(no subject)

[honest_johns]

It's an hour since they last spoke. The sun is sinking into a pink sky, now, latticed by leafless trees and spreading a blood-red trail across the lake.

It's growing chillier. Susan has a thermos of hot chocolate, and another of coffee; Eddie and Cuthbert each carry an extra blanket folded over arm or shoulder.

They've heard Susannah's tale, the hard truths lived and then hidden and hoarded until now. They've heard the story's ending.

Now it's time for another kind of ending. It's Alain and Cuthbert's turn.

Comments

[no-prisoner.livejournal.com]

The names make it.

The names make it real.

He thinks for a moment of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, the wall of green glass with a name every six inches. How long of a wall would you need to carve the names of all the casualties of not a war, but a world that moved on?

All the soldiers, all the mothers, all the brothers. The sons and daughter and lovers and farmers and merchants and whores.

A whole city dead. A whole nation. A whole world. He's seen the graveyard of that world, but the dying of it---

The wall would stretch forever, around the circumference of all that is, and every inch would sing with the names of the lost. It's too big.

But the names make it real.

[key-youth-bert.livejournal.com]

A part of Cuthbert doesn't want to let them reach him or comfort him.
It is bitter--bitter
A part of him wants to curl up, black and miserable and alone with his pain.
but I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart
But it's not just his pain. He was or is ka-tet with these people, and that makes it all of their pain in some way--but mostly, it's Alain's. Alain knows. Alain was there.

Which is why it's Alain that he gives in and leans on, though his free hand goes to his shoulder and closes over Susan's, gripping tightly.