#fast forward 1000 years later when roland just straight-up yells at a train

[dcschain]

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT MEME. | always accepting.

@mercysought​ asked: How does your character normally deal with confrontation?

The hot tallow sparks, leaps upwards with a myriad of pops as he throws the rabbit flesh to cook on the pan. Its butchered head stares at him from the block, bloodied cleaver beside it, the eye something vacant. Inside it, the wind of cold winter right around the corner. The cold, a song, a song no sane man would dance to. 

The voices come behind him, and come muffled. Carried on the wind, they sound like little more than whispers. Abebi, angry. And Chapman falling in her footsteps. Alain, low and calm, his father’s drawl, as sturdy as his blood’s a flame. 

He ignores them, and chooses the rabbits instead.

He has two more to butcher that are threaded: a miracle that will feed their bellies for a few days at least if he’s smart with the cooking. The remaining twelve, muties one way or another, will make good enough bait for larger game when hunting, and the fur, what’s there of it, will line their new shoes.

He was more than careful with the threaded hides. 

The voices behind him still fall, bits of anger he doesn’t heed as they tumble from the branches around him. Golden, red, catching blood and sunlight indiscriminately, wearing the end of summer like a death-bag. The rustle of the first fallen leaves as there’s footsteps. Chapman’s boots appear in his line of sight. He makes no notice of him, and hasn’t since the raid, and he knows it drives Chapman furious.

It is not pettiness and it is not immaturity. It is ritual: Chapman has not cried his pardon for his dinh, and so his dinh does not think him therefore worthy of his time. The hierarchy, even in war, is a stubborn beast. And it gives sanity to a world that’s got no sanity left in any of its rivers.

But there is one piece of the hierarchy Roland is refusing. One piece which sticks in the gob of the order of things, like a bone that’s too big to swallow, too small to cough out.

Chapman stands before the dinh and does not back down. He stands as if this were the Council Hall, as if the tables were mahogany and not dust, as if there were a right hand and a left hand beside Roland, instead of three boys with their father’s guns on their hips like the masks of their faces. Beneath which, the truth, the ugly truth of the world, is showing. That the time is coming for the curtain to fall. That the end has reared its head, and from the peaks you can see its beady eyes in the moonlight.

Amos Chapman is older than his king is. Greyer. Sturdier. He’s seen more wolves and had more claws to give him pain. He’s seen more harriers. He’s seen three dinhs in his lifetime, and the third sits in front of a campfire and cooks pilfered rabbits they took from a traitorous homestead.

Amos Chapman seeps tradition with every cracked, fatigued breath he can muster himself to give. And he can question the boy-king before him, in ways he never dared to question the father.

Amos Chapman spits in the fire. When behind him, Jamie makes a movement whether to chastise or punish, Roland silences and stills him with a gesture. Chapman snorts, looks over his shoulder to the Red Hand of the dinh and then again to the dinh. Roland blinks at the smile he gives him. Those teeth. All creatures of malice, yet not the sharpest smirk he’s seen, not by a long shot. Chapman learned from the world how to bare his fangs, but was never born with them. 

The slow blink and then the dismissal: he turns back to his newest rabbit to butcher, and the thudding of the cleaver as he decapitates it weighs down on an otherwise still air. Abebi hugs herself and moves away too briskly from Alain, whose eyes look so much like his father’s now. Cold in the late summer darkness that trickles and trickles, slowly, from the azures of day into a violent purple, the yellows of the moon, light screamed against the cloud and heavy gauze.

Chapman hunkers down, to be eye-level with this child. The ones who know Roland as first Ro and then as dinh see his hands clutch the rabbit a little bit tighter, blood oozing past his fingers as he holds it by the leg, already skinned before being butchered. 

“I won’t stand around as you lead us to perdition, boy.”

Again, the thudding of the cleaver. The snapping as he dislocates the joints to cut the limbs off easier. The silence. The silence that crawls out of his eyes like the singing of ice comes from frozen lakes. The untrained foot that walks thinking them solid and does not see the hairline-cracks in the white-blue surface. 

No ice is truly blue. 

It reflects the sky. 

Chapman has the resolve at least to not reach across and touch Roland. He wants to, and Roland can see this from the way he leans in his hunker and the way his right hand tenses, untenses, clenches, unclenches. And hovers. Closer to Chapman’s own body than his, but the intent, the movement, the want -- all there. Roland reads it from his clenching jaw and his darting tongue. 

Whatever he said before when the wind was carrying it to him and he was not listening, it hangs here too. It hangs. Chapman’s tying the noose himself and is ready to pull it.

“You spit on your father’s face, so ya do, and ya can’t even kennit.”

The knife sinks effortlessly along the rabbit’s spine. The seeping crunch of metal to bone. 

“His pride rot ya father’s house and the maggots saw it good enough to eat it.”

The knife over the ribs, to detach the flesh and take the back meat off. The ripping noise and then the scraping.

“Cully, the rot’s eaten at you too. Ain’t no dinh that’s never worn the title. Gilead-dinh I understand, mayhap, for we’ve got no Gilead left to return to, but cam-dinh? Refusing that be like refusing the Tower itself!”

The Deschain’s knife pins the head of the rabbit his son just butchered to the block he’s using for his butchering. It shatters the cancerous growths and breaks past the skull and into the brain. In. Deep. If rage could ever hold a gaze, the rabbit’s glassy eyes spill over with it.

“Kian delah-kensa-thea. Chapman-sai.”

Heed me very well. Sai Chapman. 

Abebi shivers. Roland’s voice is the voice of a thousand years before him. It’s the voice of thirty generations. It is low, so terribly low, close to the mud and the muck and the radioactivity warnings. 

It commemorates no esteemed deed.

“Thee said it yourself. There be no Gilead to return to. When the bastard John Farson’s head finds its way to my pike, then we may speak once more of cam-dinh and cam-a-cam-mal, Gan willing its waters.”

He yanks the knife out of the head. It rolls off the block and lands in front of Chapman, blood and brain oozing. Its mouth hangs open. 

“If thee takes our hope from us, you miserable cur, then Farson’s already won.”

Farson won the day he gutted my father like a Fair-day fish, a thought which makes Alain flinch when he finds the aftertaste of it in Roland’s head. He shares a look with Cuthbert, who watches with those disquieting, dark eyes.

He resumes his thankless task. Skin. Decapitate. Butcher. Repeat. His audience is over, the throne-room to be vacated. Chapman still hunkers, and hungers, for whatever’s left of the life he once knew. He’d sink his teeth in its heart if he could. 

But the king with his blue eyes and daft hands has nothing else to say to him, or to anyone else assembled there. He barely dignifies Chapman with a second look. 

Abebi follows Chapman when he storms away, and over her shoulder she sees how the dinh watches them go, and that calm, the way he keeps on skinning, on butchering, fills her belly with enough anger to wish him dead.

The thought is sudden, and the thought scares her, and shames her. She smothers it and breaks its neck, and tells herself he is only trapped, like all of them, beneath their fathers’ and mothers’ ghosts.