Work Text:
Refrain
See them well now.
See them very well, these three strangers (not strangers) with the dust of another world still on their boots and the memories of blue bombardier eyes in their dreams.
Susannah and Eddie and Jake, all that’s left America-side of the gunslinger’s last ka-tet. Hot chocolate cups empty in their hands, oversized jumpers done with their jobs as a locating device and now just warm against the cold (what cold, she’s never been anywhere else but here, has she? Has she? Why do her fingers remember deer pelts, stitching under a changing moon with the needle moving the steps of a formal dance while he -)
There was no he.
That’s the thing, may it do you fine. Their life is new here. Newborn, clear and threaded, aye. No need of their death-dealing father here.
‘Shall we go home?’ Eddie asks and that’s odd, they haven’t had a home together, but that’s right, because they do have and will have. In this world at least.
See the world slipping into place around them. Eddie’s apartment is ground floor (did he know she was coming?) Jake’s room has a dog bed and two bowls on the floor (he’s not here yet. Far away on the path of the Beam still, with the one they called Dinh; a universe and death itself to cross before he ends up here but he’s on his way, Oy the Brave who will end up in the scant dirt of one world before finding the tarmac of this one.) There’s a wardrobe in the bedroom and half of it is empty, a cut out of space waiting for her to fill it.
And here she is, Susannah of New York now Susannah of New York again, back where she once belonged and isn’t a tune from the good old days, ladies and gentlemen? Can ye hear old Sheemie singing it, three young almost gunslingers who don’t yet know the name Jericho Hill singing it with him, The Romp’s four dead eyes staring down at them all? Long ago and far away but tonight she’s back and the worlds are very close, say thankya.
And here is sleep for the three of them, under old stars and new stars and the clutter of New York City lights, and they dream of the same thing. Of course they do. The worlds are close and the Tower is near and a ka-tat is not broken as easily as stories would have you believe.
They dream of roses.
The morning is sweet, as new things are. Coffee and a walk where they search for a bookstore without knowing it, where they shy away from two towers yet to fall, and hear the song of the turtle in a sunbeam on the street. They don’t know the words. (The words are their heartbeats now, the flow of their living blood around bodies which know what it is to die.)
They see roses, too.
There are days to come yet. School for Jake, which is Piper and isn’t Piper; is a place where they love him and fear him, just a little. This kid who sometimes looks a little too wise for his age, who can tell you how to tack up and ride a horse though he’s never seen one aside from the ones the mounted cops bring around on riot nights, who wakes remembering the smell of a hay loft and the flying leap to the barn floor and calls it a dream. A place where he’s happy, anyway, mostly and isn’t that the best we could ever wish for for the youngsters?
(He remembers a kiss on his forehead. A burning brand of lips. Will remember it as long as he wears this face and this name, a long life and a blessed one to come and he’ll remember that kiss and not the deadly face of his father.)
Days to come for Eddie, a knife in his hand and a stick turning from dream to life in his hand. He’ll be an artist, one day, with a little business of his own and carved things beyond measure. There’s a key etched in each of them, and he doesn’t know why. He smiles about it in interviews; he’s always smiling, is Eddie Dean. ‘I like to have something in my hand, ya know?’ He quips on a chat show and the audience laugh with him, and he laughs because it’s not a joke, because his hands itch with emptiness sometimes, as though he once carried something important in them and the whittling keeps it at bay.
There’s a song for Susannah, Man of Constant Sorrow playing on the wireless and why does she think it’s called that, it’s a radio in this here and now, which has always been her here and now. It plays on street corners and in shops, and she hears old names and sees older faces and she thinks sometimes ‘I have loved these people before,’ and other times she thinks ‘I have never seen this city before,’ and both are true.
Their first time is sweet, her and Eddie. They move like old dance partners, and what is this but one of the oldest dances? They trod the steps before, after all; the kissing steps and the killing steps and bodies remember if minds falter. She wakes and says to Eddie ‘do you remember rice?’ and he smiles, sex sleepy, and replies ‘sure, Suz, there was a dance for the rice,’ and blinks and shakes his head and replies again ‘no, I don’t.’
She doesn’t, either. No matter. They can practice their new dance here, and find the words to match with it. (It’s ’love,’ and ‘I love you,’ and ‘will you marry me?’ And snatches of songs that you can only remember when the wind is right, and the clouds stream across the Beam.)
And there is Oy in the end, not entirely canine with his squiggly tail and his bark does sound a little like words and a lot like the song of the rose. There at Jake’s side like a shadow, and the four of them look at each other with the surprised relief of fishermen who make it back to harbour after a wreck and find the believed lost crew to be there before them.
Here you are, the look says. Here we all are, at last, in New York, which once was the Great City of Lud and once the domain of a man in black and a plague called Captain Tripps, and now is New York again.
We could leave them there. Or leave them that night, when they hear a list of names echoing above the sound of car horns; their own names and others, all unknown and yet as terribly familiar as a mirror. Or the next morning, to the music of a horn that was never sounded in this world, and yet plays for them all like a charm.
Best to leave them there, I think. Eddie’s whittling a horn and Oy is begging Jake for scraps and under the clouds that move too straight, Susannah is resting a hand on her belly and feeling the movement there, because all rules have exceptions and Time in the Keystone World could be one of them, if Ka wills it so, and so the baby is there, kicking in her dream long before it is in life, this blue eyed son of theirs.
Best to leave them all there.
Commala- come - come
Journey’s just begun