Susan. Mother and Father, and all the rest in Gilead. Desmond. Jamie. Alain--and now Roland and I. Have we all died for nothing? Has any of this been worth anything?

But he doesn't say any of this, because her smile both answers his questions and soothes his anger.

Cuthbert doesn't know if he's ever seen so much love in a smile before. He doubts it.

And, with no bitterness in his heart, he takes her hand. (http://www.livejournal.com/community/milliways_bar/2710548.html)

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In the corner of his eye, he sees Cuthbert fall.

And he sees the Horn of Eld, the Horn o' Deschain, fall from Cuthbert's hand.

Roland turns away -- he'll come back for it later, if he can -- now his business is killing --

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And Joe comes forward.

There's a man in front of him/them now, a great bull of a man with his face nearly purple under the paint, with a lance. His only concession to armor is a tarnished brass helm. This is not going to be easy.

He stoops--slides, really, because he's in motion--and does something he'd never do in his own body. He tosses the gun in his left hand into the air. But this Roland is maybe two vital years younger, and has apparently had his nerves replaced with razor blades.

He swoops his left hand down and scoops up the horn, simultaneously cocking and firing the right hand pistol into the man's knee. He flips the horn in his hand like a man showboating a pistol, snakes his wrist through the loop and reaching up for the pistol it slides down his forearm, nearly to his shoulder.

And he's reaching up with his right, too, and cocking, and catching the left and cocking it and firing both into the face of the enormous man about to topple forward on to him with that fucking lance.

He stills falls on him, but the spear turns aside, into the ground and then snapping, and the man falls onto him with his full weight, the helm cracking into his skull, and for a while both Roland and Joe are lost to darkness.

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