@dcschain: 𝚆𝙾𝚄𝙻𝙳 𝚈𝙾𝚄 𝙻𝙸𝙺𝙴 𝚃𝙾 𝙳𝙰𝙽𝙲𝙴 𝙱𝙴𝙵𝙾𝚁𝙴 𝚈𝙾𝚄 𝙶𝙾? / a man with no name.
Every highway motel has the same blurriness to them no matter the state, Arya’s found. Like peering at them through a glazed window, colors and shapes blending and melting. This is just another waxen image of little homes stacked side by side, both paradoxically perpetual and transient at the same time. Maybe she’d stopped here once before. Maybe it’d been a different motel back then, bought and stripped down and renovated, not even the studs of the originals remaining. Bad bones, replaced by worse ones. It wouldn’t matter. They’d still be the same place somehow.
This one’s extra quiet, and the sticky late evening heat of the summer air settles on their skin like cling wrap as they wade to their room. The square bit of wood the room key dangles from is too big for her to wrap her fingers around, engraved with the numbers 127 in tidy block print, painted cream and an ugly shade of maroon.
The giant shadow at her back passes into the room when she opens the door, floorboards creaking beneath his feet. Arya grabs the beaded light cord of the single bedside lamp and yanks.
Where Roland Deschain sticks out like a sore thumb in nearly every place she’s seen him he fits in like a glove somehow here. That liquid state of transience and permanence flows from him like a river. The thought reminds her of her mother, which reminds her of her father. But she finds that’s not uncommon when you spend your days travelling with a walking skein of blood and grief, a reflection blown too large, a broken mirror you don’t want to look into but can’t seem to turn away from.
“I’m gonna grab us dinner,” she mutters, slipping back outside without looking at him. Her eyes shut and she presses her boney shoulders back against the door and she tries not to think about wading into the river for her mother’s body.
It takes her a little less than twenty minutes to scrounge together a couple of microwave burritos, some soda and a few of her favorite kinds of candy. The nostalgic clank of her change in the machines is still in her ears when she opens the door again. She ignores the easy, graceful way he drops his hand from his irons.
They eat in companionable silence, Arya smiling crookedly at Roland’s expression when she pours a packet of hot sauce she’d gotten from her truck on his half finished burrito. She watches with greater amusement as he sorts through the different candies she’d brought back: a Snickers bar, sour Skittles, strawberry Twizzlers.
After dessert, they go outside to their usual haunt. Arya’s legs dangle from the tailgate, while Roland’s boot tips lightly brush the gravel. They tip their heads back and watch the stars spin overhead while the radio in the cab plays some gentle oldies.
“There’s not so many stars where I normally stay,” she observes lightly. Roland remains as quiet and contemplative as ever. So she lays back in the bed and talks for a while, tracing the outlines of constellations, both real and made up, the stories she’d learned and the stories she’d built for herself. When the clouds scud past she names them too, and gives them stories to go with their names. She’s not sure how long she talks, only that by the time her voice has grown hoarse he’s laid back too, scarred hands folded over his chest, blue eyes intently watching the mythos she’d laid out above them. For a long time they lay like that, soothed by the thrum of cicadas and passing trucks and the fuzzy music spilling from the radio. The clouds thicken, the scent of summer rain growing.
“I’m gonna head inside before I fall asleep here,” Arya whispers. Roland gets up with her, pauses after his boots crunch into the gravel.
“Would you like to dance before you go?”
It’s the most he’s said in hours, and the first question he’s asked in days. Arya chews her bottom lip for a moment before leaning into the open cab and turning the dial up. She doesn’t know the song, but it’s not too fast and not too slow.
“I’m not as good as my sister was,” she warns with a crooked smile, taking his outstretched hand. When his remaining fingers close over hers, her hand nearly disappears. He smiles, a pitiful thing but a smile nonetheless, and takes her other hand too.
He’s lighter on his feet than she would have ever imagined, and the pain she’d noticed in his hip seems almost to disappear but for the slightest stiffness on that side. Still, he moves with startling grace, with startling life. Life! She laughs when they stumble, once, then twice, a choking barking sound full of joy and grief. The tempo of the song picks up briefly and so too do their steps, the pair of them spinning wildly beneath the spitting night sky. When the song drops back down again she nearly falls over from dizziness, but he catches her gently. They sway the rest of the song away, Arya’s ear pressed against his chest, and she knows deep in her marrow that the same as she’s thinking of her father he’s thinking of his son.
They dance until it starts to rain in earnest, and Arya drifts to sleep in her bed to the scent of wet earth and Roland’s pipe smoke while he sits watch in the blurry space between morning and night.
