(no subject)

Later that night, Alain lies awake in the room he acquired at Cuthbert's direction, and feels the grin pulling at his lips again. It's a room of astonishing luxury, after so many months and years spent in barracks and on the trail; a real bed with clean sheets, and table and desk and water pitcher, and artificial light, by the gods. But that's not why he's smiling. He wishes, greedily, for Jamie DeCurry, and for Desmond Blackburn and all the others lost along as Gilead slowly tumbled into flames and war, but he has Roland and Cuthbert and Susan Delgado who burned ten years ago, and that is as much joy as any man could ask for.

Even later, in the darkness, he finds tears leaking from his eyes, soaking into his hair. He would have said that he had cried all the tears in him, tonight, but this is a different emotion, now; not joy but private grief. For himself, for his friends, for their world that moved on and their dreams that ended. They stood true, all of them, and they remembered their fathers' faces, even half-starved and betrayed among the great ancient stone faces of Jericho Hill. But their world ended for all of that, and fair Gilead fell. Now they will never find their way to the Tower, or see the men they would become later, or marry, or even see another dawn together on a calm clear morning. So, here in the darkness of a night at the bar beyond life and death, he turns his face to his pillow, and weeps.

And, after, he splashes his face with water from the pitcher, and pulls his blankets around him, and sleeps soundly. And in his dreams he smiles.